LIFE
of those huge Panasonic telephones
for old people which block everyone
automatically, which is why old peo-
ple are lonely. It’s not because their
children don’t love them, they blocked
their own children by mistake. And
they would not find Gazelle either.
I have been here before and I have
not been here before. These gaudy,
shrivelling Mayfair hubris mansions
all seem the same to me now —
Sexy fish, Novikov, Rivea at the Bul-
gari Hotel, which I thought looked
like tinfoil. This is because they are
designed to please the same people,
who cannot, despite the current
vogue for prosperity theology within
wealth-enabling circles, be in multi-
ple places at once. And even if they
can’t, they do not like to be surprised.
The dining room is velvet — red,
like sitting on a cardinal’s knee, with
yellow too — and there is a charm-
ing waiter with a beard so fiercely
groomed I thought he might be
Narnian. Are Narnians going to be
deported, and if not, why not?
There is exposed brickwork and a
purple spiral staircase so polished it
could become an accident destinationI
couldn’t find Gazelle. I walked
up and down Albermarle Street,
in which Oscar Wilde once plot-
ted his own doom in the Albermarle
Club, and I couldn’t find it. I had to
go to Caffè Nero opposite the Ritz
Hotel and email my dining compan-
ion — where are you? Are you there?
Does Gazelle exist? Or is it a modern
European restaurant and cocktail bar
so exclusive that it exists only in the
imaginings of the International Pri-
vate Jet Set who have turned Mayfair
into something so ugly it could only
be purchased at Harrods? Is it an
imago that serves breakfast?
It’s not an imago that serves
breakfast, he replied, via Caffè Nero’s
free wifi, which is always useful when
you wonder if restaurants are semi-
mythical. It’s next door to John Mur-
ray, publishers of Lord Byron; his
memoirs were burnt there, either
because they were so scandalous they
couldn’t be printed or — and this is a
hack’s theory — they just weren’t that
good. And so it is. I find it via minus-
cule gold signage. I am of an age to
need proper signage. I just bought one
for women with big shoes. At the top
is more velvet, this time in green and
blue, and an enormous photograph of
what looks like a woman, all curled
up, with no head. Who needs a head
these days anyway? In any case, it
behaves like a restaurant waiting for
customers, and for night.
Again, it is just us in Gazelle, us
and the well-groomed Narnian and
his multiple handsome assistants. I
am beginning to think I do this delib-
erately, so I do not have to meet the
other diners. Also, I do not take class
A drugs. I wish I did.
It is breakfast time, so we cannot
have the dish called ‘Oyster, Yeast
Emulsion’, which I thought was paint
(3.5, or £3.50 if you like pound signs,
which apparently they don’t here,
which is quite droll) or the dish called
‘Scallop, Yeast, Imperial Caviar’ (£19,
because I do like pound signs). Instead
we eat fennel and spelt toast, a char-
cuterie plate and a poached duck egg.
It’s an English Breakfast for idiots,
then, and Piggy’s greasy spoon in Air
Street — it’s next to Cordings, which
sells corduroy trousers for mani-
acs off a rack that looks like a rain-
bow — does a much better English
Breakfast, although it does not have
a purple staircase for women to fall
off. Perhaps they could not fit one in?
It is a slight improvement on Sketch’s
English Breakfast Stew. I give it that.
That done, there isn’t much to do
but look out of the window, lament
the end of Mayfair, and admire what
is, apparently, Britain’s original one-
way street.Gazelle, 48 Albemarle St, Mayfair,
London W1S 4DH, tel: 020 7629 0236.Food
Breakfast for idiots
Tanya Gold
There is
a charming
waiter with
a beard so
fiercely
groomed
I thought
he might be
NarnianWhen I say that it has given
comfort to my husband, you can
judge how foolish the Wellcome
Institute was in using the word
womxn and then apologising
for it. It had wanted to be more
inclusive with a workshop on
‘how womxn can challenge
existing archives’. There, womxn
serves as a plural, but it can be a
singular too. Wellcome did not
invent the word. The BBC quoted
Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance, of
King’s College London, saying
that it ‘stems from a longstanding
objection to the word woman as it
comes from man’. Dr Bradbury-
Rance is not a philologist,
preferring the ‘intersectionalstudy of sexuality and gender in
film and popular culture’.
Some people assume that
woman is derived from womb-
man. This is not the case. It
comes from wife-man, where wife
means ‘woman’ and man means
‘human being’ (like homo in
Latin, to which a modern theory
relates man etymologically).
The wife- element accounts for
the strange pronunciation in
the plural: ‘wimmin’. I observed
not so long ago (June 2013)that some people say ‘ wom-en’
for the plural now, as a sort of
spelling-pronunciation. It had
been a tribute to the tenacity of
spoken English that the oral form
‘wimmin’ and the written form
women had existed in parallel for
hundreds of years. The spelling
wimmin (mocked by Private Eye)
had avoided the hated element- men, and was first spotted in
the magazine Lesbian Tide in
- An alternative feminist
form womyn emerged in the
same year, in another magazine,
Lesbian Connection.
The elements -man, -men
are straw men of course. Unlike
other Germanic languages, which
adopted a separate new form
to mean ‘human being’ (such
as mensch in German), English
continued with man in both
senses. There had been sex-linked
terms: wer (as in werewolf) and
wif. A male equivalent of wif-
man was wæp-man, in which the
wæp- element, related to weapon,
has, so the OED insists, the sense
‘membrum virile’.
As for womxn, it has been
kicking about for a couple of
years and now has few friends. I’m
afraid we have lost man as a non-
sexual denominator, but there
seems no need to lose woman,
women as the name for people
like me. — Dot WordsworthMIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Womxn‘Well at least we always left a tip.’