My fish and chips with a Venus of the Cotswolds

Brian Sewell
1 Aug 2008

What should an old man do when he sees an exceptionally pretty girl? The circumstances were mightily unpromising.

I and a friend had spent the day mostly in the car, inching for more than an hour across London to reach the road to Oxford; then more inching in a crawling jam before anything resembling an open road; then into Oxford and another jam, only to be disappointed in an academic errand and miss an old-fashioned proper lunch in the Randolph. Late in the afternoon, ravenous, we drew into Chipping Norton in the hope of nourishment, but found that the fate of the Mary Celeste had struck this village, too - except for one thing, the smell of fish and chips.

In the days of my childhood every village had its Copper Kettle tea rooms; even in my Glyndebourne days there was one a few miles short of the pretentious opera house where, for the price of tea and a sticky bun, they let me use the loo to change into my dinner jacket - but those were the conveniences of another century, already distant, and Chipping Norton, at least on a preliminary skirmish, offered nothing of the kind. Sans lunch, our salivating expectations of cucumber sandwiches, scones, cream and strawberry jam frustrated, needs must and desperate measures, we agreed, followed our noses like a brace of Bisto Kids, found the fish shop and went in.

And there she was, this exceptionally pretty girl - though pretty is not the proper word for her. This one was beautiful in an abstract sense as well as physical; the hair, the skin, the mouth and the hint of breasts rather than a full-blown bosom were all perfection, yet to these delectable features there seemed something more, the Botticelli effect of tempering with unmistakable wistfulness the delight of his Venuses and Virgins.

Walter Pater, Victorian man of letters, opined that the art critic should be deeply moved in the presence of beautiful objects, and so I was in hers, silenced by abstract beauty in Chipping Norton's fish and chip shop. George Clemenceau, a French Prime Minister known as Tiger to his friends, was, at 80, quick off the mark in a similar confrontation with "Oh, to be 70 again!" but I was as confused and tongue-tied as a callow youth.

She should not have been there. She should have lain naked to delight Vel·zquez; she should have seduced Sardanapalus on his silken couch; she should have been Beatrice, Heloïse and Quixote's Dulcinea; she should have told tales to Arabian Emirs. She is too beautiful for Chipping Norton and an old fool with white hair should have told her so.

As for the fish and chips, they, too, were quite delectable.