Talking of memorials, as I was the other day, yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day and I marked it by re-watching The World at War's three-hour special documentary, 'The Final Solution'.

Three hours of logistical, emotional, philosophical and theological overload: a labour of bitter love, meticulously stitched together for a popular television audience but with only a fraction of the urgent care, planning and pedantry that was lavished upon the original labour of hate.

Watching 34 years ago, usually with my sister, these were once-seen, never-forgotten images (the hangings, starvings, death pits, ovens and 'that' bulldozer altered our minds in an instant as children), but watching now is far harder.

To be in one's majority; in full possession of one's ethical character; to know of 'the will to exterminate' since, now, and to fear its deployment in the future is profoundly unnerving. As well it should be.

You cry for those smooth-running railway networks to be bombed; for the disempowered and disbelieving majority to rise and the murderous minority to finally disrelish the gorge of murder (as some, but not nearly enough, did).

You question your faith in the power and importance of forgiveness when you realise that the likes of Himmler, Hess and Eichmann might shoehorn their way in to receive grace, and you end up thinking that maybe forgiveness were best abandoned as a concept, to close the loophole around their necks.

And it's then that you feel the radical power of such acts to dehumanise and degrade. Ideology can be the most virulent biochemical weapon of all.

There's no way to summarise and nothing I can say that would be remotely adequate but I wanted to transcribe part of an interview with a woman (grown up by 1973) recounting the day she saw her brother loaded onto an eastbound train at the Vught Transit Camp in Southern Holland.

 
"And after nine months he had to go and I should have gone with him but it was not allowed because I had scarlet fever ... when you were sick, you couldn't go to the gas chambers. No, first you had to recover. They gave you the illusion nothing happened because they didn't send you on a transport when you are sick. 

My brother he came to say goodbye and I was looking at him and thinking 'for heavens sake, he can't go, not in these poor clothes'. He was small, you see, and I gave him one of my jackets and I was thinking: it is closing the other way round, but who cares!

And I gave him a pair of my boots, then I looked at him when he walked away from the barrack — to his back and on his back he looked like me. And I was sure I would never see him again. I was sure."

Rita Boas Koupman

Click to enlargeI walk past Tate Modern several times each week and yesterday, to my disappointment, I noticed that Louise Bourgeois's splendid spider, 'Le Maman', has finally abandoned its invisible web on the riverfront and scurried off to who knows where?

In an earlier post, I fantasised about the spider's assault on London and now in its place there stands a mute and ashen memorial to the lives that were lost repelling the attack. It seems that London prevailed again and St. Paul's remained intact.

The new presence outside the side entrance heralds a retrospective of Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz's work, which has just begun at Tate Modern.

His work is meant to resonate with tension between the real and the illusory and this fake cenotaph certainly does that: immediately conjuring a blot of sombre (if aimless) meditation in your heart as you pass by, and yet pricking a colder curiosity as to how the illusion has been created and what exactly makes this artefact so nearly convincing?

You're also reminded of public and personal griefs and of how close to the surface they lie. You might even identify a little with Freud's exemplary hysterics and neurotics who cannot pass by London's monuments without halting and grieving afresh:

"But what would you say to a Londoner who today stood sadly before the monument to the funeral of Queen Eleanor, instead of going about his business with the haste engendered by modern industrial conditions, or rejoicing with the young queen of his own heart? Or to another, who before the 'Monument' bemoaned the burning of his loved native city, which long since has arisen again so much more splendid than before?"  (The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, 1910)

And how strange and suggestive seems to be this trans-riverine stretch of space between Tate Modern and St. Paul's?

Life is getting dangerous at Masterchef HQ. Last week, no fewer than three attempts were made on the lives of expert judges Wallace and Torode in the form of two plates of undercooked chicken and an utterly raw risotto flan (or similar nightmarish 'invention').

The flan incident may not actually have been an assassination attempt, as the budding Masterchef in question thought that 'blind baking' meant cooking while wearing a balaclava on backwards, with a couple of sticky baklavas pressed onto his eyelids for good measure. He actually missed the oven and sat his flan on the top shelf of the fridge for 30 minutes at 'Fridge Mark 5'.

But last night saw the biggest challenge yet to the edifice of Masterchef. Rather than trying to terminate the fleshy, mortal, replaceable experts, one contestant struck a symbolic blow right at the philosophical heart of the programme.

On being told that his main course of liver, bacon, butternut squash and peas tasted "like liver, bacon, butternut squash and peas" (such insights, while beyond the grasp of most of us, are the bread and butter of 'ingredients experts'), he replied: "Yes, I'm bored with the food I'm cooking."

Well, you could have heard a quinoa grain drop. John Torode was so utterly gob-smacked that sliding a live, wriggling monkfish sideways into his gaping maw without touching the sides would have been as easy as overcooking a scallop.

Bored with their own food? Bored with food 'qua' food? Bored in or near a kitchen? Bored in the presence of lamb's lettuce or fenugreek? How could this be? Where was the passion? Where was the desire to CHANGE THEIR LIFE? How could they hope to have 'a future in food'; to open up a specialist bistro for the newly divorced or dentured; to combine the different food cultures they were exposed to on their gap year 23 years ago; to queue-jump many long hard years of working in the restaurant business with three or four hours spent fiddling around with a self-basting chocolate pud on the telly for Gregg Wallace?

The iron shutters of Masterchef HQ slammed shut like bulkhead gates on the Titanic. John, Gregg and the other contestants gathered around the heretic, deboned him, marinated him, grilled him underneath the studio lighting rig and plated him up with some beautifully cooked dauphinoise potatoes and a light fennel salad.

"Ooh, yum! I just want to eat the whole thing!" shouted Gregg, before eating the whole thing.

Round Two is where our fledgling masterchefs get a hectic glimpse of London lunchtimes in hectic London restaurants like Soho's chic BYO food salon, 'Heqtik'; 'Heck, Teak' in Hackney's furniture-making quarter; and Brian Turner's Yorkshire Pudding-themed brasserie, 'By 'Eck It's 'Ectic In 'Ere' in Fitzrovia.

Today, 'experimental cook' Sukie, 'family cook' Esmerelda and 'depressed cook' Dave will be heading into the heart of London's Central London to work a hectic lunchtime shift at top Greek restaurant 'Hekticos' under the demanding eye of award-winning chef, Nikos Kazantzakis.

"Okay guys, lunchtimes around here are most hectic between noon and 3 and I'm expecting the very highest standards from you. Nothing gets out of this kitchen until I've personally seen, tasted and completely devoured each and every dish. Got that? Good. Right, I'm going to play 'Firestarter' by The Prodigy really loudly now. Let's montage!"

And so begins the most pointless round of Masterchef, in which it really makes no difference how our contestants do. Nobody has ever been booted out for allowing a piece of huss to stick to the skillet or boiling a reduction to pure tar. In fact last year's eventual winner accidentally deep-fried a sous-chef's face but by the end of the hectic lunch service they were serving up technically excellent plates of food and even helped cater the funeral.

The orders come thick and fast:

"Two more langoustine frappuccinos Esmerelda!"

— "Yes chef!"

" That's four wren cheeks en croute Dave!"

— "Yes chef!"

In a rare quiet moment, Nikos gets to know the contestants a little better.

"So Sukie, what was the first food you remember that really excited you?"

— "Yes chef!"

 "Dave,  what makes you want to open your own soup kitchen?"

— "Could you turn The Prodigy down a little please chef!"

So, our contestants started nervously, allowed some food to go cold, let themselves down with poor presentation,  made sauces too thick or too thin, were either too laid-back or too uptight but by the end of the hectic lunch service they were all turning out technically excellent plates of food. So good in fact that Nikos finished each and every plateful before it left the kitchen.

Now it's back to Masterchef HQ for the final cook-off.

Hekticos (128 Marylebone High Street. Monday to Saturday, Lunch 12-3, Dinner 6-11, booking recommended; nearest tube, Bond Street)

This is a tale of serendipity, perspicacity, limoncello and, above all, poppetry. Firstly, what is a poppet?

According to onelook.com a poppet is "a mushroom-shaped valve that rises perpendicular from its seat; commonly used in internal-combustion engines" but that's not the kind of poppet I know and love.

To me, a poppet is an adult of either gender who embodies kindness, quirkiness, winsomeness, selflessness and a strange pheromonal aura that makes you want to lift your right hand like a lucky Chinese cat, curl your fingers gently, make a rapid stroking gesture, tilt your head to one side and say 'Ahh' or 'Aww', maybe even silently mouthing the word "poppet" to your companions.

There was once a family-run Italian restaurant on Frith Street (some maintain it was the last one in Soho but I can't be sure) that was blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of impressive poppetry in the form of its principal waitresses (the men of the establishment, while certainly pleasant enough,  seemed to be attendants to poppetry rather than poppets themselves).

There was the very beautiful poppet whose kindness extended to dating an unappealing young man (we all agreed: this isn't just my opinion) who wore a thin red leather tie, bought her those roses that are schlepped from door to door and took her out for a Valentine's Day meal in the very same restaurant she worked every day.

Then there was the statuesque 'Über-Poppet' who was the boss of all poppets and whose poppetry was so strong that it shone through her ruthlessly efficient outer casing.

But most impressive poppet of all was the 'Apoppeteosis of all Poppetry' who combined beauty, energy, efficiency, faultless attentiveness, genuine friendliness and a close-to-convincing interest in poetry to boot. The food was pretty good but it was the staff and the atmosphere that made us return so frequently between 1998 and 2003, or thereabouts.

I don't know how or exactly when it happened but we started eating there less, even though I would always wave or say a few words to the Apoppeteosis as I dashed to and from the Curzon Soho. Someone had a birthday meal at a Strada, which we all enjoyed, and so we went there a few times instead, lured by the house wine they used to sell by the inch, the discount cards and the admittedly pretty good pizzas (this was before I stumbled upon Spacca Napoli of course).

Life rumbled on, the seasons passed and one day I received a text from The Good Doctor, informing me that the restaurant was no more. Its windows were blanked out with that weird whitewash stuff they smear defunct premises with and the just-visible 'Specials' blackboards (each day, each week, each month identically special) had been rubbed off with a damp cloth.

I felt ashamed and bereft. No more poppetry. I texted back: "It's our fault. That's what comes of sucking on Strada's garlicky xxxx". 

So imagine our joy when, the other night, we decided against the Woodlands Restaurant and opted for Strada and who should be there, running the floor, looking fitter and brighter and keener than ever? The Apoppeteosis of all Poppetry! She recognised us at once and treated us to prosecco on the house and told of how maintenance problems had sunk the old restaurant and how she'd been banished to Chiswick for a while but now was back, ironically, at Strada.

But it's not the restaurant or the chain that matters, it's the power of poppetry pulsing through. We ate well and slept well that night, happy that a small piece of the London jigsaw was back in its place, retrieved from beneath the sofa of neglect, no longer snared in the carpet-fibres of regret. All was well with the world for a while. And free limoncello too.