I am obsessed with Fortnum & Mason, and the jams of the England that never was but could be. It is, of course, a class-based obsession for the lower-middle to the upper-middle classes (but not below or above): a very pantomime of Englishness. It is, essentially, imperialism made gaudy with jam. Where do you think all those hampers were going in 1880? Kent?
So Fortnum & Mason is rather more than a department store with a pleasing clock and a faint air, even now, of Grace Brothers. It serves also to make rootless cosmopolitans — I mean Jews obviously — feel safe, even if we are supplanting, by demonic and any other means to hand, everything that is noble in the fake socialist dystopia that is the Labour party. That, amazingly, considering where the jam was going (it really wasn’t going to Kent), you are in a benevolent world that welcomes you, in your strangeness, your industry and your indefatigable longing for jam. No one will throw you in the sea. OK, they did in 1290 but that was only one time.
I have never met a branch of Fortnum & Mason I did not like. I go to the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon on Piccadilly for tea and the cake carriage — I love the idle grandiosity of ‘carriage’ — and I go at Christmas to watch a German Christmas become, through magic and will, an English Christmas. I buy strawberry jam on the ground floor for £5 a pot. I go to the satellite branch at St Pancras station and now I am in the branch inside Heathrow Terminal 5 at 5.30 a.m. My commitment to this myth is absolute.
Fortnum & Mason is always weird, but this is the weirdest Fortnum & Mason I have found.
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