Pulse

and a cook. Or rather, listening, since they were discussing the effect of different foods on the taste of a man’s sperm. ‘Cinnamon,’ said the novelist knowingly. ‘No, not just by itself,’ replied the cook. ‘You need strawberries, blackberries and cinnamon, that’s the best.’ She added that she could always tell a meat-eater. ‘Believe me, I know. I did a blind tasting once.’ Hesitant about contributing to the conversation, I mentioned asparagus. ‘Yes,’ replied the cook. ‘It shows in the urine but it also shows in the ejaculate.’ If I hadn’t written the exchange down shortly afterwards, I might think I was remembering part of some hot dream.
    A psychiatrist friend of mine maintains that there is a direct correlation between interest in food and interest in sex. The lustful gourmand is almost a cliché; while aversion to food is often accompanied by erotic indifference. As for the normal, middle part of the spectrum: I can think of people who, because of the circles in which they move, exaggerate their interest in food; often, they are the same sort of people who (again, because of peer pressure) might claim more of an interest in sex than they actually feel. Counter-examples come to mind: couples whose appetite for food, and cooking, and eating out, has come to supplant the appetite for sex, and for whom bed, after a meal, is a place of repose not activity. But on the whole, I’d say there’s something to this theory.
    The expectation of an experience governs and distorts the experience itself. I may not know anything about sperm tasting, but I know about wine tasting. If someone puts a glass of wine in front of you, it is impossible to approach it without preconceptions. To begin with, you might not actually likethe stuff. But allowing that you do, then many subliminal factors come into play before you’ve even taken a sip. What colour the wine is, what it smells like, what glass it is in, how much it costs, who’s paying for it, where you are, what your mood is, whether or not you’ve had this wine before. It is impossible to factor out such pre-knowledge. The only way to get round it is an extreme one. If you are blindfolded, and someone puts a clothes peg on your nose, and hands you a glass of wine, then, even if you are the greatest expert in the world, you will be unable to tell the most basic things about it. Not even whether it is red or white.
    Of all our senses, it is the one with the broadest application, from a brief impression on the tongue to a learned aesthetic response to a painting. It is also the one that most describes us. We may be better or worse people, happy or miserable, successful or failing, but what we are , within these wider categories, how we define ourselves, as opposed to how we are genetically defined, is what we call ‘taste’. Yet the word – perhaps because of its broad catchment area – easily misleads. ‘Taste’ can imply calm reflection; while its derivatives – tasteful, tastefulness, tasteless, tastelessness – lead us into a world of minute differentiations, of snobbery, social values and soft furnishings. True taste, essential taste, is much more instinctual and unreflecting. It says, Me, here, now, this, you. It says, Lower the boat and row me ashore. Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier , says of Nancy Rufford: ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ Falling in love is the most violent expression of taste known to us.
    And yet our language doesn’t seem to represent that moment very well. We have no equivalent for ‘ coup de foudre ’, the lightning strike and thunderclap of love. We talk about there being ‘electricity’ between a couple – but this is adomestic not cosmic image, as if the pair should be practical and wear rubber soles to their shoes. We talk of ‘love at first sight’, and indeed it happens, even in England, but the phrase makes it sound rather a polite business. We say that their eyes met across a crowded room. Again, how social it sounds. Across a crowded room. Across a crowded harbour.
    Anita Riberas didn’t, in fact, die ‘on the breast of Garibaldi’, but rather more mundanely, and less like a lithograph. She died while the liberator and three of his followers, each holding a corner of her mattress, were moving her from a cart into a farmhouse. Still, we should celebrate that moment with the telescope and all it led to. Because this is the