The Prawn of a New Era

Arch and buckle, o, fractured temporal plane. We’re back in Kerala, last week. Life slowed down amazingly there.

Wait for an hour and a half at the Baywatch restaurant on Cherai beach, and this is what you get. Tiger prawns as big as kittens, split and rubbed with oily garlic and spiced and grilled. Marvellous and messy with the sea rolling away just behind us. The only time I’ve ever otherwise seen prawns this big is at Doyle’s at the Sydney Fish Markets, one of my favourite places in the world. The tiger prawns stuffed with chutney ingredients and pine nuts have been on the menu there for donkey’s years; unlike the spicy grilled prawns at the Baywatch, they are a dish I’d advise nobody to order. The consumption of prawn heads has recently been a theme of both my reading and correspondence. Delicacy these may be, I’ve been lead to understand; the sisters Pike nevertheless left the prawn heads untouched.

While we’re on the subject of Keralan cuisine, cooks there use coconut oil rather than ghee as their fat of choice. I, however, was rubbed with spiced ghee and put into a steam cupboard to cook whilst in Kerala. Ayurvedic healing takes you to some strange places. The strangest place I’ve found myself in quite some time is sitting locked in a nineteenth century style steam cabinet with only my head poking out, wearing a cotton loincloth, dripping with aromatic, therapeutic ghee. True story.

The titular allusion to new eras provides a flimsy pretext for a reference to a new era in French presidential romance. I’m behind the times and I’m shocked. I just found out that Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni have become encoupled in a maelstrom of love. It’s way too late for l’esprit de l’escalier. I’m shocked. I know that I’ve intoned loudly in the past that the private lives of public figure should not be the topic of hysterical response and scrutiny. Still, smiling, nip, tuck, slash, burn, all in the name of progress sharks like Sarkozy and quasi-bohemian guitar strumming supermodel heiresses like Bruni should not even be allowed to meet. Je n’aurais jamais cru…