On Meth Cooking and Madison Avenue

With only The Great British Bake-Off and Our Zoo catching my attention of late, I have been busying myself with a couple of box sets which had finally been shipped out to us by Lovefilm after a few years of waiting: the first season of Breaking Bad and the third of Mad Men.

Breaking Bad was as wonderful as everyone claims - it had us gripped from the first moment, a crazy, nude-apart-from-a-respirator campervan chase across the New Mexico desert. Brilliant scientist Walter White, who has begrudgingly ended up a dull Chemistry teacher in an indifferent high school, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, despite never having smoked a cigarette in his life. Somehow he has to afford the medical treatment his family (a pregnant wife and partially disabled son) insist he try, even though it is likely to fail. And he needs to be able to leave them a financial legacy for when it does. Walter is too proud to accept a hand-out from a wealthy friend and one-time academic associate (who seems to have made his money from one of Walter's brainwaves anyway). So Walter begins cooking meth, therewith entering a seedy criminal underworld for which he has not even a smidgeon of the wherewithal required to succeed. And yet... Time after time, his scientific knowledge saves the day. His meth is the best on the market. His weaponry is an arsenal of chemical explosions and lethal gas clouds. He knows how to dissolve a body in acid, even if his dippy high-school dropout assistant doesn't listen to his instructions. Walter's moral code is painfully considered and unconventional. He proves you can be a good guy in the guise of a bad guy. And he can get away with stuff simply because to the world (and his Drug Enforcement Officer brother-in-law) he is still that dull Chemistry teacher. You can't help but love him, and I sincerely hope it's not another few years before we get sent Season Two.

I have never been to New Mexico, and (funnily enough) I have never cooked meth. I was the one cowering at the back of Chemistry lessons, too scared to even light my own Bunsen burner. Caravans are where we spend cheap family holidays, and they are usually reserved for huddling under blankets, reading Julia Donaldson, and playing endless games of Shopping List. The only thing ever cooking is a pan of pasta on the gas stove.

A caravan in a very drug free (unless Calpol counts) corner of Holland

I have however watched a parent die of cancer, and the whole backdrop to Breaking Bad makes me so thankful that my mother's treatment - thousands and thousands of pounds' worth of ultimately unsuccessful hormone-blocking medication and chemo and radiotherapy - was entirely funded by our National Health Service, leaving our family savings intact.

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We watched the second season of Mad Men while on holiday in Nice, as some evenings were wet and cold enough to make use of our apartment's DVD player. Our visit to the French Riviera was very much the sort of holiday that pre-dated our daughter's arrival - lingering over long lunches washed down with Provencal rose, exploring galleries of Matisse, Miro and Chagall, lying still on a beach for hours, and buying pungent cheese from local markets. It seems like a lifetime ago.

And thanks to the five years that had lapsed between seeing Seasons Two and Three, I was a little hazy as to what had been going on. But it wasn't long before the various takeover transactions, sexual obsessions and murky behaviour came back to me, and the third season was - as ever - a delightful watch. At first, not much seemed to happen other than the usual vast amounts of smoking and drinking in offices and kitchens, and me wishing I looked as good in a dress as Christina Hendricks. There was a new British contingent in the office, but otherwise, same old, same old, and nothing wrong with that. But suddenly several slow-burning plotlines unfolded to a significant finale, when long-suffering Betty Draper finally showed her philandering and mysterious husband Don the door, and the ad men of Madison Avenue had to steal their way out of soon-to-be sold down the river Sterling Cooper to set up the new, hopefully upriver Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, operating out of a hotel suite. The tipping point for these events was the Kennedy assassination. Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that news. Unless, like me, you weren't born yet. My generation remember where they were when they found out Diana died instead.

But it's not really about the plot on Mad Men. It's the comments on society that fascinate me. The treatment of women, both at work and home: no divorce rights, the expectation that you stop work as soon as you get married, let alone have your first child, and the assumption that if you are appointed to a position that is something other than secretarial, you will fill it for less pay and have most of your suggestions ignored. The treatment of men during childbirth, banished to the hospital waiting room. The treatment of women during childbirth, for that matter: sent comatose by medication while flat on their backs, with their doctor armed with forceps. The racism, covert and overt: you have a African American maid, and while she may be paid and you tut a little when horrific events unfurl in Alabama, it's quite possible that it's "just not the right time" for the Civil Rights Movement. The attitudes towards disability: a leading light in the company gets his foot severed in a stupid workplace accident and is instantly written off as never being able to work again, whereas now he would sue the company's ass off and they would at the very least be obliged to make the office wheelchair accessible. The closet, frustrated nature of homosexuality. The lack of connection between smoking and lung cancer, or risks during pregnancy. Lucky Strike is Sterling Cooper's biggest client, whereas nowadays you wouldn't even be allowed to advertise tobacco products.

So today, yes, in Britain, women may succeed in advertising (though not necessarily at equal pay to their male counterparts), and there is no sitting around all day drinking on sofas - or at least not on the office sofas. And all smoking will be done outside on the street. But there is so much competition between clients and colleagues that the stress levels are probably enormous. I had a housemate in London who had a job in advertising, and she loathed it so much that she would vomit every single morning before she set off to work, unable to deal with the pressure to create copy to ridiculous deadlines and keep up with her zany, quirky contemporaries, who were all baying for her job.

Did I walk down Madison Avenue in New York in the autumn of 2002, my only ever visit to the city, another trip that feels a lifetime away? Well, I must have done, because the Whitney Museum of American Art is situated on a corner of it, and we spent a whole afternoon there. The Whitney exhibits art that would have been utterly contemporary at the time of Mad Men, Andy Warhol in particular. Plus a vast collection of Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper paintings, all housed in a giant concrete cube. A wonderful place. But there was no sign of Don, Roger, Pete, Peggy or Joan on the street outside. Nowadays, the advertising agencies synonymous with Madison Avenue have largely moved out, just like the newspapers on Fleet Street in London. As Bob Dylan would sing only a month after the close of Mad Men's Season Three: the times, they are a-changin'.

A Very British Airline

"It was a cold and wet December day
When we touched the ground at JFK..." (U2 - Angel of Harlem)

I started to watch this fly-on-the-wall documentary not really expecting much and planning an early night, but it was actually interesting enough to hold my attention for its full running time. Even if it did feel like a very long advert. The action, such as it was, alternated between JFK and Chengdu airports and a cabin crew training centre close to Heathrow.

BA flying over Clapham, London

The training centre quickly made it clear that I wouldn't last five minutes as an air stewardess. Aside from probably tipping someone's dinner into their lap, I just couldn't cut the mustard on the appearance stakes. I would find it physically impossible to apply that amount of make-up. My hair would refuse to be doughnuted. And I can't walk anywhere in heels, let alone a narrow aircraft aisle pushing a trolley through a bout of turbulence. Although here the role-playing scenarios and aeroplane mock-ups seemed to be in an ordinary classroom, without any special turbulence or cramped legroom effects. Nonetheless, someone still managed to be thrown off the training scheme for not wearing enough lipstick, which is so disgustingly sexist it leaves me speechless. (Can it even be legal?) To be fair, the girl in question had also been late on a few occasions and turned up to the exam having left her uniform hat and scarf in the car, but seemingly it was the lack of lipstick that did for her. Another girl was praised for her customer service skills, but told her language wasn't up to BA's gold standards when she offered a pretend passenger a choice of cola that was either "diet or full fat". Such wit is clearly Ryanair's domain. Although they no doubt charge their passengers for being told that they might be overweight.

Trying to educate these ladies and gentlemen about wine was another part of the training programme. All to get the cabin crew ready for that important Club World service. One girl said that she usually mixed red wine with Diet Coke and was that weird? Well, it might not help you distinguish between a Cab Sav and a Merlot too easily. And how can it in any way taste nice? Clearly a lot to learn.

Meanwhile, over in Chengdu, they were trying to sort out the in-flight menu. The BA employee in charge of organising, well, everything to do with this new route, held up samples of the airport snacks currently on offer at the Chinese end, which included "dried duck's tongue". So obviously, he said, their aim was to make things a little more accessible for British travellers. A top chef had been employed to design a Sichuan-influenced menu. But our BA man (of Chinese ethnicity but Essex bred) said he found Sichuan food far too spicy and craved bangers and mash.

The stereotypes were out in force. A crazed perfectionist choreographer was trying to lick a load of dancing pandas into shape in a Chengdu shopping mall, screaming at her charges in true Tiger Mother style. Two blokes at Heathrow boredly painted a panda face on to an aircraft. (This is all anyone at BA knows about Chengdu - it has pandas, and spicy food.) Cabin crew handed out fortune cookies in London's Chinatown in a bid to recruit Mandarin speakers into their midst. Then the dancing pandas had to dress up as British stereotypes - like footballers or princesses. One panda was told to behave more respectfully as it was carrying the royal baby. Once the first flight from Heathrow had finally landed (in terrible smog, with the Internet down) at Chengdu, the red carpet was laid out for boss Willie Walsh, with no royalty in sight. Then there was a lavish banquet, entertained by yet more stereotypes, like a grenadier in a bearskin and a very sweaty bagpiper. Who should have just been thankful that he hadn't been made to wear a bearskin.

The smog at Chengdu looked dire, and so did the snow on the other side of the world at JFK (definitely "a cold and wet December day"). BA at JFK has its own terminal, with plenty of Noo Yoikers with (a very refreshing) attitude on its staff. However, in charge is a very fastidious Brit, who liked wearing pink ties and removing scuffs from the floor with his highly polished shoes. A graduate trainee had been sent over from London to join him. The trainee law graduate quickly realised he would need to require more of that Noo Yoik attitude, especially when they laughed at him for calling everything "tip-top".

We flew into JFK once (the U2 lyric made us want to do it, much to the annoyance of the friend we were visiting, who had begged us to fly to the more passenger-friendly Newark). Needless to say, we got nowhere near the luxury first class passengers' exclusive Concorde lounge that we were shown round on this programme. I can't imagine what it would be like to fly first class on a long-haul flight. Is it really that amazing, and worth all that money and free champagne, when you're breathing the same shitty air as everyone at the back of World Traveller? I don't suppose I will ever find out.

But actually, the closest I have ever come to an upgrade was on that outward flight to JFK. At check-in, the airline had been unable to seat me and my boyfriend together. Now that I have been married to the same man for nearly ten years, we'd probably not be that bothered about spending five hours apart, but back then, given that we weren't even living in the same city as each other, it was a big deal to miss out on the start of our holiday together. We explained our plight to the lady taking boarding cards at the gate, and she did her best to help us. Briefly, she looked to see if an upgrade was possible. But the plane was so full (she claimed) that one wasn't. So instead she made us sit in the departure lounge watching everyone else going past getting an upgrade -"Ah, you will have a nice surprise on board, madam", "Turn left on entering the aircraft, sir". I think she had actually taken a brief look at us, rather than at her computer screen. I should definitely have dressed posher. Actually, I probably couldn't have dressed less posh; my aim when flying to be as cool and comfortable as possible. And my husband, with his thick stubble and Celtic colouring, has the sort of suspicious appearance that always seems to get him frisked at security. Thankfully, once we were on board, we managed to persuade a man who had been sat next to a family with a screaming baby to swap seats with us. Funny how little convincing he took.

I miss Concorde. The only one I got to go on was at the air museum at Duxford when I was a little girl. I was too young to have actually been on a normal aeroplane at the time, so couldn't really make any comparison. But I have seen Concorde fly over the skies of London many, many times. It used to go over, punctual to the second, at 20 past 5 every day when I was living under the Heathrow flightpath in Clapham. There was simply no missing it, even at speeds well below the breaking of the sound barrier. My aunt used to specialise in noise pollution and spent a lot of the time standing at the end of London runways with a decibel measuring gauge. She said Concorde sent it off the scale.

But this programme would be disappointed to hear that I once had a very bad experience flying British Airways. I was booked on a flight from London Gatwick to visit a friend in Baltimore, only to arrive at Gatwick to be told that the flight to BWI had "gone tech" (cynics might read "undersold so cancelled as not financially viable") and that I would have to fly from Heathrow to Washington Dulles that afternoon instead. Irritated that they had assumed everyone flying to BWI (Baltimore-Washington-International) was going to DC rather than Baltimore, I asked the grumpy check-in clerk if there would be any transfer arrangements to take me on to where I wanted to go once I had arrived Stateside. "No idea, but here's a coach ticket to take you round the M25 to Heathrow." When I said I urgently needed to contact my friend, who was planning on picking me up from BWI, she handed me a BT Phonecard. The Phonecard lasted for all of two minutes once I had managed to wake my poor friend by calling her at 5am her time. This was all before the days of Skype and Facebook and either of us owning mobile phones, you see. I was pretty narked, and the only compensation offered by the check-in clerk was a sandwich voucher to spend at Heathrow. Anyway, it all ended well - my lovely friend drove sixty miles in the wrong direction to pick me up from Dulles. And BA, after a stiffly worded letter from me, sent me a big enough travel voucher as an apology to get me a free flight to Montreal the following winter.

We ended up flying British Airways to Verona last September, the first time I had been on board with them for many years. Despite BA's current campaign to persuade people to spend more on flying with them rather than with Easyjet (and the premise of the television series is to show us how they are doing it), BA was actually our cheapest option to start with. Flying with "budget" airline Monarch from Manchester would have cost twice as much for the dates we needed to travel, even after adding on the extra petrol and hotel accommodation required to enable us to depart from Gatwick early in the morning. It was such a pleasant surprise, after years of travelling with Ryanair and Jet2, to remember how flying to Europe used to be in the good old days, when taking a suitcase was included in the price and you got something to eat for free on board. Members of staff were available and willing to help at every turn, which is so very much appreciated when you've just spent a sleepless night with a toddler who decided to throw up her dinner all over a Premier Travel Inn restaurant the evening before.

Oodles of Boodles

Whilst my husband was out running last night, I indulged my inner girl and watched a programme about jewellery. The making of a million pound necklace, to be precise. And then, because diamonds are apparently a girl’s best friend, I carried on my millionaire’s fantasy and watched a programme about the making of a diamond-studded Rolls Royce.

Boodles the jeweller’s is full of women who are not very much like me. They might also technically be described as housewives, but they are the sort of housewife who is in fact a lady of total leisure. A lady who doesn’t do a scrap of cleaning, cooking or child care, yet takes an unlimited salary out of her husband’s bank account and gets so bored that she feels the need to go into town to drink champagne with a jeweller who is trying to get her to spend £87,000 on a necklace. Now, I too generally avoid doing much cleaning. With two cats and a three-year-old in the house, there is nothing less rewarding than making the effort to find half an hour to hoover one night, only to have your carpet knee-deep in fur, Cheerios and train sets by eight o’clock the following morning. But I do partake in a lot of cooking and child care, even if I have no great skill at either. However, I only go out and spend my husband’s money on food for us all to eat, and things for our daughter (most of which are second-hand). But I never spend a penny on myself. Which is one of the things I find hardest about full-time parenting – with the loss of our child benefit (don’t get me started, you bastard coalition), I am now entirely without income. I was very used to paying my own way before I had to stop work. So I now feel unable to buy myself a new pair of shoes, or a jumper or a book that isn’t from a charity shop, because I haven’t earned the money to do so. (And I didn't spend our child benefit on these things either, for the record.) I don’t wish to give the impression that my husband is an old meanie – he never spends any of his money on himself and would gladly let me buy something for me (provided it wasn’t an £87,000 necklace) if I asked. But that’s just it - I hate to ask. I detest being financially dependent on someone. Therefore, however much I like shopping, I find it hard to relate to people who just see spending their husband’s money as a hobby. Especially that much money. And especially when they don’t do anything else with their lives.

Trying to look like I belong in Monaco

Casino in Monte Carlo

The people buying from Boodles and Rolls Royce also inhabit a world I cannot relate to. I’m not sure that many of us can. They inhabit places where I have never felt less at home – Monaco, the shops on 5^th Avenue in New York City, the ballroom scene in Vienna. In Monaco, I spent a lot of time trudging past roadworks and ate lunch from a portside shack. I’d paid 1 Euro on a bus from Nice to get there. In Boodles’ world, the people have arrived by helicopter, luxury yacht or racing car, and are hosting a glamorous party high up on the skyline, looking down on the casino in Monte Carlo. For me the casino was a long hike up a ton of steps and when I got to the top, I didn’t dare go inside. Not even to use the loo. I did go inside Tiffany’s in New York, and possibly wasn’t even the shabbiest tourist in there, but there was no way I was going to buy anything. Thankfully most of it wasn’t to my taste. I did once have a box at the ballet in Vienna, but it was a freebie from a flautist in the orchestra that I happened to be staying with, and I have never (given that I was in the middle of a student Interrailing trip) genuinely had nothing to wear more in my life. 

The only jewellery shopping I have ever done was to buy my engagement ring. After feeling very awkward in a number of establishments on Bond Street in London where the assistants made it all too plain we were giving off whiffs of “we can’t afford it in here”, we ended up at Arlington’s in Hatton Garden. It certainly wasn’t Boodles, awash with champagne and perfectly manicured coffee and petits fours, but they were helpful and cared, and didn’t make us feel like we shouldn’t be there. And when we finally found the “one”, which was of course so perfect and beautiful and slipped on my finger like something out of Cinderella (no comments about ugly sisters, please), but was also an awful lot over budget, they gave us a massive discount if we paid for it then and there. My husband said that the look on my face made it worth every penny. Ah, we were so in love.

The only time I have been driven in Rolls Royce was on our wedding day. It was vintage and a shade of brown that was very close to my school uniform, and I was too nervous to appreciate it properly on the way to the church. On leaving the church, several Japanese tourists (we were getting married in the heart of the Lake District) tried to climb in there with us.

Me and a Rolls

But these giant oil tankers of a car that Rolls currently manufacture look like my idea of driving hell. Try parallel parking one of those on our narrow York street. They’re not exactly nippy either. But hey, they all come with an umbrella hidden away inside one of the front wings, so that’s OK. Not much use in Abu Dhabi though, where most Rolls owners live. The diamond studded Celestrial car also came with a picnic set of uniquely designed plates worth 20,000 pounds. The owner will probably never even use it. (Sand in sandwiches is, after all, never particularly pleasant.)

The images of no expense spared in both programmes was really quite disturbing – the poor goldsmith had to redo the diamond panels for the Rolls Royce about three times, thanks to tiny flaws no one would probably have ever noticed. No doubt he was being paid handsomely, but it seemed so extraordinarily reckless, that they could just repeat and repeat any process with no cost limitations. Because someone out there would eventually buy the end product, no matter how extortionate the price, and see them recoup their losses. And the luxurious launch parties and car shows were jaw-dropping in terms of extravagance and show. And yet a lot of the people the companies employed seemed fairly normal. Quite posh at the top, but down on the factory floor, you could still feel a connection with them.

Though the team at Boodles trying to think of a name for the emerald million-pound necklace was a farce. You could just see Siobhan Sharpe from Twenty Twelve and W1A in the corner shuffling the yellow Post-Its around before announcing. “Here’s the thing, the thing is, the thing is, here’s the things, yah, the thing is, it’s green, yah? And it’s so like fiery. So let’s call it greenfire, dude, yah?” And that’s exactly what they did.