We buy real newspapers at the weekend, partly because I find I’ll read the news on paper with a sustained attention that’s hard to bring to snippets on a screen, and also because I like to save the magazine section to enjoy over solitary working-from-home lunches midweek.
(I am sorry, of course, for those forced back to the office, and also I recall my mother-in-law’s saying: for richer, for poorer; for better, for worse but please God not for lunch, you need something to tell each other at dinner.)
Last week I noticed that one paper had juxtaposed a blurb for a restaurant review with a headline about war crimes. Jarring, I thought, meaning that it made me feel uncomfortable about wanting to read the restaurant review as well as, and in all honesty maybe more than, I wanted to confront another instance of human inhumanity.
I like reading restaurant reviews, even though I rarely go to restaurants. Constrained prose is often good, restaurant reviewers can be beautifully concise writers and writing about sensory experience is interestingly challenging.
Is it okay to think about restaurants or art while children are bombed?
Don’t tell your child to be careful, or not to fall. Instead, stand ready to catch
I’m learning to wear my new glasses, not to be dismayed by what’s now clear
Let’s put a real kitchen in every school. We could use some of the Apple taxes
I don’t much like reading about atrocities – which is maybe okay; you might worry about someone who did – but I recognise that the least I can do in my comfortable life is know what’s going on, who’s paying what price for the comfort of others.
As I’ve been working on a happy novel while war, genocide and autocracy gather momentum, it’s impossible not to think about such juxtapositions. I remember reading and hearing about massacre and civil war in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s collapse when I was a teenager.
I found it shocking that the adults around me didn‘t seem to care all that much, even though details of appalling torture and killing were set out in the paper on the breakfast table every morning. They couldn’t claim not to know, and knowing, how could they not act?
It’s right that the newspaper puts one beside the other, invites us to see that food writing and war coexist
(Looking back, my own action was absurd: I made contact with a women’s group collecting supplies for refugee camps, which they drove across Europe in vans. I lobbied everyone at school to contribute sanitary protection and toiletries and collected them in boxes that cluttered up the house. As always, it would have made far more sense to conduct due diligence and give money to be spent locally on what the women in the camps wanted rather than giving what we thought they ought to need and incurring all the costs of the ridiculously long drive, at least one of whose purposes must have been to make the volunteers feel useful, even self-sacrificing.)
There’s no answer to the question about the sense or morality of keeping calm and carrying on. It is outrageous to read restaurant reviews and go out for a nice meal while children are being slaughtered, and also not buying newspapers or going to restaurants won‘t stop war crimes, only impoverish the free press that we need for democracy, and make life harder for small businesses.
My dismay in the early 1990s was, as my older son used to enjoy saying of his younger brother, annoying but developmentally appropriate. My instincts were adolescent, which is not to say they were wrong, only that as often, righteousness failed to consider context. My feelings were of no use, and my earnest actions almost certainly did nothing to alleviate suffering; if they made me feel better, that was not to the good because it fostered my delusion that I, and not the women in the camps, had agency.
When we’re outraged, it’s easier if there are goodies and baddies. We want to be right and good, and we want our enemies to be wrong and bad. Playground politics minimises cognitive dissonance and discomfort.
But at least one truth is that we’re all implicated, that it’s not okay to think happily about restaurants or even art while children live and die under bombs. Another truth is that if we give up on restaurants and art, we’re obeying in advance, reducing being human to survival in situations where more fulfilling and creative ways of being remain possible.
So it’s right that the newspaper puts one beside the other, invites us to see that food writing and war coexist. And the restaurant review and the atrocity may not, anyway, be so far apart: people still gather to enjoy food, even as bombs fall, because the desire for nourishment and pleasure and company is not trivial.
