I had dinner the other night at The Clink, a restaurant built in the walls of Brixton prison, and left feeling full and inspired. The state of our prisons is disgusting and ultimately self-defeating, leaving inmates no less likely to offend, but here is a project doing something constructive.
The brainchild of the chef Alberto Crisci and financed in part by Lady Edwina Grosvenor, it recruits prisoners with six to 18 months of their sentence left to serve and gives them kitchen skills that should help them into the hospitality industry upon release. The reoffending rates of the participants are instructively low, though I couldn’t help feeling that the restaurant industry could also learn from the experiment.
As a diner, you are patted down for drugs on entering; something that would reduce the chances of sitting next to braying coked-up City types in London restaurants.
We arrived at 7pm and our meal was over by 8.45pm because the inmates had to be back in their cells, which, frankly, is as long as any meal ever needs to take. Best of all, our phones were confiscated on entry, removing the possibility of people instagramming their food as they ate. Almost the perfect evening.
Badly shaken
There was, for obvious reasons, no booze on offer at The Clink, so I was in the mood when a friend suggested drinks later in the week. Unfortunately she picked a swanky cocktail bar in one of the five-star London hotels, which always expose me as an unsophisticate from Wolverhampton. I ordered a vodka martini and when asked if I wanted it “shaken or stirred”, found myself saying “both”. More Berk than Bond.
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Unexpected bonus
The technophobic response to Amazon Go, the new supermarket with no checkout tills that opened in Seattle this week, has been tedious. Yes, they use cameras to track customers, but there are cameras everywhere in the 21st century.
Yes, such a format would mean job losses but, trust me, as someone who has worked in shops, it is not good work anyway.
Besides, have you actually been in a supermarket lately? Nearly all the cashiers have already gone. What this store actually offers is a future where we might be free of self-service checkout machines screaming at us that there is an unexpected item in the bagging area. Bring it on.
The price of laziness
I’m struggling to understand what is so controversial about the insurance company Admiral admitting this week that it increases premiums for drivers who apply using a Hotmail account. Of course our email addresses reveal things about us — I’m forever judging people by their choices.
Anyone who messages from a Btinternet, Virgin or Aol account is clearly lazy: it is quite something to settle for the first email address that your provider gives you. And anyone who employs a wacky nickname like hipstergirl03 in their address is bound to be flaky. The absolute worst though is couples who share an email address, especially a Hotmail one. I would not dine with them, let alone offer them insurance.