Recent hysteria concerning the food shortages threatened by a no-deal Brexit brought to mind the furore here in Israel surrounding the dearth of vegetables that occurred earlier this year. The torrent of tomato and cucumber chaos threw into sharp relief a seldom-mentioned fact about us in the Holy Land: our addiction-like reliance on salat katzutz—the finely chopped mix of cucumber and tomato (add onion, basil, parsley, lemon juice, pepper and sea salt to taste) that is a staple of Israeli life. With the threat of our own Great Blight looming, and prices rocketing, I turned my attention to the cucumber’s cousin, the trusty gherkin. Always around in times of need—salted, pickled and ready to tang your tongue at the shortest of notice— how is it, I mused, that the gherkin has so few mentions in our popular culture (pace allpoetry.com)? It would seem to be, after all, the perfect antidote to deficits in both post-Brexit Britain and vegetable-scarce Israel, and thus a perfect bridge-building symbol. (Yes, I know the tomato is a fruit, you can eat it with custard, but bear with me.)
The seminal reference must surely be Gherkin on Bad Manners’ Gosh It’s... album of 1981, a paean to the heartache of unrequited love brought about by inferior pickled cucumbers (My Southern Belle was not impressed/My gherkin power had failed the test). Lead singer Buster Bloodvessel’s emotion is as crisp and raw as a pre-brine cornichon, while his rendition of Peut-être je suis/Un stupid French git/Comme tout le monde dit and his similarity to a bald, pasty-faced Boris Johnson, offers a proto-Brexit sensibility that speaks to us even today. But not even Big Baby Johnson would get anywhere near Buster’s famed 27-burger intake as he relishes the relish on the sandwiches he imagines he will soon be sharing with The Donald.
The bar was raised yet higher in 2003 by Bill Bailey’s Unisex Chip Shop in which Bailey, in one of the greatest rhymes in all poetry, dreams of protecting his beloved from the sexual fascism that was lurking/Round the gherkins. Bailey’s song is of course a tribute to Billy Bragg whose own political credentials are well established thanks to tracks such as Ideology, Sexuality, his cover of Joe Hill’s 1913 There Is Power in a Union and most memorably in Great Leap Forward where he proclaims “The revolution is just a T-shirt away!” Workers Playtime, the album on which that track appears, is arguably Bragg’s most lyrically accomplished recording.
But Bragg himself, the big-nosed bard of Barking (yes there really is a place called Barking; well, there’s a Reading, a Tooting, and a Havering, and even a Barkingside) is not averse to the occasional tribute. His A13, Trunk Road to the Sea is an Essex version of Chuck Berry’s famous Route 66. But while Berry (a man with “cheekbones you could hang your coat on” according to John Cooper Clarke) exhorts us to get our kicks on the evocative coast-to-lake road trip, Bragg suggests we “go motoring on the A13.” Pretty mundane in comparison, rather like a pallid BoJo to an orange Donald. However, where else in poetry or song do we ever hear of Shoeburyness or Grays Thurrock, not to mention Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-on-Sea, Chalkwell or Prittlewell (all fine sites for fruit and veg)? But here the Gherkin Road rather runs out.
In fact our pickle-poor culture all adds up to a fitting metaphor for the way our lacto-fermented leaders are driving us towards a water’s edge where the brine will neither preserve the rights Bragg discusses in his recent book The Three Dimensions of Freedom (see my review here), nor sate any sense of frustration we may currently feel at populist politics.
It’s time to lift the cucumbers from our eyes.
Watch Bragg and Bailey performing Unisex Chip Shop together here. Oh, and check out Handyman Blues. Just do it.
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