How low can you go?

Wednesday, April 11th 2001 will forever be etched in my memory as one of the best days of my life. This is the day my son was born! Alexander Beowulf Sutherland came into the world at 10:11 on this beautiful spring morning.

I’m not going to describe the whole childbirth experience in this opinion, though, because there is another reason this day is particularly memorable for me. Namely, it’s the day I tasted–and, bizarrely, finished–the worst sandwich I have ever eaten.

Little baby B had been lying oblique breech for the last three months of the pregnancy, and there was no way he was coming out any other way. Darling Snoogums and I are both planners by nature, and we actually appreciated being booked in for an elective caesarean section: this meant we knew exactly when the baby was going to arrive, and could take action accordingly. Unfortunately, this didn’t extend to making me a packed lunch. Having a baby is tiring work, even for the father, and even if the birth is a 45-minute surgical procedure rather than a 24-hour front-row preview of Hell.

So, at about 13:00, just after I’d made the obligatory phone calls to family and friends, I found myself quite hungry. The Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion is in the heart of Edinburgh, right next to the main University buildings, and hence also very close to numerous small sandwich shops and cafés. But did I choose to go to one of these funky, independent purveyors of freshly made fistfuls of food? No. I decided to visit the local Subway franchise instead.

Big mistake. Huge.

The restaurant itself was clean and tidy, and blandly decorated. Even at the peak of lunchtime, it wasn’t very busy, which I suppose was a bad sign. As I stood in the queue, I observed the dishes of sandwich fillings resting limply behind the glass counter. The meats and cheeses were packed in columns of perfectly cut, pre-processed squares–another bad sign, but stil
l I waited in line. The staff behind the counter was a morose assembly line, constructing supposedly tasty baguettes with all the enthusiasm of bored welding robots. But did I heed these omens of doom and flee? No. I ordered a foot-long “Subway Melt”: a hot concoction of turkey breast, ham, bacon and cheese.

Big mistake. Huge.

To me, a hot melt sandwich should be brimming with thick, freshly cooked (or failing that, just fresh) meat, and overflowing with a lava stream of strong cheese. It should have the option of being dunked or delicately topped with some rich tomato ketchup.

I understand this is not to everyone’s taste. Obviously, there must be a market for the bland monstrosity (this *should* be a contradiction in terms, but nooo…) that Subway served me up, because otherwise they’d be out of business, right?

Picture this: a 12″ long, sort-of freshly baked soft wholegrain baguette. Now, take two (2) wafer-thin square slices of reconstituted turkey breast, two (2) wafer-thin slices of tasteless ham with a water content of at least 75%, and two (2) rashers of overcooked bacon that nevertheless manage to be just as limp as if they were raw. Add two (2) slices of bland, processed dairy product. (I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to call it cheese.) Now fold, and nuke in a microwave for long enough for these contents to congeal into a sticky mass. Or should that read “mess?”

My stomach begged me to give up and run away as I watched this abomination being put together. At the very least, I thought, it could be livened up with a dollop of ketchup. But was simple, honest ketchup even on offer at the end of the assembly line? No, of course not. I could have a kind of bar-b-q sauce, mustard, or a variety of relishes, but simple ketchup, that most basic of fast food staple condiments, was apparently beyond their comprehension.

And you know what the worst thing was? As I sat down on a low wall on the Middle Meadows Walk, in the glorious sunshine, and attacked my hunger with this offence against good taste, I positively wolfed it down. Every flavourless morsel of sandwich, every last disgusting splodge of bitter, vinegary BBQ gunk, they disappeared down my cakehole as if they were spiced sugar plums. Ugh.

They say that hunger is the best sauce, but I can tell you this is not true: it’s parenthood. If, however, your mind isn’t addled and befuddled by the birth of your first child, I must urge you to stay away from Subway. For your own sake, avoid it at all costs.

The 6th Day: Arnie’s back, and his clone is, too!

Arnold Schwartzenegger hasn’t had a big box office hit since the fantastic True Lies in 1995. Eraser was a competent action movie that sank without a trace, and End Of Days was simply a turkey of mythical proportions. Can The 6th Day revive his flagging career as an all action hero? You betcha.

The 6th Day takes its title not from last year’s film about seeing dead people, but from the Bible, and the story of creation: on the sixth day, God created Man. The film is set in the near future, at a time when animal cloning is not just common, but commercialized. Human cloning has been attempted, but scientists have deemed it too difficult a problem. In addition to that, a series of so-called “sixth day” laws have been passed, making it illegal even to try.

Of course, there is a group of people who have gone ahead and done it anyway.

Schwartzenegger plays Adam Gibson, a helicopter pilot who runs an adventure skiing business. He and his partner Hank (Michael Rapaport) fly people up to the tops of mountains to let them enjoy the fresh snow up there. The story effectively starts when his partner covers for Gibson’s absence one day, and flies billionaire businessman Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) up to the hills. Drucker runs a business empire built on animal cloning technology, and has many enemies. At the top of the mountain, anti-cloning extremists assassinate him, and everyone else on board the helicopter, too.

Drucker’s company (being big and corporate and therefore not entirely trustworthy and above board) owns the technology to create fully grown human clones, and to give them a complete set of memories. They make a clone of Drucker, and, thinking that Gibson (Arnie) was flying the chopper, one of him, too. So now there are two Gibsons wandering about, neither aware that anything unusual is going on. When the company discovers their mistake, they send a team of experts to kill one of them–it doesn’t really matter which–and so destroy the evidence.

Of course, this doesn’t go according to plan.

From here, the story takes off at a rocking good pace. Racing against the team of corporate thugs chasing him, Gibson works to uncover the truth about human cloning, and to figure out how to get his normal life back. There are car chases, gun fights (featuring some pretty cool tracer bullet effects), and a healthy dose of humour. There are relatively few stunts for stunts’ sake (which I think is a good thing), but the set pieces, especially the final confrontation with the bad guy, are tense and well staged.

As an action movie, it works on every level. Interestingly enough, though, it also works as a damn good science fiction film. Not even a “sci-fi” pseudo-western filled with spaceships and blasters and swaggering heroes, but a genuine exploration of scientific ideas and their consequences.

Okay, so the cloning technology they use is far fetched, perhaps even ridiculous–or so I thought at first. Then I looked at it a little harder, and I wasn’t so sure any more. They create fully grown “blanks,” which are featureless humanoid shapes. Then they infuse the blank with the genetic material of the cloning subject, and force the final development, causing the clone to adopt its ultimate shape and characteristics. Given that humans are all 99-point-something percent genetically identical, and assuming that we will sooner or later have a complete map of the human genome, and the ability to edit a cell’s DNA, can someone please explain to me why this is impossible?

(The idea of taking a snapshot of someone’s memories and mental state through a retinal scan stands up to much less scrutiny, but I’ll let that one slide for now…)

But once you take this development as your basic premiss, the plot sticks to it absolutely: if this is the case, what are the logical consequences? The script doesn’t feel obliged to explain in great pseudo-scientific detail why it all works, or how some equally implausible technology can solve all of the characters’ problems, defeat evil, and generally bring about world peace. What it does do is examine the situation it has created within the context it has laid out. You have an identical clone, with all your memories, who really does think that he is you. How do you react to him? How does he react to you? How do you feel when he kisses your wife, and she thinks that he is you?

All the while I was watching this film, I was thinking that it could have been made on a much smaller budget, with hardly any special effects, and a cheaper, unknown cast, and it still would have been a good film. It has a good plot. It has a good script. It even has a sub-plot, for goodness? sake! Schwartzenegger action movies don’t have sub-plots! (It features Robert Duvall as the scientist behind the human cloning technology, and his dying wife. His wife doesn’t want to be cloned and brought back to life after her death. How does he deal with that? Does he respect her decision, even when he knows that he could have her back, exactly the way she was before, when even she wouldn’t know any different?)

I said it in my review of End Of Days, and I’ll say it again here: Arnold Schwartzenegger isn’t an actor, he’s a movie star. Robert Duvall steals the whole film, in my opinion. But is says a lot for Arnie as a movie star and as co-producer of this film, that he allows the show to be stolen. He knows that he’s the box office draw, so he can afford to allow the director (Roger Spottiswoode, whose recent credits include the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies) to focus on the significant talents of the supporting cast.

This is actually quite a mature film. Cloning as a theme has been done plenty of times before, and recently in films like Multiplicity and Alien Resurrection, but the philosophical consequences were secondary to either the comedy or the action. Total Recall, also featuring Arnie, made a half-hearted attempt at examining the issue of identity in a world where memories can be bought and sold and forged. The 6th Day takes a deeper look at these themes. It comes closer to capturing some of the paranoia of Philip K. Dick’s work, but the author whose stories it reminds me of most is John Varley. Varley has a series of tales, set on the moon and nearby space settlements where cloning and memory replacement–effectively backing yourself up–is an everyday thing, and perfectly normal. Being an action movie, it’s hard to do full justice to these ideas, but at least The 6th Day tries. For that reason alone, it deserves a look.

The fact that Arnie kicks ass, and is great fun to watch, is just a bonus. Highly recommended!

The Winter Glen sits at the bottom of Hanover Street just before it turns into Dundas Street. It’s a basement restaurant, reached by a short set of stairs. Most of the restaurants in this area are two blocks further up towards the centre of town, and with its discreet entryway, the Winter Glen is hardly in your face and screaming for business. It relies on reputation to pull you in, or, if you happen to walk by it every day on your way to work (like I used to), a rather tempting menu.

When we went there last Saturday, the menu was filled with imaginative sauces and variations hung from a backbone of solidly classic ingredients: lots of game and fresh fish. Although there is no a la carte selection, there is plenty of variety on the fixed menu. And at £26 for three courses, the price is pretty decent, too. The wine list is short but adequate if you plan to drink a whole bottle. Being pregnant, my darling snoogums wasn’t drinking, so I just wanted a half. This left me with two reds and two whites, one of which had just sold out. The Pouilly Fumé I ended up with proved quite tasty and crisp nonetheless.

Feeling adventurous, there were two dishes that grabbed my attention straight away. I started with mussels, tiger prawns and scallops in a light fish broth flavoured with Chinese spices. The scallops were a bit small, but the tiger prawns were huge and juicy. The fish broth, though, was the star of this show: it was sweet and exquisitely smooth, like pure distilled shellfish. Put away all images of fish heads bobbing about in a witch’s cauldron, and consider the joys of liquefied crab meat overlaid with the condensed aromas of a Chinese take-away…. Now you’re getting close!

My main course carried on the oriental theme. (I suppose we could have just gone to a Chinese restaurant instead, but hey.) Thin strips of duck breast draped over steamed vegatables, in a sweet oriental jus, with shallots in an orange marmalade. Unfortunately, this is where the disappointment set in. I could forgive them the broccoli (after all, chef could hardly be expected to cater to my every culinary whim), but the shallots and orange completely overpowered the whole dish.

The first bite of duck was delicious. It was cooked pink and moist, and it soaked up the honey-sweet dark jus like kitchen roll. But as soon as the orange aftertaste started to kick in, there was no turning back. The duck’s distinct flavour was washed away. Even pushing the soft, whole shallots to one side wasn’t enough, because the sauce had picked up too much of their flavour. Adding bites of new potato and courgette didn’t help, either. The tang just blasted them away, and I could only tell them apart by their textures.

By contrast, the venison that Abi had was overcooked and tasted of bland, generic Meat Product. We figured that if we put them together we’d have two perfectly flavoured main courses. Set apart, though, they weren’t quite up to scratch. Full points for imagination, but chef’s palette is obviously a bit more robust than mine.

Things started looking up again at dessert, though. I had a mouthwatering slice of lemon and lime tart with a light drizzling of thin vanilla custard, and Abi took the chocolate tart. The base of my slice was a moist, crumbly biscuit and the citrus filling was rich and velvery, melting on my tongue like frozen silk. Tiny strips of lime zest added an occasional extra tang to the mix. The experience was over far too quickly. Abi’s chocolate tart contained the entire cocoa output of a small South American country, yet was almost as light as my citrus tart.

We finished the meal off with coffee and tea. I don’t know why, but I felt unreasonably disappointed when the waiter arrived with just a single cup of tea for me. Normally I don’t drink more than a single cup anyway, but I do rather like having a pot there. I’m sure they would have been only too happy to bring me a refill, but for me it ended the evening on a minor note.

We both came away with mixed feelings about the Winter Glen. The restaurant is decorated in a modern Scottish style, with relatively sparse table settings. The place filled up nicely while we were there (from about 19:30 onwards), and there was a nice buzz to it. The atmosphere is upmarket smart casual; the maitre d’ wore a jacket and an open collar shirt. It is equally suited to business dinners and smart family evenings out.

Food-wise, it was very good, but not uniformly excellent. Starters and desserts were top class, but our main courses let the average down. Also, maybe it was just my selections, but I suspect that chef has a bit of a sweet tooth. That’s fine for me, because I do too, but don’t go there expecting a light touch on your tastebuds.