Posts by Peter Moss

Review: Kapitoil

Peter Moss — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 13:19:07 +0000

New York, 1999. The Twin Towers are still twins… and towers. Out of the elevator and on to the 88th floor steps a young Muslim, hero of Kapitoil, by Teddy Wayne (Duckworth, £8.99) He is soon to make his mark on the USA - not in ways more stereotypically associated with his brethren, but by intellect alone.

Karim Issar is not your conventional literary hero. Shy and diffident, tongue-tied and somewhat tone-deaf in the art of modern idiom (though as a Qatari removed to Manhattan this is not altogether surprising), he is, to all intents and purposes, Clark Kent without the clothes-change routine or the super powers… except perhaps one.

His gift for financial wizardry is about to surf the improbable in predicting oil futures and reap hitherto uncharted profits for his bosses at Schrub Equities. His programme for capitalising on oil prices becomes his first stab at English wordplay: "Capitalize + Oil = Capitoil. That's K-A-P-I-T-O-I-L", he says to his colleagues. "I want people to remember this was Karim-esque".

Big business and number crunching are subjects that leave me not so much cold as positively hypothermic. But Teddy Wayne digs way deeper than the surface sheen of the big deal and the fast buck. Warmth and humour percolate the emotional redundancy and moral vacuity that routinely inhabit the corporate world, resulting in a book both touching and funny, the sing-song rhythm of technical jargon acquiring an almost pop-lyric cadence.

This book's hero, at once needy and nerdy, astute and sublimely logical, loses his virginity…several times. He loses it to art, to music, to Halloween, Thanksgiving and Starbucks. He loses it to his colleague Rebecca Goldman (though he might already have actually lost it by then), and finally to racquetball, his first stab at sport and a game he perfects by calculating the cubic capacity of the court over the diameter of the ball multiplied by the number of balls the court can hold (1.76 million, but that shouldn't ruin the ending for you).

In short Karim finally loses his cherry to the Great American Way without ever compromising his values. Well, once. He lays between Egyptian sheets with a half-Jewish American girl on the Upper West Side listening to Bob Dylan intoning With God On Our Side… during Ramadan. As his indomitable boss Derek Schrub had once told him: "Every day there are shifts so small you do not identify them, until finally you become a different person without even recognising it".

With the possible exception of Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian Player Piano, I can think of no debut novel that has more engaged and enthralled me than Teddy Wayne's offering.

Review: We Are All made of Glue

Peter Moss — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:39:25 +0000

By Marina Lewycka
Penguin, £18.99

We all know silence.

There is good silence, the comfortable silence of companionship, and there is bad silence, the silence that screams of a deep fissure in a close relationship. Of this latter silence, Marina Lewycka, two books on from her stunning debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, writes with great insight, not least in the voice of her heroine, Georgie Sinclair, whose husband has just walked out on her:

“The silence had an intrusive jangling quality, like a persistent tinnitus. When I walked from room to room I could hear my footsteps on the laminate floor. When I ate I could hear the scraping of my knife and fork on the plate in the echoing kitchen. I tried having the radio on or playing music, but that made it worse: I knew the silence was there even though I couldn’t hear it.”

And Georgie’s is not the only compelling voice. There is also that of Naomi Shapiro, a beguilingly eccentric old Jewish émigrée neighbour whom Georgie finds rummaging through her skip in the middle of the night.

In Naomi, Lewycka has drawn a character as rich in resolve and stubborn resilience as she is in comic malapropisms and the rampant mispronunciations that come with a steadfast refusal to fully engage with a language you have been using for the last 50-plus years.

Mutual suspicion between the two women soon gives way to a touching and often hilarious, odd-couple friendship, accelerated by Georgie’s determination not to allow Mrs Shapiro to be ripped off by a succession of seedy estate agents determined to part the by now hospitalised old lady from her semi-derelict, but nonetheless highly valuable, Islington mansion — Canaan House.

And what of Mr Ali, the astonishingly useless builder called in to renovate Canaan House — and his two feckless assistants, who can have learned their trade only by watching endless screenings of Bob The Builder?

And what, too, of Artem, the husband Mrs Shapiro left behind in Israel in 1950 on land hitherto occupied by Mr Ali — if indeed Artem really was her husband, and if indeed Mr Ali really did occupy that land?

In the way that We are all made of glue develops individual and compelling story-lines for each of the main players before the brilliant Lewycka pulls all the strands together in a fashion you would have thought, at best, unlikely, it recalls both Nick Hornby’s masterful Long Way Down and an episode of Seinfeld. Honestly, I can offer no higher praise than that.

The list to end all lists

Peter Moss — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:01:15 +0000

The indefatigable Ben Schott’s latest social barometer, Schott’s Almanac 2010 (Bloomsbury £16.99), curiously published together with his 2009 edition (Bloomsbury £18.99), is a gloriously random tome full of information of no real value, but huge fun nonetheless.

If Schott hadn’t written it, Nick Hornby would have, and if not Hornby, then me. Why? It’s a compendium, a catalogue, an annual memoir in list form, and it takes a mildly obsessive, list-making, alpha male, like Hornby or me, to compile enough lists to rival all the things we Jews are told not to do in the Book of Leviticus.

In short (or is that Schott?), it chronicles in minutest detail every last thing that happened in every walk of life in every corner of the globe this past year. Vital information is contained within Schott’s 350 pages. Apparently the World’s Most Dangerous Biscuit is the hitherto humble Custard Cream. Schott doesn’t explain the perils that lay within the confection, but from here on in, I’m a Jaffa Cake man.

The Most Eligible Bachelor On The Planet is Prince Harry, which seems hardly fair on both George Clooney and indeed me (though technically I’m a divorcee), while Israel’s incursions into Gaza are reported with such journalistic balance, it is hard to believe the writer is the same person who reports David Beckham’s hairstyle (which one?) as beyond peer.

Speaking of football, the wage bill of the 20 Premiership football clubs last year is reported as £1.2 billion. In Lesotho that would buy you… well, Lesotho. The World’s Best Cities are a sad disappointment and can be based only on economic factors. How else can London, New York and Tokyo rate ahead of, say, Budapest, Quito and Sarajevo? But none of this devastates as much as learning that the World’s Busiest International Airline is Ryanair.

Most pleasing fact? Schott lists nine Major Jewish Religious Dates as against six for Islam. I’m not sure he’s entirely accurate, but a win’s a win and I’ll take it. Second most pleasing fact in the book? Israel makes it into the Top 10 Holiday Destinations To Experience The Greatest Tourism Growth this last year from UK holidaymakers. That it lags, at 10th, seven places behind Poland says all you need to know about UK holidaymakers. I’ve been to Gdansk. I know.

Fictional non-fiction

Peter Moss — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:01:38 +0000

The cult of celebrity, says Melissa Katsoulis in Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes (Constable £8.99), is nothing new, but the desire to see the worst and/or smallest parts of a star is a post-war invention. And because the unearthing of sordid details about well-known figures is such a big-money game, it is no surprise that literary hoaxers with dollar signs in their eyes have sprung up in all corners of the media.

Katsoulis has assembled tales of 50 or so such hoaxes, each begging the question: how genuine are these hoaxes? The question of who is hoaxing whom hangs in the air throughout the book’s 300-odd pages.

Some are funny, even sweet. Abraham Lincoln, Ms Katsoulis, tells us, is famous for many things but being a great lover is not one of them. A certain Wilma Minor begged to differ, publishing a “newly unearthed” collection of love-letters between the 16th president and one Ann Rutledge, betraying in Abe a libido only marginally less surprising than his apparent lack of literacy.

Others are more obvious. The Hitler Diaries? Who’d have thought it. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Hardly a new story, well related though it is by Katsoulis.

Perhaps the most damning is that of Misha Levy Defonseca. As the author says, making up stories about Nazi horrors and pretending they happened to you — pointing at the scar on your arm and whispering: “Mengele’s child”, as Defonseca apparently did — is surely the work of a damaged mind. Damaged, but commercially astute, Defonseca sued her publisher four years ago for $33 million for siphoning royalties into various offshore accounts before being exposed by a couple of historians, Deborah Dwork and Lawrence Langer, as an opportunistic liar and fantasist.

Defonseca turns out to be Monique De Wael. In apologising to her readers she said: “There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It was not the actual reality — it was my reality, my way of surviving.” I’d say all those dollar signs might be a more useful survival device.

Another of the book’s Holocaust hoaxers, Herman Rosenblat, asks: “Why did I write that story? Because I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them to love and tolerate all people…” Of course.

Why Guyana is the ultimate power trip

Peter Moss — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:40:18 +0100

A brow-beaten and slightly emphysemic eight-seater plane of uncertain age and less certain power (max speed 110 mph — my Audi does that on West End Lane) flew us from Guyana’s weather-boarded old colonial capital of Georgetown, birthplace of more West Indies cricket legends than you can wield a bat at, to the fabled and heart-stoppingly sensational Kaieteur Falls.

At 750 feet, one of the longest and most powerful single-drop waterfalls on the face of the planet, Kaieteur is arguably the most beautiful waterfall in the world, and incontestably the most remote and least visited.

Five times higher than Niagara, pumping out 140,000 gallons of thundering water each second, it’s a flight or nothing to get you there. Visitors land at a dusty airstrip cobbled from machetes, hatchets and a broom in the thick of a 100 percent humid jungle rich in luminescent scarlet macaws, screeching howler monkeys, microscopically tiny yellow poison dart frogs, even the occasional jaguar.

And since Guyana receives fewer than 2,000 tourists a year (that is 40 visitors a week in a country the size of England and Scotland combined), pretty much the whole country is pristine and virtually untouched by human hand, Kaieteur included.

Guyana grows more beautiful and beguiling the deeper you wend your way from the Caribbean-vibe coast and into the interior. Eighty percent of this is lost in the jungly rain forest, the rest in flat savannah, where the one percent of the country’s 700,000 population who do not live on the Atlantic coastal strip have built their tiny settlements.

One such settlement is Karanambu, a 125-acre ranch deep in the Rupununi savannah, for more than a century home to the legendary McTurk family, latterly Diane McTurk, renowned for her work rescuing orphaned giant otters.

A year either side of 80 (no-one seems quite sure, least of all Diane), Diane is a star. Rarely have I been in such total awe as those moments each day when Diane would wade chest-deep into the river to play with her “children”, a chunk of fish in one hand, a psychotically boisterous and hysterically squeaking otter hanging from the other by its sharp pointy teeth. Graceful and down-to-earth, Diane’s Home Counties vowels are the perfect vehicle for her myriad tales of life on the wild side.

In the company of Diane on a night-time river trip in our makeshift dug-out, rum punch flowing, I became, instead of one of life’s talkers, a born-again listener.

The river, and its labyrinth of brooding razor-thin creeks, is home not only to a whole raft of impossibly vast lily pads (hundreds upon hundreds of them that, with yellow lilies in the middle, look uncannily like 72-inch Fiorentina pizzas on water), but also to the fearsome caiman alligator, a 20-foot long brute who prowls the shadowy creeks of the Essequibo river.

Eclectic, often downright eccentric, wildlife abounds in and around Karanambu, from Bandit the black-eyed house raccoon to the bats that draped themselves seductively across my bed at night, or dive-bombed my mosquito net at every opportunity.

Nothing, though, compares with the elusive anteater. With a hump-backed whale of a body, a vacuum cleaner hose for a snout and a feathery quill of Shakespearean proportions to the rear, this creature proves, once and for all, that God has a sense of humour.

No less oddly cobbled together is the tapir, a creature encountered while staying at the idyllic Rock View Lodge not so far from the border with Brazil. It looks, depending on how rum punch affects you, like an inflated pig or a deflated rhino. Either way it has, like the anteater, a seriously odd snout that wiggles and sniffs, and will scoop a whole mango from your hand.

Rock View is a complete joy, presided over by Colin Edwards, whose affable bonhomie belies the raw determination of a real maverick, who has single-handedly breathed life, water, electricity, airstrips, schools, clinics, and his own glorious hideaway into a previously untouched and unreachable corner of Guyana. Dawn treks from Rock View are a real treat. One morning, while the sun was coming up, a few of us even blazed our own trail up a mountain where, it is entirely possible, no human had ever before set foot. We built cairns, stuck coloured poles into the ground, and felt like pioneers.

Guyana isn’t short of visionaries like Colin Edwards. In the nearby micro-settlement of Annai we met Virgil, a man with charisma that runs deep as a well. Virgil used to head up the local school and now staffs the local pirate radio station. In fact he is the local pirate radio station. It has just one producer, one technician, one presenter, one tea-maker, one cook and bottle washer. Virgil.

Deep in the rain forest at Iwokrama Field Station and Research Centre we met biologists, zoologists, entomologists and all manner of naturalists, — inspirational folk who discover, monitor and preserve all manner of species never before known to man. From the nearby canopy walkway — a succession of rope bridges and small landings 120-feet up in the trees — we observed a cavalcade of monkey and bird life. Squirrel monkeys, spider monkeys, resplendent yellow-billed toucans with bigger bills than at any of Gordon Ramsay’s establishments, and Guyana’s national bird, the hoatzin, resembling a bird fossil more than an actual living bird.

I stayed a fortnight in Guyana, commuting by light aircraft, canoe and jeep — the last of which says all you need to know about Guyana: a main highway 400 miles north to south, from the Atlantic right the way down to Brazil and not a blob of tarmac in sight, just a very, very long strip of pock-marked pink that only a seasoned and well-oiled jeep can handle.

Many countries have moved me but none has made me feel so privileged just to be there as Guyana. Rare and precious, it fills the senses and lightens the heart. I’m already fixing to go back there fast as my canoe will carry me.

Getting there

Journey Latin America (tours@journeylatinamerica.co.uk; 020 8747 8315) specialises in tailor-made and group tours to Guyana. A 15-day tailor-made tour in Guyana including Kaiteur Falls, Karanumbu and Iwokrama from £2,981 per person based on 2 sharing. Price includes accommodation, ground transfers, most guided excursions and most meals but not flights. Prices are vulnerable to fluctuation. International flights from £750 return with British Airways.

Slovenia: Venetian class in the old Yugoslavia

Peter Moss — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:15:06 +0100

At the time the old Yugoslavia was carved up 15 or so years ago, Slovenia emerged with the thinnest end of a pretty fat wedge —- a country the size of Wales with a measly 25 miles of coastline. But what a 25 miles they are.

The coastline is so tiny it seems almost like a negotiated afterthought — you can’t even run a coastal marathon in Slovenia and stay in the one country — but in a way that’s part of the appeal. It is the most fun landing on Italian soil at Trieste airport, hiring a car and driving 800 metres to the border, crossing into Slovenia for a long weekend by the seaside, with a detour perhaps up to the lakes and mountains, knowing that the barest half hour more in the car will take you into Croatia.

This last time around I stayed just outside — actually above — the workaday port of Koper at the Villa Andor. I stayed there once before. That time there was a bit of traffic — three cars and a motorbike, I think — and I was slow getting there from Trieste.

This time, no traffic. I made it from Italy to my hotel in Slovenia in a shade over 50 seconds and made immediately for Koper harbour. The place was in a heightened state of excitement. I happened to be there on the day a major cruise ship — from Venice on its way down south to the islands of Croatia — was docking for the first time on Slovenian soil, a pretty huge thing for a country that is all but land-locked.

The centre of Koper’s Old Town is Titov Trg (pronounceTirg), an appealing, traffic-free Gothic-Renaissance square with Venetian undertones.

A war hero’s gongs are cat food compared to the façade of Koper’s 600-year old Praetorian Palace, which fairly groans under the weight of hundreds of medallions and coats of arms of the rich and famous and the Venetian doges who used to sail across the gulf for their morning coffee and a little ennoblement.

Koper’s town planners are slaves to creative imaginings. The stunning 1463-built arcaded Venetian Gothic Loggia on the square’s north side is now a coffee shop, while the Almerigogna Palace, a hauntingly beautiful colonnaded edifice bedecked with many Romanesque frescos and gargoyles goes that uber-hip, post-modern ironic one step further: it’s a pub.

Truth to tell, where I stayed in Koper is where I like best i — the tiny village of Ankaran. Technically part of Greater Koper — though how a town of just 22,000 people has a greater anything remains a mystery — Ankaran nestles seductively on a hillside high up the Milje Peninsula, separated from Koper by a succession of vineyards. Lush, green and subtropical, my tranquil little wisteria- and hibiscus-clad hotel had lovely enough coastal views, and more than enough local wines, to make disengaging from my private balcony a bit of a wrench.

The local wines, I might add, are superb: top notch Merlots and Syrahs from the nearby Rojac vineyard. Koper really is a fine wine region, while the exceptional Istrian cuisine makes absolute mincemeat of dieting. Not for nothing is Koper the centre of Slovenia’s Italian ethnic community. Italians know their food and drink and the border is crossed more than frequently for a good night out.

The undoubted jewel in Slovenia’s coastal crown is Piran. Izola has its fans, while Portoroz, for all its clean golden sand and shiny spa resorts, is rather too much the abandoned love-child of Atlantic City and Blackpool for my own pure and cultured tastes. (Once I see three discos in a row and a turnstile on the beach, I know it’s time to move on, preferably to Piran.)

Piran’s Old Town is a minor miracle of Venetian Gothic. To be perfectly frank it does Venice better than Venice does Venice. Venice without the crowds, Venice without the smells, Venice without the Harry’s Bar prices. Piran is all narrow streets and labyrinthine cobbled alleyways where outstretched arms can touch both sides of the street simultaneously. Piran is not so much Venice in minor as Dubrovnik in miniature. And the views. Goodness me, but they are truly something else. To run one’s eye along the tapering line of terracotta rooftops towards the turquoise waters of the Adriatic from the highest point in town is to have one’s breath whisked clean away.

A few short weeks ago, under the most unseasonally warm sun that I could have never possibly imagined for the time of year, I hauled my backpack — groaning under the weight of two bottles of deep crimson Syrah and a hunk of parmesan the size of Bolton — upstream from the Sienna-like main square, Tartinijev Trg, past the Monastery of St Francis and the Church of Our Lady of the Snows, all the way to the blissfully silent Church of St George atop a hill that was, let me tell you, pretty damn hilly. Parmesan is very heavy.

From here, one does nothing but gaze. This is the highest point in town and these are, pure and simple and whichever way you turn, amongst the very best rooftop views in Europe. Dubrovnik, many hundreds of miles down the Croatian coast, has rooftop views to die for, and Slovenia’s own capital city of Llubljana — a sort of Prague lite without the crowds — scores even higher on the terracotta-and-chimneys scale. Piran, though, is right up there with the best of them.

Each time I’ve visited Slovenia I have not once missed the chance to sit awhile in a canal-side café in Ljubljana. Nor have I eschewed the twin lakes of Bled — with its hand-propelled gondolas and the 120 steps that lead from the jetty to the church at the apex of the lake’s deliriously enchanting little island — and Bohinj, each more beautiful than any lake I know in Western Europe. Nor have I managed to step on Slovenian soil without scarring my shins on the precipitous slopes of Mount Triglav at the heart of the soaring, often thrillingly hazardous, Julian Alps.

This time, though, Piran hooked me and it was quite an effort to desert its picturesque charms for the country’s interior. I arrived for a day — I had booked into the Villa Andor overnight with the intention of a week’s camping on, and climbing above, the banks of Bohinj — but stayed the long weekend.

For now I was happy enough to walk the same walks, sometimes right out of town and down the coast, each day from Friday through Monday. By night I had my fish suppers down by the pretty little harbour and took in the odd concert at the lovingly restored Tartini Theatre, before sipping a nightcap in the theatre’s café-bar, much the liveliest spot in this gloriously unspoiled unexpected corner of the old Yugoslavia.

Slovenia, and particularly its coast, is way less visited than Croatia down the road. Actually, most people don’t even know it has a coast. But that is one secret best kept between ourselves.

Travel facts

Ryan Air (www.ryanair.com) flies daily from Stansted to Trieste from £60 return. A shuttle bus runs from Trieste Airport to the Slovenian coast with single fares from 15¤ (£13.40). Room rates at Villa Andor (00 386 5 615 5000; www.andor.si) from 40¤ (£36) per person (based on two sharing), with breakfast. For details of all things Slovenian contact the National Tourist Board (www.slovenia.info)

Jewish Slovenia

As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovenia was once at the heart of European Jewish history. Today some 500 Jews live in Llubljana.

The Jewish Community Centre is at Trzaska 2, Llubljana (00 386 1 252 1836; ww.jss@siol.net). One Jew remains in Maribor where the 1429 synagogue is now a museum and cultural centre, chronicling the story of Slovenia’s Jewish history.

The radical cure for the ills of Jewish football

Peter Moss — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:42:07 +0100

Fifty years this year --- that is how long I have been playing Jewish football. Hard to believe. It feels longer. My first team was Bar Kochba FC, named after a Jewish revolutionary who not only was leader of a gloriously futile insurrection against the Emperor Hadrian 2,000 years ago, but was also rumoured to be the first biblical character to wear moulded studs.

We played in the Maccabi Football League, where every player has to be Jewish. The standard, aside from a handful of teams in the top division, many of whose players got their “real” football in the more rarified Saturday leagues, was not very good. It has got no better.

Matches are played against a wall of sound issuing from players’ frustration at their own ineptitude. Most yellow and red cards arise from second, third, fourth, even fifth opinions on every last refereeing decision. Let the ball do the talking? Not in Jewish football.

The demographics may seem to support an all-Jewish league — 1,000 or so Jewish footballers who want to play competitive football and are, for the most part, not good enough to play in non-Jewish football — but paradoxically this does little to foster an arena in which they might improve sufficiently to play at a higher level.

I have a singular perspective on this. I am involved, as player and coach, in FC Team, a club that has three teams, two in the Maccabi League and one in the Middlesex County League on the FA pyramid that leads (from my mouth to God’s ears) all the way to… the Football League.

Our formative years in the Maccabi League were pretty successful. Six promotions in three seasons for two of our teams attest to that. But the quantum leap in standard came only once we had pulled our first team out of the Maccabi League and into an altogether higher level, while at the same time augmenting our “county” squad with a few non-Jewish players. This improved not only the players in our first team, but also our remaining two Maccabi teams, whose players now have a higher level of football to aspire to within the same club .

Sadly, Jewish football is in danger of disappearing. Maybe not next season, nor the season after, but soon enough. The Maccabi League lost one whole division last season, while the entire AJY men’s league has long gone to the wall.

The only way Jewish players will flourish and improve, short of other clubs trying their hand at higher leagues (and there are plenty of Sunday leagues as well as Saturdays), is to admit non-Jewish players into the league.

Doubtless the Maccabi League will have reasons aplenty why this should not happen. I have the greatest respect for its dedicated chairman, but if he wishes the league to continue in its present format he must accept that both numbers and standards will continue to decline.

Ethnicity in sport is no longer the way forward; integration is, and football — a global language if ever there was one — should be the last place for insularity and exclusivity. Perhaps the league might one day agree. Only then will we avert the very real possibility of teams being sponsored by Aspirin, Disprin and Nurofen Plus.

Review: Three Musketeers

Peter Moss — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:00:56 +0000

By Marcelo Birmajer
Toby Press, £14.99

‘Almost all good jokes about paranoid people converge on a single, serious doubt. Is paranoia a state of alienation which imagines dangers where there are none, or a state of lucidity which perceives real dangers invisible to everyone else? All paranoid people who are not psychotic will claim the second explanation; the wives of paranoids will go for the first.”

Such wry observations have seen young Argentine author and screenwriter Marcelo Birmajer labelled “the Woody Allen of the Pampas”. Stuff and nonsense: Birmajer is much the more concise writer of the two. His Jewishness is grounded in deep knowledge and a real empathy for his faith, and, more to the point, Woody Allen, who famously never leaves the city, wouldn’t know the Pampas from a hole on Fifth Avenue.

The three musketeers in question are three young Argentine Jews who effectively signed their own death warrants when they joined the left-wing Montoneros guerrilla group in the dark days of the “Dirty Wars” of the ’70s and ’80s. But one, Elias Traum, survived and made it to Israel. Twenty years later, he returns to Buenos Aires finally to mourn his two friends and perhaps offload a secret or two.

Our narrator is Javier Mossen, a thoroughly disaffected and lust-lorn Jewish journalist who balances his waking hours between evading writing assignments for a popular Argentine red-top and losing himself in ever more convoluted sexual fantasies. His editor’s secretary is one such fantasy: “The thickness of her lips pointed to a full body with little subtlety about it. She must have had the rear end of an untamed mare, or at least dominated only by the higher authorities at the newspaper”. Reason enough to be an editor, I’d have thought.

Mossen is not especially well regarded by his editor, Pesce (himself holder of more shadowy secrets than is healthy), but he is at least given the Jewish jobs on the paper. Indeed, Mossen “was rushing headlong to turn himself into a gentile newspaper’s decorative Star of David. This was the unavoidable alternative for the children of Israel in exile, wallowing in the oasis of a tolerant newspaper”.

One such Jewish job is to meet, greet and interview Traum on his return to his homeland. Mossen could have never dreamt how many twists and turns his life would take from the moment he stepped into the airport terminal.

Secrets and lies, paranoia and parable, Israeli Intelligence and Jewish wit dry as the Sahara when the sun’s up; all are ladled and stirred in this wonderfully engaging cholent bowl of a novel. Marcelo Birmajer as Woody Allen? Flattery indeed… for the speckled, bespectacled old New Yorker. Birmajer is a rising star worthy of attention.

Review: Chocolate and Cuckoo clocks: The Essential Alan Coren

Peter Moss — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:26:08 +0000

By Alan Coren (eds: Giles Coren and Victoria Coren)
Canongate, £20

The late Alan Coren and I used to live either side of Hampstead Cemetery. It was a favourite walk for both of us. Alan lived on the uber-expensive Hocroft Estate, where houses sell for uber-millions, and called it Cricklewood. I live in West Hampstead and call it East Kilburn. We both earned our daily bread writing humorously for various mediums.

There. the similarities end. For Alan Coren was consistently funny in a gloriously urbane way, a kind of pre-fried Stephen Fry, both as a writer and as a panellist on Call My Bluff and Radio 4's News Quiz. He is the only humorist I ever aspired to be. Now he's dead perhaps I might be... with his children's kind permission.

Ah, his children, Victoria and Giles, bright humorists themselves. Their Foreword alone is worth the price of the book.

G: "Well, if we were going to treat him as a serious writer, we'd start with the Saul Bellow stuff. The lower-middle-class home in Southgate. Osidge Primary. East Barnet Grammar. Then he went off to Oxford. And there was that first morning when he came downstairs in his digs and the landlady had cooked bacon and eggs..."

V: "He always called it egg and bacon..."

G: "... she says with talmudic precision, of the kind which crumbled in 1957 when he took the first forkful. And that was the beginning of the end, really, for all things Jewish."

V: "He was always sentimental about Jews though."

G: "He was always sentimental about everything..."

Such contributions, along with those from Clive James, Stephen Fry and others, are but a sideshow to the main feature: the collected writings of Alan Coren, son of Victoria and Giles's Grandpa Sam whose occupation was something of a mystery to the Corens, but was assumed to have been a plumber on the grounds that he owned a spanner. Coren had as great a genius for titles as for the rhythmically playful prose that followed. In Go Easy, Mr Beethoven, That Was Your Fifth, he responds to a doctor who penned an article on the bicentennial of Beethoven. Coren writes: "One flaw, however, mars the sunny scholarship of your piece: not content to commemorate the bicentenary merely by your thrilling evocation of distorted bowel and giblet and leaving it at that, you insist, I'm afraid, on going on to moralise. And it's none of your business, Doc. Having broken the unethical news that Ludwig's organs got this way through a daily consumption of booze that could have floated a Steinway down Kaiserstrasse, you then wind up the scoop with the homiletic clincher...."

I'll leave that story there. I love anyone who uses the word "homiletic". It's so random, so poised, so Alan Coren.

As I said, Alan Coren and I used to stroll through Hampstead Cemetery and swap the occasional quip.

Now he's in there, permanently, where, according to Victoria, the funeral cantor "sang a mournful Hebrew song, and then came out to Sandi Toksvig". Coren is in the ground, his book is in the bookshop. I urge you to visit both.

Warsaw: re-birth of a culture capital

Peter Moss — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:49:07 +0000

The Polish capital is an utter enigma. Brooding and intense, the largely grey imprint of Stalin is writ large across the avenues and boulevards. Yet it is quite possibly the most fascinatingly, almost beguilingly, re-birthed and culturally rich European capital city.

I was in town for a concert by the greatest of all my musical heroes, the Serbian composer Goran Bregovic, at the vainglorious, yet acoustically pitch-perfect Palace of Science and Culture - known almost universally as Stalin's Wedding Cake - a building resembling one you will have seen dozens of times before across the old Soviet Union: a myopic dictator's imitation of the Empire State Building, only much smaller and with piggy-eyed little windows.

But more than the music, I was there for the history and the statistics that grow more chilling as each zero is added: three million, the number of Jews in Poland in 1939; 460,000, the number of Jews herded into the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943; 70, the number of Jewish newspapers in Poland before the war; 1968, just four decades ago in the heady days of love, peace and flower power, that those Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, or who returned after the war, were driven from their country again, this time by a new bout of Communist-inspired anti-Zionist purges; 5,000, the number of Jews in all of Poland today; one, the number of synagogues still standing in Warsaw.

You'll pardon my very brief history lesson, but it begins to explain the resonance of Warsaw for Jewish tourists.

The Nozyk Synagogue, all lurid yellow paint on the outside, echoing marble floor and marble-pillared ark on the inside, is as much a memorial to a lost community as a functioning house of prayer.

Warsaw was destroyed during the war. Not totally, but as good as. Almost nothing remains of the Jewish Ghetto, and visitors must make a special effort to find it and read, on the remaining wall, an explanation in Hebrew, Polish and English of the Ghetto's agonising history. Nearby, is Natan Rappaport's dramatic black marble memorial to the Ghetto - twin to the one in Yad Vashem - while on Mordechai Anelevich Street stands the stark monument to the Ghetto uprising; not far away, yet another memorial marks the spot where Jews boarded trains to Auschwitz. Wherever I looked I saw Adrien Brody in The Pianist sifting through the rubble for signs of anything... or anyone. The city conjures such images.

Pockets of the centuries-old Praga district on the other side of the Vistula river remain intact, and a programme of urban regeneration is slowly breathing new life into the old warehouses and tenements, where narrow passages and wooden galleries retain an atmosphere of the overcrowded past whilst morphing into the present with the coming of bars and galleries.

But cross the river back to the city's hub and you'll discover an Old Town that is actually newer than the adjacent New Town, an entire historic quarter rebuilt in the 1960s to look medieval.

Old Town Square is approachable from all four corners, but no corner is better to approach than that heralded by the strikingly reconstructed city walls of the Barbican whose picture postcard buildings look barely distinguishable from those constructed at the turn of the 13th century.

In fact, the oldest thing on the whole people-filled square is the endearing 19th-century Mermaid fountain that looks as though it might still pump water for the masses, and the thousand-year-old cobbles on which old men crank up their barrel-organs for the steady flow of tourists.

The Old and New Towns have eight such squares, each one prettier than the next, and none more so than Pilsudski Square where legions of red poppies stand guard in front of the Tomb to the Unknown Soldier.
Warsaw resembles Prague (though it is so much richer in every sense, and way less stag-weekend tacky), its cobbled, colourful, neo-Gothic and effortlessly user-friendly heart encompassed by a tsunami of Eastern bloc concrete anonymity.

There is a certain Parisian déjà vu strolling down the Royal Route from the Royal Castle to Belvedere Palace, a stretch of Baroque churches and monasteries that remained intact, not least the unbeatable Church of the Nuns of the Visitation, upon whose boat-shaped pulpit the young Frederic Chopin would play the organ once a week.

The boulevards, studded with stylish shops and atmospheric little cafés, that carve this north-south swathe through Warsaw bear comparison with Budapest, and there can be no praise higher than that.

Warsaw is one of the greenest cities I have visited in a very long time, the long, lazy banks of the Vistula awash in parks and monuments. A tram ride north along the endless Marszalkowska Street goes through half a dozen parks before arriving at the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East.

But the park of parks, and well worth the 20-minute ride south of town, is the lovingly tended acreage of Wilanowska, the centrepiece of which is the gorgeous Baroque-style Wilanow Palace.

Wilanowska is worth a visit also for the clean white space of the Poster Museum, possibly the only one outside of Hanoi. Warsaw is the poster capital of Europe; barely a lamppost or wall goes unadorned in the city, testimony to all the art and culture on offer around town, and a museum to house the best makes perfect sense.

Just as beautiful, and closer to the city centre, is the Royal Park at Lazienkowski, definitely one of Europe's loveliest, home not only to the exquisite Monument to Chopin, but also to the Palace-on-the-Water, the Theatre-on-the-Isle, and the unbeatable New Orangery which, with its cast iron and glass façade, exotic plants, and exclusive Belvedere restaurant, is like the Baltic lovechild of Holland Park and Petersham Nurseries.

Warsaw is just as rich in spires and domes. Such is Poland's location up by the Baltic Sea, its ecclesiastical edifices are redolent of most of its neighbours, near-neighbours, and not-so-near-neighbours.

The green dome on the Church of St Casimir is pure Helsinki; the neo-Gothic towers of the Church of St Florian that dominate the vista across the Praga district are purest Latvia; onion domes abound to remind you of Mother Russia's invasive influence; and most bizarre of all, the gables of the city's cathedral are straight out of Reykjavik, which isn't even remotely a neighbour, but at least it demonstrates a rare eclecticism in the post-war re-shaping of the city.

It wasn't my Jewish conscience that took me to Warsaw, though heaven knows that kicked in when the waiter took my order of latkas and smatana at the Menora restaurant next door the synagogue. These days there is little to ignite the Jewish flame in Warsaw but, paradoxically, it is the very absence of a Jewish life that once flourished in this intriguing city that most stoked the fires of yiddishkeit within me.

Travel facts

We stayed at the 48-storey InterContinentalHotel opposite the Palace of Science and Culture (0048 22 328 8888; www.warsaw.intercontinental.com). The views from the top floor spa and pool are stunning. A double room for two with breakfast starts from 119 euros (£000) plus tax per night. Easyjet (www.easyjet.com) offers return flights from Luton to Warsaw. Prices start from £27.99 one way including airport taxes.

Jewish Warsaw

Around 1,500 Jews remain in Warsaw, many very elderly. The Nozyk Street Synagogue (and mikveh) is at 6 Twarda Street (0048 22 620 4324; www.warszawa.jewish.org.pl). It operates daily and Shabbat services. The same address houses Shalom Travel Service (0048 22 652 2802; shalom@jewish.org.pl). The Jewish National Theatre, Plac Grybowski 12/16, gives occasional performances in Yiddish. The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes is on Zamenhofa Street. l Warsaw has a few "kosher" restaurants, but check with the synagogue as to which actually are kosher.

Barcelona keeps its cool

Peter Moss — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The influx of tourists have done nothing to curb the quality of this stunning city

Cities are like rock stars. You discover them, you love them, you tell your mates about them, the whole world jumps on board, then suddenly you are not as keen as you once were. It happened 30 years ago with Supertramp and it has happened lately with Barcelona.

I first found my way to Barcelona when Columbus was knee-high to a periscope. Next thing you know, you cannot move for camera clicking cathedral gazers.

Barcelona’s magnificent 700-year old Cathedral is a rare treat. So rare, in fact, that no-one can see it, not from the front anyway, and it has been that way for almost three years now, the façade shrouded in scaffolding and what looks like Spain’s 1,000 largest dust sheets. It is an unholy mess and it disfigures an otherwise appealing plaza, though the rear aspect on Carrer De La Pietat remains a miracle of grace, serenity and unfettered beauty.

As cathedrals go this is the good news. Anton Gaudi’s more than faintly absurd Sagrada Familia, the symbol of Barcelona, is still not complete 125 years since the extravagant architect’s first line of cement was smoothed into place to a design so exacting that today’s workforce have little idea how to finish it off. It has been that way since Gaudi died in 1926.

Gaudi was a visionary; Europe’s own Frank Lloyd Wright. His rooftops are something else, the one atop the Casa Mila apartment building is like a coral reef, all slithering sea creatures, slinking mermaids and elaborate ironwork that resembles floating swathes of seaweed. Across the road, his Casa Battilo looks like a dragon with windows.

Gaudi is like Marmite; you love him or you loathe him, but no-one sits on the fence with the guy… Not that he ever designed a fence, though if he did he would have surely placed it in his blithely surreal Parc Guell, a colourful and imaginative explosion of gardening, gazebos and garishness. Suffice to say, when a gigantic ceramic dragon slithers down the stairway towards the entrance, guarded either side by a pair of gingerbread houses from which serpentine paths snake uphill to a vast city-view terrace bounded by a sinuously meandering patchwork balustrade-cum-bench, well, you know you’re not in Hendon.

So yes, I like Gaudi, and never mind the Sagrada saga, the Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony of property development and still several decades short of a finale.

Barcelona majors in parks and gardens and king of the hill is Montjuic, Barcelona’s local mountain, a rising sprawl of parkland, iconic stadiums and world class museums, amongst which the white-walled Fundacio Joan Miro stands in sublime contrast to the neighbouring colossus that is the Palau Nacional.

Never did two such strikingly different structures so gloriously dominate a mountain. With Montjuic’s arts and parks behind you, hop on one of the mountaintop cable cars and swing down to Port Vell on the city’s burgeoning waterfront.

From here you walk: Barcelona is one of the great walking cities of Europe, and anyone who says otherwise is talking out of his tapas. You can easily spend a whole day walking the backstreets of the Gothic Quarter and not once encounter a car, a bus or, for that matter, daylight.

The little backstreets of the city’s old quarter are implausibly narrow and atmospheric, and among them is the tiny Calle Marlet, where you will find the city’s ancient synagogue, discovered just 13 years ago and the oldest in Spain if not in Europe. From there, head to the tiny Placa Del Pi, which nestles peacefully by the side of the cloistered old Santa Mari Del Pi, another of Barcelona’s churches notable above all else for that heady melange of austerity and scaffolding.

Barely 100 yards east lies the seething and relentlessly touristy thoroughfare known as La Rambla.

Better by far to stay rooted to one of the comfy silver-blue chairs outside the Bar Del Pi, a fine place to sit and impose on the hospitality of the bar owner while nursing the one cappuccino through an entire afternoon under a sun that filters and flickers through overhanging branches and church roof gargoyles.

The joy of finding something new — new to me anyway — in a city you know well is incalculable.

This time in Barcelona I discovered Poble Espanyol, a vaguely pointless yet rather enchanting re-creation of much of Spain’s regional architecture, from the granite edifices of rain-swept Galicia to the sunny patios and orange trees of Andalucia, all contained within a facsimile of the walls and towers of the Avila Gate, and all of this in an area not much greater than an five-a-side football pitch.

My best discovery though was the newly opened and tastefully restrained Hotel AC Miramar. Goodness me, it’s a long time since I so enjoyed a hotel. The Miramar is way out on its own, literally.

It sits alone and aloof, high up Montjuic with a 360-degree cityscape view, a vista without equal in all of Barcelona, and one afforded every one of the hotel’s 75 individually designed rooms and suites.

The hotel is breathtaking, all muted colours and soft lighting, a gorgeous central atrium, an even more gorgeous spa (complete with Turkish bath), bedrooms you don’t want to leave, a huge bath, a walk-in monsoon shower and a hi-fi set-up that transforms your room into Carnegie-Hall-with-pillows.

Outside, every room has a private terrace complete with hot-tub and that drop-dead city view, while the back of the hotel has sculpted gardens, a seriously funky pool with the cutest recliners you ever saw, and a handsome colonnaded period façade to which has been welded an uber-cool modern extension.

The AC Miramar is a triumph, and its modest size and peaceful hillside setting ensures blissful respite from the hyper-active thrum of the city itself, the centre of which can be reached at gentle walking pace in around 20 minutes.

Jewish Barcelona

A prosperous and Jewish community lived in the city in the 13th century. The synagogue at 5 Calle Marlet can be visited on weekdays

Some 3,000 Jews live in Barcelona today.

There are Orthodox and Progressive synagogues, a mikveh, a Chabad-run kosher food service, Jewish community centres and a Jewish Travel Agency (0034 932 460 300).

Walks of the Jewish Quarter and to view Montjuic’s ancient Jewish burial sites can be arranged through Urban Cultours Project (0034 934 171 191; www.urbancultours.com)

This is new-wave cruising

Peter Moss — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0100

I have placed, and lost, three disastrous bets this year: I put £100 at 33-1 on Luton getting promoted to the premiership. We were relegated. I bet my good friend Mark Wilcox a pair of brand new Ray Ban Aviators that Tony Blair would never apologise for his many debacles on leaving Number Ten. He did, sort of. And most recently, when boarding the Regent Seven Seas Voyager at the never knowingly understated harbour at St Tropez, I bet the Regent rep a bottle of the local Caprice Merlot that I would be younger by far than what I assumed would be the 600-odd leather-skinned pensioners bound for Barcelona, Menorca, Portofino and other Mediterranean ports. Again I was wrong, and this time by a country mile and several decades.

Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped inside a mystery, tucked inside an enigma”. I have long viewed cruises pretty much the same way, the only certainty being, in my mind at least, that all cruisers are, how shall I say it, a bit old.

What did octogenarians do all day, I wondered, cooped up in a tower block at sea? Is it all bridge and quoits, tea dances and bingo? Is the on-board entertainment really provided by a superannuated magician called Mephisto and his assistant, the Lovely Jayne? Is dining at the captain’s table really considered an honour equal to, say, receiving a knighthood? Is there really a Zimmer-frame park strategically placed alongside the life-boats? And are cruisers all so old that they remember when the Titanic was ocean-going rather than ocean gone? The answer, I can now tell you, is no, no, yes, no, sometimes.

Discounting the enigma of the captain’s table, the other concepts are all hopeless stereotypes perpetrated by people like me who had never actually been on a cruise. For this cruise was passably young(ish) and enormous fun.

I will start with my cabin. Did I say cabin? Stateroom, entry to which banished all thoughts of the one that three Marx Brothers plus 28 crew spilled out of in A Night at The Opera. In mine you could have played tennis. It was vast and luxurious, right down to the sumptuous Egyptian linen, the squash court-sized walk-in closet and the private balcony. I should have asked to see one of the really large rooms, just to see the goals at either end.

There is not much call for the sweeping staircases that cascade down the Voyager, not with four glass elevators, the kind that gave Mel Brooks high anxiety in High Anxiety, to whisk you all the way up to the sun deck which is encircled within a 250-metre jogging track with golf nets and paddle tennis at the far end. There on the deck, around the pool and the Jacuzzis, you will find all life laid out before you, much of it inside swimsuits that, I shall charitably assume, once fitted their owners.

Not that anyone seemed much bothered by ill-fitting twin-sets and Speedos. Everyone on board the Voyager seems content to soak up the Mediterranean sun and the food and drink that comes on tap and is all included — wine and champagne, too, in the package price. Food is king on the Voyager, lots of it; morning, noon and night, with menus ranging from the death-defyingly calorific to the low-fat and salt-free. All diets, and appetites, are catered for, including challah and kiddush wine on Friday night for the Jewish guests.

Regency offers a bewildering array of daily tours and excursions at the various ports of call, all of which sound mighty tempting. Avoid them. They come at a price. Olive oil tasting in Portofino costs a whopping $189; Positano by private boat with gourmet lunch a stratospheric $825. Even a three-hour horseback ride in Menorca will leave you little change from $200. No, all these places are best discovered under your own steam with your pocket largely undisturbed.

Me? I spent a whole day walking Barcelona and nursing a succession of cappuccinos in my favourite corner of the tiny Placa del Pi, which nestles quietly by the side of a cloistered old church barely 100 metres from the relentlessly touristy La Rambla.

Barcelona is over-hyped and over-visited and will never be in the same league as the criminally under-valued Valencia just down the coast. But anyone who tells you that Barcelona is not one of the great walking cities is talking out of his tapas. From the waterfront up to Montjuic via all points Gaudi, Barcelona has scores of mighty viewpoints and scores of surreal rooftops at every turn, and the day they finally finish building the ever more bizarre Sagrada Familia will be the day I stop returning — I suspect never.

Back on board the Voyager, I hit the ocean view gym before presenting my body at the ship’s Carita de Paris spa facility for a one-hour hot stone massage. I am not sure how therapeutic the treatment was, but the girl was so proficient at laying the stones, I am planning on getting her in to do my patio.

I took dinner that evening in the ship’s intimate top-deck La Veranda restaurant, the most laid back of the Voyager’s four dining options, and indulged myself in a meal of disgracefully delicious desserts, right down to the last scraping of creamy white pannacotta. My statins had their work cut out that night.

I downed that little lot while sinking feet first into a bottle of Rosso di Montepulciano in the abundant company of a cavernous septuagenarian buba from Great Neck who was dripping foundation and diamonds from every fold of skin while showing me photographs of her recently deceased fourth husband’s funeral. “He died in my arms,” she told me. “So, it was murder,” I muttered under my breath. I think I got away with it.

Her name was Irma Finklestone. The cruise was rich in Irma Finklestones, a generic order of folk all of whom seem to travel with their divorcée’s 30-something daughters in search of a fifth husband for one and a second, perhaps third, for the other. Falling between the two age-groups, I felt doubly threatened, but I cannot deny they were great company.

Dining was less formal than I expected. Aside from the odd black-tie gala nights, casual attire (“country casual” they call it; I have no idea what it means) is pretty much the style, and the less structured of my Paul Smith jackets and Jimmy Choo loafers saw plenty of late-night action in the ship’s casino. I am not, you may have gathered, a very good gambler, but I do know how to pose, and a ship’s casino is a poseur’s paradise, and honestly, you would have thought it was James Bond, such was my air of languid nonchalance at the craps table, even after everyone else had long gone to bed.

This was a nice cruise. I am up for another. Regent do not just cruise the Med. From the Baltic to the Caribbean, Antarctica to French Polynesia, they cover the world, pretty much, and provided I can get sponsored by some kindly old Finklestone in search of a toy boy, I think I might just go for their epic 60-day circumnavigation of South America. Why not? Cruises are fun. You just need to know the ropes and enter into the spirit. “At last,” to lift the closing line from High Fidelity, “I can see how it’s done.”

Travel Facts

Regent Seven Seas Cruises (023 8068 2280; brochure: 0870 225 0912) will be cruising this September for 7 nights from Nice to Venice (with overnight stay) via Livorno, Civitavecchia (for Rome), Sorrento and Dubrovnik from £2,576 per person, with special offer of free flights from London and return. Special half-price Baltic itineraries from Stockholm to Copenhagen from £1,991 per person (flights additional) including two nights at St Petersburg.

Social Perversity in South Bedfordshire

Peter Moss — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:41:39 +0000

"Sex and death", Woody Allen once remarked. "Two things that happen once in a lifetime – though at least after death you're not nauseous". To this short list he might have added "…and Luton Town Football Club winning a major trophy, or any trophy for that matter". Silverware on the Kenilworth Road mantlepiece is about as commonplace as a dreidl in the Vatican, and 24 April 1988 was the day, the one and only day, we called in the engravers.

Luton then were as West Brom are today, up and down more often than Benjamin Netanyahu's Y-fronts, our flirtation with the top division never quite blossoming into a full-blown affair. But in cup competitions we shone, as the mighty Arsenal were to find out that sunny Sunday afternoon as both teams took to Wembley's old meadows for the League Cup Final, or whatever the sponsors called it back then.

That I elected in the first place to lend my vocal support to the decaying rubble we Lutonians call a stadium (all regulations governing health and safety mysteriously stop at the ground's turnstiles, both of them) showed early and unsettling signs of perversity, and perhaps gave a clue to the years of therapy that were to follow.

The fact is I wanted to be different, and let's face it, when you're a Jewish kid growing up in Hendon Central, fairly drowning in a tidal wave of Spurs and Arsenal fans, Luton is about as different as you can get. Today I can pass it off as some sort of post-modern ironic statement. Back then it was just plain weird.

Or was it? For Luton – and tell me if this is not perversity itself in a town where Vauxhall looms larger than God - is probably the most Jewish club of the lot, the Red Sea of Kenilworth Road parting at various times to engulf a Jewish chairman, Jewish manager, and that most exotic of species, a British-born Jewish player – respectively David Kohler, David Pleat, and the much travelled and largely forgotten Barry Silkman, journeyman ball-juggler who graced our midfield for a few brief games between spells at some dozen or more other clubs where the catering was doubtless better, from Maine Road to Maccabi Tel Aviv via Orient and Palace and Hereford and…oh, the list goes on and on and on…

Silkman was a contemporary of Kevin Keegan with, arguably, less natural ability than the whingeing Geordie, but an infinitely better perm, while Kohler's main claim to fame, apart from the ability to win any number of Rodney Bewes lookalike competitions, was his obsession with what he modestly called his Kohlerdome, an all-singing, all-dancing, all-purpose arena replete with moveable pitch and retractable roof, at a cost that could fund Joey Barton's legal bills for next decade-and-a-half.

The stadium never happened. Nothing under Kohler happened, save for the wholesale disposal of our better players, the signing of no-one that actually involved the handing over what you and I know as money, and the inevitable and horribly rapid descent to the basement of the Football League.

And when finally Kohler was consigned to the footballing catacombs by fans bearing letter-bombs, his legacy was a team in which my late grandmother, aided only by her frame and a few puffs of Ventolin, would comfortably have held her own.

All of which leaves me hankering for the class of '88, the team of nine internationals, fashioned by Pleat, inherited by Ray Harford, and managed once again by the crumple-faced cliché-meister whose manic jig on defeating Manchester City with the last kick of the 1982/83 season to preserve our top flight status was one of the defining moments of the 20th century.

Armstrong set foot on the Moon, Mandella walked free from Robben Island, and Pleat ran around like an idiot. The Earth may not have moved when Pleatie weaved his spell, but there were tremors in Bedfordshire from Sandy all the way to Leighton Buzzard, street parties the likes of which Flitwick had never before seen.

And yes, you read me right – nine international players, including the progeny of a South African ANC activist (Brian Stein) and a Nigerian military attache's son (Emeka Nwajiobi). Unfashionable we may be. We could sign Beckham, Zidane and Ronaldinho, bedeck the entire squad in Armani shirts and Paul Smith jocks, and change our name to Real Luton, and we'd still be about as chic as Roger Whittaker.

But we were fielding players called Pasquale Fuccillo, Bontcho Guenchev, and Herve Bacque long before Greater Europe started beating a path to the Premiership door. Goodness me, but the word galacticos was first uttered not in Madrid's Bernebau Stadium, but about 50 metres north of the Dallow Road Industrial Estate.

We beat Arsenal 3-2 that day. God, we were so much better it was embarrassing, and never mind a Luton crossbar more pockmarked than a Sarajevo apartment block. Spurred on by Andy Dibble's 85th minute penalty save from the ever-hapless Nigel Winterburn, we staged the finale of which legends are made. Arsenal hadn't read the script. We were fated to score twice in the last five minutes, retribution for always losing to them in the league. This was Pulp Fiction, we were Samuel L. Jackson, and did we ever strike Arsenal down with a vengeance.

Fate these days finds Luton's jigsaw box assemblage of schoolboys and loan-players, has-beens and never-will-be's, tripping the light fantastic to Colchester, Southend and other footballing outposts where the leading scorer is rivalled by the tea lady in terms of earning power.

Our local derby, now we've lost Watford to a higher calling, rests on drawing Milton Keynes Dons in the Cup, our one trip abroad is against Cardiff City, our hopes of a new stadium got lost more than a decade ago in some kind of bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle, and the one policeman that patrols outside the ground does so for the sole purpose of throwing people in.

Things do not look good. The town – once derided byThe Idler magazine as "the crappiest town in Britain" – still struggles to grasp the twin concepts of sanitation and pavements, while the team's fortunes, relatively sound just now at midway in the Championship, will surely once again nosedive once the big bad wolves of the CWM brigade (that's Clubs With Money) come a-huffing and a-puffing, cheque books in hand, for our better players, whom doubtless we'll let go for petty cash just as we've always done and continue to do simply to survive. And our manager will doubtless be dismissed, like Joe Kinnear, by text message just as he gets the team looking like viable contenders i.e. now.

Such is the plight of the smaller club. We can spot a good player, but we can't keep him. We can top the table, but we can't stay there. We can only go so far before it all ends in tears. But Luton are my team, handed down by God on Mount Sinai, and they'll be my team until death, or a spectacularly lucrative takeover bid, do us part.

Mind the (age) gap

Peter Moss — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:37:26 +0000

32 years. It must be some sort of record.

It's not official, but I'll claim it anyway. 32 years, surely the largest age gap anywhere between the two oldest players in a senior Sunday Division Five Jewish soccer team based on a corporation football pitch in the shadow of a major north London hospital somewhere between Wembley and Ealing.

The team? FC Team, Maccabi League newcomers, trendsetters and brainbox university graduates. The second oldest player? My son Gideon, age 22, team captain. Footballing credentials? One-time junior at Hendon FC (with Joe Cole), member of the all-conquering Kinnor youth teams of the mid-late 90s, university footballer. Footballing assets? Fast, strong, good brain, great vision, outstanding in the air, very very skilful. In short, you'd never know he was my son.

The oldest player? Me, age…well, the maths aren't difficult. Footballing credentials? One time junior at Hendon FC (with Old King Cole), Maccabi League journeyman, and, er, that's it. Footballing assets? Fast (former Maccabiah Games sprint medallist), fit, brain and vision in decent working order (though rarely applied in the soccer sense) and, er, that's it.

So…nepotism aside – and isn't it good to see it work in reverse for a change – what the heck is a bald old 150 pound (by coincidence my weight and my transfer value) geezer doing abandoning the comfy armchair of Maccabi Masters football for the Keystone Cop high-speed chase of regular Maccabi League football alongside, and against, a bunch of kids who were barely off their mothers breasts while I was attaining veteran status in the heady world of amateur sport?

The answer? Vanity, of course. Just knowing I can keep pace with all those testosterone-fulled post-teenies, each of whom would give Roadrunner a run for his money in his pursuit of the wily old coyote, is enough to give my ego a rub down. I'm in the team on merit, until death, or a life policy exclusion clause, do us part.

Then, of course, there's the wily old coyote syndrome. I've learned a few tricks down the years, and a knowledge of how to stand on the opposing centre forward's foot as he tries to leap for the ball at a corner without the referee spotting it is a knowledge worth imparting.

Most of all, though – and you won't really know this unless you've a son of your own – the joy of playing alongside your boy in a team, a serious team, not just a park kick-about, is a dad's dream come true. And in our case we really are alongside each other, Gideon in centre midfield, me to his left, still playing the old Number 11 game that I always played so…well, that I always played.

How long can it last? Well, the truth is, just so long as Gideon stays fit and injury-free, what's to say we can't keep this thing rolling till Gideon Junior comes along and stakes a claim for his dad's shirt. Now that will be some gap.

Top Tenerife

Peter Moss — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0100

The Spanish holiday island proves an unexpected hit

Tenerife. It’s not really a word I’d ever uttered, except perhaps ironically, nor a destination I’d considered, except (you’ll excuse the pun), as a last resort.

A bit, you know, touristy. Frankly, I blanched at the thought; even my passport flinched. I’ve no tattoos, I don’t like beer and I’m not from Gravesend. How would I blend?

Well… I went, I blended, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself on this tropical slice of Little Britain, where you can buy an English newspaper any day of the week, first thing in the morning, just so long as it’s the Daily Mirror.

I went because it was October, it was two weeks and lots of stitches after having a couple of hernias repaired, I was pale, sun-starved and short of funds, and it was great value, given the promise of sun, sea, sand and session upon session of massage and pampering in a splendid five-star spa hotel at the quiet end of the island… and all — as Canaries’ experts Voyana pointed out — barely a four-hour flight away.

My first full day at the Gran Tacande Hotel on the palm-strewn Costa Adeje ran something like this: woke earlier than was really necessary, stepped out on to my private, ocean-view terrace, saw nothing but blue ahead and above, and instantly ditched all plans to hike up Mount Teide in Las Canadas National Park.

At 12,300-ft Teide is higher than any peak in mainland Spain, and only a half dozen or so summits stand any higher in all of Africa, and it did seem a bit daft to consider tackling it with a newly patched up abdomen. And anyway, there’s a cable car that does the job.

I settled instead on a half hour in the hotel’s gym, followed by a glorious jog along the coast — so far along the coast, in fact, that I ran clean out of coast and was forced inland, away from the red-brick paths and slatted boardwalks that bisect the beach, and on to soft lush grass through laurel groves and amid billowing hibiscus and palm leaves. This, I thought, beats the treadmill at the David Lloyd.

I felt I’d earned my breakfast. And so, on the dot of 10, I picked up my king-size cappuccino (by me that’s breakfast) and carried it, along with my over-stacked backpack, through the hotel’s sculpted and manicured terraces and pools, past the hotel’s Vitanova Spa with its Roman

and Turkish baths and relaxation rooms, and down on to the beach.

And there I stayed till the sun went down, attached as though surgically to my recliner, save only for a paddle in the Atlantic each time I finished a chapter of “Cold Comfort Farm” (my most oft-read book; I never travel without it). I lay there in a world of my own, a little middle-aged Jewish speck between Africa and America, blissfully oblivious to all the comings and goings. And how easily oblivion comes, with a good book, the new Ry Cooder album whispering through my iPod and an obliging beach attendant to tend to my periodic cappuccino refuelling needs.

On the odd occasion that I looked up I noticed just what a lot of kids there were. Fair enough, I thought. Broad, clean beaches, rocky bits to clamber up and jump off, plenty of ice-cream vendors along the boardwalk peddling the most fantastic ice-creams and fruit shakes.

Of course, it’s easy to affect such benevolence to rampaging kids when the rampaging kids are somebody else’s, and you’ve nothing more grown up and responsible to do than adjust your recliner and slap on some more Factor 5. But honestly, if my kids were still kids I think I’d bring them here.

By five o’clock the beach was all but deserted — just me, the sea, and a bloke who bored me senseless with his coma-inducing tales of life as an Essex County Councillor. Then he was gone, doubtless to call home and see if the proposed twinning of Billericay with the whole of the Canaries had been approved. People gone and iPod exhausted, I could not have been happier than to have no sound other than that of the waves to wash over me. It would be another three hours of peace — definitely not a phrase I’d expected to use of Tenerife — before I presented myself on one of the hotel’s massage beds for a micro-blasted seaweed wrap with lipolitic action (I’m sure I saw the same thing on the dinner menu) followed by a half-hour’s reflexology and a late-night, four-course supper washed down with a deeply pleasurable local Cumbres de Abona 1997 vintage, all consumed on the hotel terrace.

And for accompaniment, the tinkling ivories of a man called Juan and a vocalist who, to judge from her reproachful glares in his direction every time he hit a bum note (which was often), I took to be Senora Juan.

And then it was midnight. It had been a perfect day. Never mind all my judgmental, pre-arrival posturing, I was really enjoying Tenerife.

Days two, three and four were not dissimilar to day one, save for one respect: I wanted to see some of the island, something more than just the pink-stuccoed, turreted and porticoed palaces of pleasure that line the coast.

Aqualand Water Park and Dolphinarium was an option, but you’ve seen one dolphin, you’ve seen the lot. They squeak, they jump for fish but, hey, I can do that.

No, it was the interior I was after, and I found it on day two in the company of my guide Ignacio, Tenerife’s answer to the Schumacher brothers and a man for whom the words “slow down” and “careful now” are a foreign language, even in his own language.

The Tenerife coast is certainly, how shall I say, a touch overdeveloped, where high-rise apartment blocks seem almost to race each other up the mountainside. If you know the hills around Jerusalem you’ll know what I mean, and if you like Marbella you’ll probably think I’m nitpicking.

But head inland and you can quickly rise above this. In Ignacio’s car, very very quickly, and as he wound his Merc around the mountain roads of Tenerife, the views grew ever more spectacular at every hairpin bend. No more buildings marching up the hillside; just acacia groves, terraces laden with fruit and vegetable crops and lovingly tended vineyards.

This is the Tenerife I had not expected. Scenery by turn Pyrenean and Patagonian, with wacky rock formations that are pure Utah.

Then, as we climbed up and above the clouds, there it was, poking through the grey-white fluffy stuff at a shade under 8,000-feet, volcanic Teide. Standing, like Kilimanjaro, in majestic isolation, the volcano lords it over the myriad tourists below who never quite make it out of their deckchairs to see the heights of this surprisingly appealing island with its beautiful sunsets.

While they were picking sand out of their toes, I was flicking volcanic scree away from my climbing boots. That’s right. I was heading up there, the man’s way. Cable cars, to paraphrase Gordon Gekko, are for wimps, as indeed are hernias. And when I got to the top I sat myself down on a narrow ledge, opened my backpack, and read my Daily Mirror. Oh yes, I know how to blend.