Blackheath Morris’ bagman Richard Sanderson, aka Baggage Reclaim, points today to a restaurant review (“Meal for two, including wine and service, £80”) by Jay Rayner in last Sunday’s Observer.

Here are a few choice extracts:

“The last time I reviewed in the Cotswolds, my bitchy comments about Stow-on-the-Wold lead [sic] to a condemnatory statement about me being read out at a meeting of the Stow Business Association. I regard this as a public service on my part.”

Sure, it does look like the kind of place which could happily accommodate a troop of Morris dancers, and that can never be positive. It’s an ancient Jewish paranoia of mine. For some reason, whenever I see Morris dancers I assume a pogrom can’t be far behind.”

Ho ho, illiterate lifestyle journalist, son of agony aunt Clare Rayner, he very funny.

For those of you with no time for such fripperies as the Observer lifestyle section:

“Jay Rayner is an award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster. He joined the Observer newspaper straight out of Leeds University in 1988 as a columnist, after a year editing the student newspaper. He has since gone on to write for almost all the broadsheet nationals as well as a wide variety of magazines from GQ and Esquire, through Cosmopolitan (for whom he was a contributing editor) to the New Statesman and Granta;… He is a very mediocre jazz pianist.”

This is from Rayner’s PFD biography.

So Jay Rayner has never had a proper job, and writes about so many subjects that that he can safely be said to know next to nothing about any of them. GQ, Esquire and Cosmopolitan? Oh dear, another fucking lifestyle journalist with no real life of his own. He needs to get out more, but should probably avoid Stow.

Rayner is a bore who should be ignored and left to his iced Bailey’s parfait (“the Essex girl of desserts”). Anyone offended by such tosh as Rayner writes about England outside the M25 is of the mistaken belief that the Weltanschauung of the Guardian and Observer has an influence that extends beyond the coffee houses of Hampstead and Islington. This may be another stereotype, but it is fully justified in this case.

Social observation is not something that comes naturally to Guardian and Observer columnists, save for a few exceptions.

I’m currently in email discussion with Chris Wood about what he perceives to be an establishment suppression of working peoples’ culture. In the lastest exchange Chris refers to the hoary old chestnut beloved of the metropolitan chattering classes that is “You should try everything once apart from incest and Morris dancing.”

This is little different from “The Welsh shag sheep”, “Northerners bugger whippets”, and suchlike. And now we have “Morris dancers are Nazis.” But I wouldn’t call it cultural suppression, as that implies an active, conscious effort. The spineless tossers who come out with such witicisms have trouble depressing the plunger on their cafetieres, and have their Polish au pairs do it instead. “Magda, darling, do be a dear and procure some organic ciabatta from the bakery.”

One can only speculate about what the esteemed members of the Stow Business Association had to say about their bitchy visitor from London. And it’s a very rich dialect they have there in the Gloucestershire hills.

Here’s my culinary recommendation for Stow-on-the-Wold:

Greedy’s Fish & Chips
11 Park Street
GL54 1AQ

This is brought to you as a public service announcement.

The pictures above were taken by me in Greenwich, London, during the Blackheath Morris End of Season Tour in October of this year. Click here for more.

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