Asadal and Jump

Asadal, 227 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7DA

Sometimes, all you want is a baby chicken stuffed with sticky rice, garlic and dates, slow cooked in a stone pot and served with broth. No? Well, you will after you go to Asadal. This basement Korean restaurant right next to Holborn tube station is quite a find. It has sleek, modern but simple decor and the food is great. Definitely try the whatever baby-chicken-stuffed-with-sticky-rice-garlic-and-dates-slow-cooked-in-broth thing is called. I have to warn you that this isn't the easiest thing to eat, particularly with thin, metal Korean chopsticks, but man it's worth the effort. The tofu jeon is also good - light, deep fried tofu with peppers.

And what better way to round off a delicious Korean meal than with the high-octane, martial arts extravaganza that is Jump, down the road at the Peacock Theatre? Performed by the Ye Gam Inc. theatre company, this is like a cross between The Itchy and Scratchy Show, The Matrix, a Bruce Lee spoof and a bad 80s pop video. On amphetamines. The 'story' basically involves a martial arts-obsessed family that indulges in fights involving crazy stunts, slow-mo action replays, fast forward, rewind, tae kwondo dance routines and all manner of bizarre and highly entertaining action.

The Golden Pig

I'm told the Year of the Golden Pig only comes around once every 600 years, and that children born during such years are endowed with great fortune, so many congratulations to all of you expecting golden piglets this year. Of course, I've also heard that the whole thing is a complete rip-off to boost business, and that the next Golden Pig year isn't actually due until 2031, but hey....

Anyway, the 15th day of the year is meant to be an auspicious date, and not being one to take any chances, I thought we'd choose this day to appease the kitchen gods. Or whatever, it's an excuse for a seven-course meal....

Mochi balls courtesy of Hopster. Hey, guys, you didn't take any pictures of the dumplings?

Now, let me share my tips on smoking duck breasts. I find that oolong tea works well. Marinate the duck breasts overnight in some soy sauce, shaoxing rice wine, and crushed Sichuan peppercorns. Line a wok with aluminium foil. Put half a cup each of rice and tea at the bottom, and some crushed star anise. Heat at a moderate temperature until the tea begins to smoulder. Place the duck breasts on a raised tray (or a pair of chopsticks) in the centre of the wok. Cover the wok with aluminium foil, leaving a couple of inches of space between the duck and the foil, and smoke for about 10 minutes. If you want that extra smoky flavour, then put on high heat and set your tea towel on fire. I found this works very well, but have a fire extinguisher ready... Slice the duck breast and stir-fry with mangetout or sugarsnap peas or whatever you feel like.

Since when were we at war with the fish?

Steven Poole's Unspeak is an insightful critique of the abuse of the English language for political use. Drawing on Orwell's concept of Newspeak, through which the State restricts individuals' boundaries of thought through the destruction of words, Poole's Unspeak presents a more subtle concept: the practice of influencing people's attitudes towards a policy or political objective by creating terms that attempt to hide often unspoken, but highly value-laden ideas.

Many such terms are, of course, well known, as in euphemisms designed to gloss over unspeakable acts of violence, such as 'ethnic cleansing' (as opposed to 'mass murder', or even 'genocide'), 'collateral damage' (which sounds more like someone keyed both doors of your car) and 'surgical strikes' (which rather ironically combines the tools of mass murder with the precision of the 'operating theatre', incidentally, a term also used in military circles to refer to an area in which, presumably, 'surgical strikes' are carried out to minimize 'collateral damage'). In Poole's view, the success of Unspeak relies on silencing any opposing view from the outset by re-framing the way in which a particular issue is discussed. Thus, we have terms such as 'tax relief', which implies that you should be grateful for your taxes to be lowered and that what the opposition is proposing constitutes a 'tax burden', or terms such as 'pro-choice', which re-frames the negativity of 'abortion' into the positivity of 'choice', while at the same time implying that if you are not 'pro-choice' then you must be 'anti-choice'. This, of course, is matched by the equally astute 'pro-life'. A common mechanism for Unspeak is to create such artificially extreme dichotomies that only one view can possibly be considered reasonable, much in the spirit of "If you're not with us, you're against us" and "The coalition of the willing", by which any opponents must by implication be unwilling and complicit in terrorism.

Much of the book focuses on propagandist terms that have become widespread in the 'War on Terror', but Poole also analyzes some surprisingly far more subtle (at least to me) terms. In particular, the apparently innocuous term 'community' turns out to be highly charged in political speak. 'Community' harks back to the days when we lived harmoniously in quaint little villages with a common set of moral values. You can thus "Go to any community", in which you'll encounter a sense of 'community spirit', and you can speak of "The biggest threat to our community". 'Community' in the sense implied, however, is rarely applicable these days, so while reminiscing about forms of life that no longer exist, we nevertheless use 'community' to label others whom we deem to be different from ourselves, as in 'the Muslim community', or 'the Chinese community' or 'the gay community'. The Unspeak quality here is that there exist such 'communities' that are, in some tangible way, different from our own, that are internally homogeneous, and whose defining characteristic is that of belonging to a different religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. In this way, we cleverly place abstract boundaries between us and them, while congratulating ourselves on our sense of tolerance, as in "There is a large Chinese community in London" (but note that they're not quite part of our community). Our sense of tolerance does have its limits, however, for while we accept such communities, there are certain people we are certainly not prepared to accept, such as 'bogus asylum seekers' and 'illegal refugees', neither kind of which can actually be legally said to exist, since anyone is entitled to seek refuge and asylum without prejudice. The descriptions of 'bogus' and 'illegal' thus preclude the assumption of legitimacy that constitutes due process and an individual's right. And so it is with 'terrorist suspects' and so on. In fact, the desire of stripping individuals' legitimacy can be so extreme that, in order to remove any association between suicide and martyrdom, people have even attempted to use such blatantly absurd terms as 'homicide bombers'.

Poole's writing style can seem rather self-righteous and his sarcastic quips are at times an annoying distraction from what is, for the most part, an insightful and often unexpected critique of the language of spin. He cleverly links the different sections of the book from one Unspeak term to another, providing a number of interesting historical and journalistic details along the way. But the book is to be admired not simply because of its recording of linguistic abuses, but more importantly for its conviction that the responsibility to resist them rests with us - that to use terms such as 'ethnic cleansing' is to be complicit in acts of mass murder by legitimizing a term historically linked to the treatment of human beings as mere contaminants and a failure to recognize genocide.

So what about the fish? My favourite part of the book comes in the epilogue, in which Poole quotes from a speech during the 2000 election campaign, in which George W Bush rationalized his unwillingness to demolish hydroelectric dams in order to protect endangered fish thus: "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully", to which Poole responds: "Since when were we at war with the fish?"