I was once invited by Terry Wogan, who died yesterday, to lunch with him in an Edinburgh restaurant about which, in my secondary role as The Scotsman’s food and wine critic, I had written a hostile review.
As the local critic - the only one at that time - I frequently received invitations of this sort from celebrated commentators who operated elsewhere but who were passing through and wanted to exchange views about the Edinburgh scene. The title of my fortnightly column - “Gut Reaction” - had presumably caught Terry’s attention, and so perhaps had my name, because, though I did not know it at the time, he was a deep admirer of the great German actor, Conrad Veidt, after whom I was named and whose film, The Spy in Black, had been set by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the north of Scotland.
Our lunchtime conversation, nearly forty years ago, ranged beyond eating and drinking into the realms of Irish writing - we liked the same novelists - and music. Though period pop music - a taste for which was something else we shared - he did not stop at that. Like Gershwin before him, he could speak of the classics and his conversation was as delightfully droll as those who knew him said.
But because, when we met, boil-in-the-bag cooking had become a trend, the topic inevitably came up. Since our talk was off the record, I did not make notes, but we agreed that it was not always as bad as it was made out to be (by me among others). What mattered was what went into the bag and whose hand was holding it.
He knew, I thought, what he was talking about. As a result, he has gone down in my store of memories alongside David Wolff of Decanter Magazine and Johnnie Apple of the New York Times, whose visits to Edinburgh I grew to cherish.
1 February 2016
As the local critic - the only one at that time - I frequently received invitations of this sort from celebrated commentators who operated elsewhere but who were passing through and wanted to exchange views about the Edinburgh scene. The title of my fortnightly column - “Gut Reaction” - had presumably caught Terry’s attention, and so perhaps had my name, because, though I did not know it at the time, he was a deep admirer of the great German actor, Conrad Veidt, after whom I was named and whose film, The Spy in Black, had been set by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the north of Scotland.
Our lunchtime conversation, nearly forty years ago, ranged beyond eating and drinking into the realms of Irish writing - we liked the same novelists - and music. Though period pop music - a taste for which was something else we shared - he did not stop at that. Like Gershwin before him, he could speak of the classics and his conversation was as delightfully droll as those who knew him said.
But because, when we met, boil-in-the-bag cooking had become a trend, the topic inevitably came up. Since our talk was off the record, I did not make notes, but we agreed that it was not always as bad as it was made out to be (by me among others). What mattered was what went into the bag and whose hand was holding it.
He knew, I thought, what he was talking about. As a result, he has gone down in my store of memories alongside David Wolff of Decanter Magazine and Johnnie Apple of the New York Times, whose visits to Edinburgh I grew to cherish.
1 February 2016
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