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Friday 24 February 2006
Why Philip Larkin favoured the EU: Friday's food quotation
One forgets that nobody stays in hotels these days except businessmen & American tourists: the food is geared to the business lunch or the steak-platter trade: portion-control is rampant, and the materials cheap anyway (or so I guess: three lamb chops I had were three uncuttable unchewable unanswerable arguments for entry into EEC if - as I suspect - they had made the frozen journey from New Zealand). The presence of the hotel in the Good Food Guide is nothing short of farce. Of course it's a Trust House, which guarantees a kind of depersonalised dullness. Never stay at a Trust House.
1971 Philip Larkin, Letter to Barbara Pym, 18 July 1971 [Selected letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite. Faber and Faber, 1992, p. 441]