The Spectator - February 08, 2018

LIFE

tiques, and enablers, and well-trod

paths, and there is only one pseudo-

intellectual left in the whole par-

ish among this troupe of rich babies,

and he is lonely and looks frightened

— of nothing tangible I fancy, just

a mood state.

One of the main topics of debate

in now incurious Hampstead is why

there aren’t any good restaurants

in such a monied place. (A fashion

magazine would call it an enclave,

but I won’t. The status of enclave is

implicit.) The answer is: there is one,

the marvellous Coffee Cup, which

I daren’t review for fear of spoil-

ing it, but I can say its pasta chef is

a genius and possibly a supernatural

being, and then there is Carluccio’s,

and Café Rouge — neither of which

are good — and the hamburger joint

Spielburger, which is too embar-

rassed to admit, rightly, that it is an

homage to the director of Poltergeist,

honoured, I suspect, just for being

Jewish. There is also the crêpe stall

C

afé Hampstead is a new café
in — big reveal! — Hamp-
stead, the gaudiest of the old
villages on the hills around London.
Hampstead was once, mysteriously,
home to progressives too many to
type; refugees from Belsize Park car-
rying their most precious back copies
of the LRB in plastic sacks. Why did
they live in Hampstead? What for?
They have moved out now, or died,
and the truth died with them. We
will never know what it was that they
thought they wanted, or saw; wheth-
er it was always betrayal, or the wife
made them do it.
You can mock, and I do, but
Hampstead is less interesting with-
out them; there is little to laugh at
these days, even if it is usual to see
James Corden and Ricky Gervais in
the street, looking for things to put
in their mouths. Comedians like
Hampstead too, presumably for the
same reason.
Otherwise it’s full of French peo-
ple now, and babies, and French
babies. They have their own bou-

patronised by tourists so stoned they

have to be told what to order because

they cannot even think about choco-

late sauce. This is pretty desolate,

even in London.

And now there is another —

Café Hampstead, which says it is

Tel Aviv-style dining but has yet

to get a delegation from the BDS

movement, asking it to merge with

Spielburger — or Wagamama? —

into a sort of one-state restaurant

where no one is a racist and, fail-

ing that, to get in the sea. Perhaps

they are busy at SOAS, building

papier-mâché checkpoints and plas-

ticine machine-guns for toy wars.

It isn’t like Tel Aviv at all, and

this does not surprise. There is no

heat, no sea, and no people screaming

at each other, even to say hello. Rath-

er, it has green banquettes and dark

floors and dim lighting under an atri-

um. It is the sort of decoration so pop-

ular in north London it might have

been stranded there by a big, green

velvet wave, and there is absolutely

nothing Israeli — or Jewish — about

it. The service is charming but itiner-

ant, the food Israeli-ish; there is ade-

quate chicken schnitzel, for instance,

and mezze — but why pizza?

It is a pleasant spot, but the identi-

ty is muted, and this is disappointing. I

am always very strict with Jewish res-

taurants — I criticised 1701 by Bevis

Marks because the food was too good

— but in this case the charge is differ-

ent: it is faintly, weakly, quasi-Jewish.

It is not Jewish enough.

Café Hampstead, 48 Rosslyn Hill,

Hampstead, London NW3 1NH.

Food

Tel Aviv it ain’t

Tanya Gold

One of the

main topics

of debate in

Hampstead

is why there

aren’t any good

restaurants

A range of book reviewers’

clichés was held up to mockery

60 years ago, in a letter by Jocelyn

Brooke to The Spectator. Brooke

(1908-66) was a strange man

who thought he had found his

vocation in the venereal disease

branch of the Royal Army

Medical Corps until he burst into

authorship, publishing two books

a year from 1949 to 1958.

One reviewers’ cliché he

singled out was the use of the

adjective jejune. Today it survives

as a shy visitor to the journalistic

bird table, of uncertain identity.

In other words, many who use it

don’t know what it means. In the

1950s, jejune was generally used

to mean ‘thin’ or ‘unsatisfying’

in some way. Indeed, the Oxford

English Dictionary supplies

more senses for jejune than it

does quotations illustrating

them: ‘unsatisfying to the mind

or soul; dull, flat, insipid, bald,

dry, uninteresting; meagre, scanty,

thin, poor; wanting in substance

or solidity.’

The most recent example it

gives is from Henry Hallam’s

View of the State of Europe during

the Middle Ages, published in

1818: ‘The chroniclers of those

times are few and jejune.’ He

meant they provide thin pickings.

Then the OED says that this is

‘the prevailing sense’.

Prevailing when? The entry

for the word carries a note:

‘This entry has not yet been

fully updated (first published

1900).’ But the OED does

find a quotation from 1982

illustrating a newer sense of

‘puerile, childish; naive’. The

new confusion, it suggests, comes

from the ‘mistaken belief that it

is connected with Latin juvenis

‘young’ or French jeune ‘young’.

This suspicion is supported by a

common misspelling of the word

as jejeune. The earliest example

found of this catachrestic or

erroneous sense is in Bernard

Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1898),

where he says that Major Sergius

Saranoff — the epitome of a

romantic hero — has a ‘jejune

credulity as to the absolute value

of his concepts’.

As Shaw should have known,

jejune derives from the Latin

jejunus ‘fasting’. Lent begins on

Wednesday and writers might

see if they can fast from the

erroneous use of jejune at least

until Easter — which, as it falls

on 1 April, would be a suitable

day to resume its foolish misuse.

— Dot Wordsworth

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Jejune

‘I’m a Vapire.’