Garlic is a venomous vegetable which kills all the organisms that make human beings sick. It also has astounding nutritional value, being noted for improving circulation, digestion and mental powers, and for elevating the male libido. This last function seems useless, since garlic is as repellent to over-amorous swains as it is to vampires. I hate the stuff.
When I was little, garlic was the baneful gas that was expelled from the lungs and pores of those alien creatures who had been born under foreign flags. My parents, by the grace of God, had been born under the Union Jack and were steeped in such British traditions as monarchy, beheadings, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, cockles, mussels, anaemic coffee and a stolid respectability. In those early years, I understood that the purpose of every English family was to eschew all things that were not painfully respectable. Garlic was not respectable. Neither were drinking, smoking, swearing, gambling and dancing, nor an enthusiastic interest in procreation . (I was an only child.) This oppressive respectability was too much to bear for a small child with big ears and watchful eyes, who was trying to learn about the strange world beyond his own family's well-regulated hearth fires.
Sinning didn't come easily to a dutiful young Englishman. You have to be wearing long pants with money in the pockets before you can learn at first hand about John Barleycorn, snooker and draw poker. I guess that's why I started my straying by wondering where babies come from. That forbidden mental activity didn't cost anything.
I started from one certainty - proper English babies were delivered by storks in full livery and wearing top hats. This being a service reserved for English people only, I began to puzzle over how non-English human beings obtained their bouncing babies. The problem was soon solved for me by some boys of Ukrainian extraction. From what they said, Ukrainian blessed events, from ordering to delivery, were the products of a very joyful process. I wondered why my forbears, the lordly English, never thought of doing it that way. My faith in an Anglo-Saxon heritage was shaken.
From then on, it was all downhill. I sampled cigarettes. I guzzled a fine vintage called Emu 999 made from grapes tramped out in far-off Australia by a flock of trained emus. I mastered some of the intricacies of poker and pea pool. I even tried to dance. In time, I began to consort with an older gentleman whose mastery of plain and fancy cussing was almost beyond belief. He was a virtuoso. He was a poet. His original alliterative constructions should be entered in an encyclopaedia and preserved for posterity. Sometimes I go to a lonely place far out of earshot of delicate people and shout his expressions to the winds. I want to remember them.
At last, my Union Jack is torn and tattered. I thrive on borscht and schnitzel and a variety of Chinese dishes. I have even stopped following the deeds and misdeeds of the princes and princesses of the royal house. The only element of my British ancestry that survives is an implacable hatred of garlic.
In the old cookbooks , the heirlooms, garlic is never mentioned. In the new ones, everything starts with garlic to which other ingredients are added at random. The authors of the recipe always insist on crushing two, 10 or 20 garlic cloves. Disgusting.
Worst of all, my war with garlic has forced me into the thoroughly un-English practice of telling lies. When ordering at an eatery, I always transfix the hapless waitress with a gimlet eye and gasp in a hoarse, strangling voice, "Not one smidgen of garlic can touch my plate or else I will collapse and die immediately of anaphylactic shock. My estate will sue you and your employers for seven million dollars." Works every time. I'm not even ashamed of myself . Desperate situations call for desperate remedies.
