Pedro and Ricky Come Again: Selected Writing 1988–2020

by Jonathan Meades

This landmark publication collects three decades of writing from one of the most original, provocative and consistently entertaining voices of our time. Anyone who cares about language and culture should have this book in their life.

Thirty years ago, Jonathan Meades published a volume of reportorial journalism, essays, criticism, squibs and fictions called Peter Knows What Dick Likes. The critic James Wood was moved to write: ‘When journalism is like this, journalism and literature become one.’

Pedro and Ricky Come Again is every bit as rich and catholic as its predecessor. It is bigger, darker, funnier, and just as impervious to taste and manners. It bristles with wit and pin-sharp eloquence, whether Meades is contemplating northernness in a German forest or hymning the virtues of slang.

From the indefensibility of nationalism and the ubiquitous abuse of the word ‘iconic’, to John Lennon’s shopping lists and the wine they call Black Tower, the work assembled here demonstrates Meades's unparalleled range and erudition, with pieces on cities, artists, sex, England, concrete, politics and much, much more.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Essays

874 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 18, 2021

About the author

Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is a writer, food journalist, essayist and film-maker. Meades has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects. His books include three works of fiction and several anthologies.
Meades is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of the British Humanist Association.
Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at King's College, Taunton, which he described as "a dim, muscular Christian boot camp". He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1968.
Meades wrote reviews and articles for The Times for many years, and was specifically its restaurant critic from 1986 to 2001. He was voted Best Food Journalist in the 1999 Glenfiddich Awards. Having given up writing about English cuisine in 2001 after being The Times' restaurant critic for fifteen years, Meades estimated, in an interview with Restaurant magazine, that he had put on 5 lb a year during his reviewing period, which works out around an ounce per restaurant. By his own statement in the series Meades Eats, after being pronounced 'morbidly obese' he subsequently managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of a year.
His first collection of stories Filthy English was followed by Pompey (1993), which was widely praised and compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Dickens and Joyce amongst other great stylists.
Meades' An Encyclopaedia of Myself was published in May 2014 by Fourth Estate. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece."
Meades's book Museum Without Walls was published on the Unbound crowd-funding site, in both print and e-book editions.

Reviews

[Charliecat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have now finished reading the 943 pages of contrary, scabrous, contradictory prose written by Jonathan Meades. The nearest comparison I can find is the late Christopher Hitchens, but Meades is much, much, more well, everything. So rare to read someone who can have me cheering one minute, laughing the next and then thinking, hang on, he shouldn't be saying this and looking up the number of the PC police. He is one of the few writers who actually change how I look at the world.

Not for the faint hearted or easily offended. Think of the cartoonists Steve Bell and Martin Rowson, but in prose.

Meades is, at bottom, a passionate Humanist, reserving his most bitter ire and satire for those who fashion baseless beliefs and use them to justify inhumanity.

It's quite simply brilliant.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

endlessy riveting, exciting, alienating in a good way, exhausting, but also infuriating as meades pounds his own unexamined personal prejudices even as he decries those of other people. in one piece he even admits to recognising his own ossification of mind but never attempts to move beyond it. no matter how clever you are in some areas you're always at risk of being an idiot in others.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massive and exhausting - worth it for the singular acid, for the style, for expanding the mind. Meades is probably the greatest living essayist in English. Our Herzog. You can get a sense of him from the TV, but after 15 years of reading him I still can't fully predict what he'll say.

people’s interventions – shacks, cars, chimneys, roads, pylons, silos, landfill sites – are omnipresent. Nowhere is the poorer for humankind’s amendments. Unmitigated nature is absent... Citizens and civility are qualities which derive from cities... it’s not so much the disappearance of nature that should concern us – nature is not only seldom natural, it is also overrated.

Open, transparent, sustainable – the three great lies of the age. Life itself is not sustainable.

Like many orthodoxies, this one is founded in ignorance, which is founded in incuriosity, which is, in turn, founded in the orthodoxy.

Brutalism was the architectural mode of the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain – Mutually Assured Construction.

The Eucharist’s brilliance lies in its recognition of food as both communal bond and mnemonic.

We create for ourselves a topographical pantheon. Perhaps it’s more apt to say that we discover it, almost despite ourselves, that it is revealed to us. It is determined to a degree by conscious aesthetic preference and by associational sentiment, but much more by the bottom of the spine and sheerly irrational fascinations founded in heaven-knows-what buried experience. The point is, we do not select the places which move us and to which we long to return.

Our hearts may sink when we see a branch of Starbucks or Costa or Nero – but our head knows that the coffee from them is more likely to restart our hearts than the drivel from an insanitary café. Standardisation has raised standards. This is as depressing as it is comprehensible: the challenge of the chains has not been, cannot be, met by small traders to whom economies of scale are so distant a dream that they are forced to stint on the quantity of coffee they put in a machine. Time after time the sentient consumer is forced to choose between conscience and appetite...

One of the perennial delights of the great European cities – among which I include New York and Buenos Aires – is a palpable sense that the question is not past or present but both/and. This country tends to preserve with the desperate archaeological detail that it brings to costume drama, or to destroy: there is apparently no middle way between formalin and explosives, between aspic and destruction.

The argument that fast art is meretricious, disposable and ephemeral is untenable. It, too, has an unintended, unofficial life which its makers and first audiences cannot guess at. It is presumptuous to bet on what will endure. The supposedly ephemeral endures. What is intended to be permanent withers and decays, does not endure. Reading the entrails is often almost as unreliable as the authoritative pronouncements of distinguished economists and leading futurologists. Rock ’n’ roll, our teachers told us smugly, was obviously a flash in a Brylcreem’d pan: it’ll all be over by next year... Fast art is necessary. What other sort of art will respond to the dangerous volatility of the past year – and the next year, and the year after?

From his arch voice and angle-grinding antipathy towards bullshit you'd expect him to disdain modern art, but he lives in a Le Corbusier project and most of this is about the triumphs of the C20th, particularly triumphant for those of us with a taste for irony and darkness. He learned RP in drama school. He shifts.

The collection covers thirty years. My opinions, tastes, preoccupations, enthusiasms remain constant. My opinions, tastes, etc., are modified by time, age, circumstance. My opinions contradict their precursors and belong to a different writer.

I pity believers. I pity them as I pity those who suffer any disease. But I am also dismayed by their refusal to acknowledge that they are ill... While it would be beguiling to appoint oneself part of that knowing cadre which lacks conviction, I lack the conviction to do so... Conviction is a euphemism for bigotry, intolerance, mono-directional certainty...

Britishness, in this instance, signifying the lack of domestic opportunity to experience the sublime or, at least, grandeur and the consequent conviction that it is something which belongs, properly, to cultures other than our own – like wine and loden coats and spices and deadly reptiles.

But those we can import, we do import: these islands are the warehouse of a nation-fence long since turned legit. We cannot, however, import midnight sun, Iguazu Falls, desert, icescapes, truly mountainous mountains, moraines, skies as blue as a butcher’s apron, skies as red as the blood which stains that apron. Because we cannot, we have invented a substitute appropriate to our scale-model environs. The picturesque...

Like folk songs or traditions or the idea of clothes. We forget that they, too, were made up, that they are the result of a creative impulse (no matter how base). Perhaps it’s the case that the baser the impulse the sooner the fact that artifice was in any way involved will be forgotten, the sooner willed invention will be unquestioningly accepted as the inevitable, as that which is taken for granted. So did the picturesque become a British norm: both as a system of design and as a way of looking.

To cast ourselves free from it requires as determined an effort as was required to invent it, as determined an effort as it takes to learn a new language – perhaps more determined, for while we know very well that we speak in English we don’t address the fact that we equally see in English.

Not all Britain is susceptible to being seen in English. Not all Britain has been subsumed by the picturesque. The exceptions: Glasgow’s quasi-Baltic skyline, Portland, Blaenau Festiniog, the environs of St Austell, the Fens, Wastwater, the north-eastern coast.

One mark of a great writer is distinctiveness. Check: you could give me any pair of sentences in this and I'd guess it was him.

Another is elevating the subject, any subject. Check: I would read Meades on any topic, and in fact in reading this I spent time on things like Harrods, Clinton Cards, Letchworth Garden City, Boring Postcards, Soviet bus stops, Derek Jarman. Anything can be interesting if you are strong enough.

Another is coherence. Another is straight fire. And so on.

Real slang is base poetry. Nothing glitters like the gutter. The coinages of football terraces, crack dens, stoops, cottages, barracks and bars are vital.

Where is the man from the grassy knoll now that he is really needed?

One of the things I love about him is that he is absolutely ensconced in art, loves so much, but is acid about the vapid, incestuous, self-aggrandising Art World. He is into art but not arty. He isn't interested in their little world, just the work. A curator who hates curators. An actual critic.

Two decades after the Guggenheim fell into Bilbao like a shot-down airliner, the global arts establishment clings to the faith – and it is a faith, a belief with no empirical evidence to support it – that run-down cities can be somehow healed by cultural regeneration: by building museums, galleries, theatres rather than, say, by building accommodation or studios. This gambit has clearly succeeded in Bilbao, where unemployment and the number of people claiming housing benefit has risen in those twenty years. On the other hand, since the Lowry and Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum of the North were dumped on Manchester there has been absolutely no gun crime in that city and the entire membership of the people-trafficking community is retraining as vibrantly diverse modern dance mentors.

Who, then, can dispute the opinion of the former director of the Manchester International Festival: ‘You can never have too much culture.’ There speaks the authentic voice of the arts, a political endeavour measured by volume and by the cost of glittering venues...

Speech given at the Royal Academy of Arts annual dinner: It’s a privilege to be invited to give this speech, to stand where the great have stood – not forgetting that the less great have stood here too; and the tiresome, the mendacious, and the frankly preposterous... The gulf between the arts, plural, and art is chasmic, much more than one letter.

I can't work out (or won't ever devote the time) to sifting the continuing stream of contemporary great work. But for 1988-2020 I don't have to.

What is not normal is Jarman, and what makes him fascinating is his openness. In his language there is no word for secret. The way he lays himself bare is rash or shameless or brave, according to taste. He exhibits his soul’s sores with innocent menace. He has no compunction about showing himself in a disagreeable light; he evidently doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

He is a naïf, with a capacity for finding everything in his cosmos interesting. This might be thought delightful, generous and evidence of his (mostly) tolerant mentality. It might also be deprecated as grossly indiscriminate. Obviously, the journal form, if it is to serve any end other than cosmetic self-advertisement, is one that cannot be too tidy. We are probably right to mistrust those who topiarise their lives.

However, Jarman’s laundry-list approach to his life is also misleading, albeit unwittingly, because it grants the same weight to the trivial as to the momentous. As a writer, his energy is mitigated by his inability to edit himself; the book’s riches are buried beneath bathetic tumuli... It is the past, the fleeting and the inanimate which he illumines with artistry. Distance and otherness are the conditions that he requires in subjects if he is to invest them with any sort of life.

These books are one of the few places I still learn words new to me (but not neologisms). "Pollards", "Gamages", "grice", "daltonism".

Respect for the inanimate, which is demonstrated, for instance, by building out of local materials, is a form of anthropomorphism, of the pathetic fallacy, of blood and soil. It is sentimental rather than sentient. It is a denial of humankind’s primacy. The picturesque affects to acknowledge nature’s superiority while tampering with it. It is an artifice which, like literary naturalism, denies its own artifice.

It apparently suits a national temperament which abhors cleverness and reveres modesty, perhaps has much to be modest about, and is self-deludingly capable of finding modesty where none existed: what, precisely, is modest about such exemplars of quotidian normalcy as Shakespeare, Turner, Sterne, Lutyens, Waugh, Wells? Men of the people? Ordinary folk? Bollocks. They might have been born thus – but they reinvented themselves through work and poses.

I often disagree - take his aggressive disdain for vegetarianism, which betrays his lack of compassion on this (and only this) matter. (I'm quite sure his own meat intake isn't factory farmed, but for aesthetic reasons.) But it would be an impoverished worldview if it didn't offend everyone somehow. He sometimes lets slip that he may be unsound about Muslims (rather than Islam). He is oddly indiscriminate about politicians, never having apparently met one he wouldn't throttle.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazone

Not for the faint hearted

Immane, risible, peculation, minoritarian, trah(a)ison des clercs (where did that extra “a” come from?), religiose, mnemonic, inchoate, utile, douce, arcana, pervious, fictive, flâneur, antinomian, galère. These are the bedrock of the Meades vocabulary. And if eximious and haruspicatory hadn’t existed he would have invented them.

He’s a man of strong views. His subjects are either saints or villains. Among the saints are Vanburgh, Hawksmoor, Nash, Lutyens, de Corbusier and Rodney Gordon (yes, really), Ian Nairn, Pevsner, Robbe-Grillet, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess and Elizabeth David. The villains include royalty, the upper classes, all religious leaders, all politicians to the right of Corbyn (who, curiously, is not mentioned in the 943 pages and must be assumed to be a saint), the mob (including the 52% who voted leave), footballers, Rupert Murdoch and others too numerous to mention. His prose with reference to the villains frequently descends to the scatological.

When he gets into his stride he can be a master of venomous prose. The one thing you can be sure of, whether you agree with him or not, is that he is never boring.

J. Stabler

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good. But too long and too repetitive. I get that it is collated writing but I'm not sure if need to read at least 200 pages that is basically the same article written at different points in time about Pevsner

[Bertbarber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mix of interesting stuff…. clever guy!