April 13, 2009
Depressed
The trip to the Isle was, on the whole, jolly good. Weather was iffy but at least never produced the predicted heavy rain. I do seem to be getting a bit wimpy about the cycling -- I skipped one cold and, as it turned out, extremely wet ride, and would gladly see Gurnard's Solent View Road blasted to rubble and bulldozed into the sea -- but on the whole these trips are still fun. I'll probably be back at the end of May to revisit the long ride to Freshwater (pictured on these pages at least twice before) as well as, in a freak departure from tradition, to have a go at -- of all things -- sea kayaking. Probably; I'm not making any promises on this score.
Nevertheless, despite the local loveliness, there was something a bit depressing about the Isle this time around, perhaps due to now being just the outer limit of the season. Wight is basically a rural backwater, hugely dependent on the seasonal influx of standoffish wealth. I found this most oppressively obvious in Cowes itself, although that's probably just sampling bias. In any case, the town is a benighted outpost, which might well be borderline-unsustainable were it not for the transient population of yuppie sailors whose barely-recession-dented riches trickle down to the locals in only the most minimal and grudging of ways.
There seem to be so many dead-end lives here, so many people marking out their days behind the counters of grim, dusty, customerless nicknack shops, trapped beyond an event horizon of hopelessness, born into a world drained of potential in the midst of conspicuous plenty; while boorish yachtie yahoos roam the streets outside, sloshing money into the gutters. Cowes is, at least in places, a pretty town, and the island is a beautiful place, but it's also heartbreakingly bleak. From the pinch-mouthed old man in the newsagent packed with semi-pornographic novelty pig ornaments -- I bought one for Quayside at �1.99, and oh how we laughed, oh how hollowly, at its profligate detail, the hours of work that must have gone into this triumph of tat -- to the (we imagined) ex-screw bouncer at the curry house, offloaded to this sinecure by the Prison Officers Association after one too many blows to the head with a torn-off bunk leg in some Parkhurst riot, the place seemed to be filled with the ground down and desperate, filled -- in some paradoxical way -- with emptiness.
All of which, of course, we observed wryly and then moved on to another ice cream, another ride, another evening of excessive drinking and talking bollocks late into the night about urban pursuits unknown to the locals, spending our money at supermarkets that will spirit most of it away, and basically having a jolly old time.
Posted by matt at April 13, 2009 10:20 PM
Please say your chosen curry house did not have pictures of Richard Branson on the wall, otherwise I'll have to feel guilty about not warning you.
And you have to remember the Isle of Wight's three main industries are boats, helicopters and tourism. Wee bit screwed.
It's a strangely moribund place for somewhere once memorably described as England's clitoris. The same person, from Freshwater - what's it say about the state of the place that being able to drink the water is note-worthy - also claimed it as England's basilic vein as it's where most of the drugs come in.
PS. I'm not a yuppie sailor (although I can't really vouch for the members of the party who flew in from Zurich and wore shoes they couldn't walk in) and appear to be doing quite well on the recession-dented bit. But it was faintly depressing to tick off most of the faces watching the rugby in the pub the next morning on a pontoon or in the showers. It seems to be one of those places that people occasionally come from but where no-one lives.
It was indeed the Bahar Tandoori, but I'm not sure what warning would have been due -- it wasn't my first time in the place. The food was still fine, if more expensive than it used to be. I don't recall ever seeing the doorman before, though.
In any case, your last sentence sums things up rather nicely.
Maybe we just got it on a busy night; after that night it's not somewhere I'd recommend.
My main course was ok-ish - lamb that should really have been used a while ago sunk in tomato puree - but I was fortunate not to have two breasts of squirty cream adorning it (apparently they still make such a thing). The poppadoms tasted of the stale verging on rancid fat they'd been cooked in. The naan mostly hadn't met with enough heat at any point to stop them being fluid. But the onion bhajis were quite good, though I'm not sure where one can go wrong making them.
Add in having to clean your own cutlery and deciding to drink straight from the bottle having seen the glasses... I would have asked for replacements but the staff were nowhere around (the on-a-loop music had a quarter-of-an-hour break before anyone came back upstairs to press play again) and I'd already checked the cutlery tray and failed to find anything less spinach speckled. And then, eventually, came the bill which appeared to have worked to a different base system and had a suspicious degree of rounding (they did not show their working). It's probably indicative that the alcohol that came in with us largely had to be carried back out.
I could understand (though not really forgive) the past-its-best food if it were a Tuesday following a very wet weekend, but it was a Saturday. The meal was dominated by things one might put up with if you did them yourself, but would make sure you didn't do again. It was all too much detracting from too little.
Not fun.
So who did you go with and how did you manage to have a better time there?