Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
GILES CORENInstant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
GILES CORENWhere my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.
GILES CORENGentile smoked salmon is all… muscular and smells of smoke. It’s not very fatty. They don’t understand – smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can’t believe how delicious it is.
GILES CORENMy dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.
GILES CORENThe notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.
GILES CORENI was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I’m at home more – and less of a disciplinarian.
GILES CORENMy time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.
GILES CORENPersonally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.
GILES CORENThe good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.
GILES CORENI tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn’t. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.
GILES CORENWhen I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn’t already do it – for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren’t much good at it either.
GILES CORENThe way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
GILES CORENI always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
GILES CORENThere is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.
GILES CORENI come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
GILES CORENA man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.
GILES COREN