'What are you doing at the weekend?'
'I'm going to see Husky Rescue.'
'What's that - a film about Huskies? A dog show?'
'No, it's a band from Finland, it's a (hasty look around the room in embarrassment)
...concert.'
(loud disembodied northern voice from the Sales & Marketing Office):
'IT'S CALLED A GIG, MARION...'
Okay, so yes. New man likes music. I am just so relieved that I no longer have to pretend to like drum and bass after sitting for hours in previous man's car having my ears burnt off that I'm delighted to be swept away by his enthusiasm. One of the things he has me lined up for is at Heaven. There's a strict over-14s policy.
5 March 2010
The day the music died
And then today, one of my colleagues was very upset that a television presenter had died. I tried to sympathise. 'I felt the same about Elvis,' I said.
'But you weren't born when Elvis died!'
'I was.'
'But it was ages ago - in the 70s...'
'Yes, I got married in the late 70s...' (of course I was a forced child bride).
'Really!' (Shocked mathematical calculation using more than just the fingers on two hands resulting in bewilderment.
'Yes, really. When were you born?'
'1985'.
I have dresses older than this.
'But you weren't born when Elvis died!'
'I was.'
'But it was ages ago - in the 70s...'
'Yes, I got married in the late 70s...' (of course I was a forced child bride).
'Really!' (Shocked mathematical calculation using more than just the fingers on two hands resulting in bewilderment.
'Yes, really. When were you born?'
'1985'.
I have dresses older than this.
A fine Romance with no piglets...
It's been a very social week as you can see by the photographs below taken at a series of swanky Pedantic launch parties. I also hosted my own party last Friday for some fellow Pedants, past and present, who have recently got engaged, though having a celebration at the broken home of a poster child (okay matron) for divorce is probably not every bride-to-be's dream night out. Nevertheless, they came, they drank tequila, they did mime... (oh yes - the French are always with us...)
The events of the evening are vague, cloudy, even - Marguerita frosted and bathed in a Cosmopolitan rosy-hued glow - thanks to my bar-tender son who left several litres of mixed drinks in the fridge which went nicely with the leaning tower of quesadillas which I had made, Blue Peter style, some time earlier in the sober light of day. My one over-riding memory is of our very own resident Marcel Marceau disappearing behind my kitchen counter as though gliding downstairs on an escalator - and then landing with a slap on the floor.
Later, when discussing someone whom he felt had been rather over-familiar, he said with a shrug:
'You know, pigs... Don't you say this?'
'Erm, no...'
'It means, it's not like we're intimate, that we've spent a lot of time together...'
'...with pigs.'
'Not necessarily pigs, maybe it's sheep.' He looked thoughtful and repeated the phrase: 'on n'a pas garde les cochons... Is that sheep or...?'
'No it's pigs, definitely pigs.'
Ah - so much for the French being the language of love. You can just see the Gallic remake of Brokeback mountain... two love-lorn swineherds... guarding pigs together.
The events of the evening are vague, cloudy, even - Marguerita frosted and bathed in a Cosmopolitan rosy-hued glow - thanks to my bar-tender son who left several litres of mixed drinks in the fridge which went nicely with the leaning tower of quesadillas which I had made, Blue Peter style, some time earlier in the sober light of day. My one over-riding memory is of our very own resident Marcel Marceau disappearing behind my kitchen counter as though gliding downstairs on an escalator - and then landing with a slap on the floor.
'On n’a pas gardé les cochons ensemble...'
'What?' We said, not sure for a second whether he was speaking French or we were just drunker than we'd thought...
He looked at us incredulously as if unable to fathom why we didn't know what he meant: '...how do you say in English? I mean, it's not like we've guarded pigs together...'
'Pigs?'
'Erm, no...'
'It means, it's not like we're intimate, that we've spent a lot of time together...'
'...with pigs.'
'Not necessarily pigs, maybe it's sheep.' He looked thoughtful and repeated the phrase: 'on n'a pas garde les cochons... Is that sheep or...?'
'No it's pigs, definitely pigs.'
Ah - so much for the French being the language of love. You can just see the Gallic remake of Brokeback mountain... two love-lorn swineherds... guarding pigs together.
25 February 2010
Seal of disapproval
I can't believe that these words are going to come out of my mouth. But nevertheless, here they are:. Tonight, I'm going to a gig.
Shudder.
It's not the idea of going to a smelly venue with a beer soaked carpet and legions of the young, so much as the idea of me going, and of having to actually say gig.
Double shudder.
It's just one of those words that people over fifty shouldn't have in their lexicon. Like fit, except as it refers to a person who goes often to the gym, or buff, unless you're talking about exfoliating. Nevertheless, to a gig I mutton go... To see Marina and the Diamonds after having first listened several times to a USB with five songs on it to accustom myself to the sound, something between a crazed Kate Bush and well, a less crazed Kate Bush. But with conditioner.
It seemed like a good idea at the time of Lukewarm's suggestion. But after the Ozu film, I am slightly worried about the retributive aspect of the invitation. I needn't have been. We go in, get our hand stamped with the mini post office set on the door and plonk ourselves down on the aforementioned beer stained carpet like kids at a picnic where we wait obediently for the support act - a miserable chap in an Oasis jacket, with an Oasis sneer and a sound something between Happy Verve and an Irish Jig. I tap my foot. Lukewarm's footballer's leg remains immobile next to mine. I tread on it several times trying to show my enthusiasm which isn't matched by his but which eventually welds mine against his and stills it. I think he may be trying to tell me something. Just like at a football match, dancing is not a good idea.
"I don't think much of them,' He says after a round of obligatory clapping, following a round of somewhat obligatory songs. I remark on how unhappy they all look - like kids who've had a lot of music lessons and been reluctantly forced by their mother on to the stage when they'd rather be playing Super Mario Cart. One chap in particular, strumming the ukulele with a fountain of curly hair covering his eyes, seemed particularly unhappy to be there. Well, playing the ukulele - you can hardly blame him.
Marina comes on next wearing a knitted pig cloak with ears and a felt nose.
I feel very, very old.
The next day I tell my youngest daughter that I'd been to hear a band, and I cringe inwardly at the word 'band' which might almost be as bad as the g-word.
Silence.
'Marina and the Diamonds. Have you heard of them?'
Shrug.
'I take it this means no.
'They are at number two at the charts,' I say encouragingly - because the singer announced this between songs.
Silence.
I realise that I haven't known what was in the charts since I was about 21, and didn't care that much then, and that it's pretty pathetic that I should even appear to care now. I'm sounding like the oldest freaking swinger in town. I give up which is a relief to both of us. It's only later at work when Publicista notices my rubber ink pad hand and says - 'Oh, you have a nightclub stamp!' that I realise it could have been worse.
A nightclub - comeawwwwwn...
'No, no - it was a g..." I protest, but the word sticks like a claustrophobic to my open lips. Unlike me, it just won't come out.
Shudder.
It's not the idea of going to a smelly venue with a beer soaked carpet and legions of the young, so much as the idea of me going, and of having to actually say gig.
Double shudder.
It's just one of those words that people over fifty shouldn't have in their lexicon. Like fit, except as it refers to a person who goes often to the gym, or buff, unless you're talking about exfoliating. Nevertheless, to a gig I mutton go... To see Marina and the Diamonds after having first listened several times to a USB with five songs on it to accustom myself to the sound, something between a crazed Kate Bush and well, a less crazed Kate Bush. But with conditioner.
It seemed like a good idea at the time of Lukewarm's suggestion. But after the Ozu film, I am slightly worried about the retributive aspect of the invitation. I needn't have been. We go in, get our hand stamped with the mini post office set on the door and plonk ourselves down on the aforementioned beer stained carpet like kids at a picnic where we wait obediently for the support act - a miserable chap in an Oasis jacket, with an Oasis sneer and a sound something between Happy Verve and an Irish Jig. I tap my foot. Lukewarm's footballer's leg remains immobile next to mine. I tread on it several times trying to show my enthusiasm which isn't matched by his but which eventually welds mine against his and stills it. I think he may be trying to tell me something. Just like at a football match, dancing is not a good idea.
"I don't think much of them,' He says after a round of obligatory clapping, following a round of somewhat obligatory songs. I remark on how unhappy they all look - like kids who've had a lot of music lessons and been reluctantly forced by their mother on to the stage when they'd rather be playing Super Mario Cart. One chap in particular, strumming the ukulele with a fountain of curly hair covering his eyes, seemed particularly unhappy to be there. Well, playing the ukulele - you can hardly blame him.
Marina comes on next wearing a knitted pig cloak with ears and a felt nose.
I feel very, very old.
The next day I tell my youngest daughter that I'd been to hear a band, and I cringe inwardly at the word 'band' which might almost be as bad as the g-word.
Silence.
'Marina and the Diamonds. Have you heard of them?'
Shrug.
'I take it this means no.
'They are at number two at the charts,' I say encouragingly - because the singer announced this between songs.
Silence.
I realise that I haven't known what was in the charts since I was about 21, and didn't care that much then, and that it's pretty pathetic that I should even appear to care now. I'm sounding like the oldest freaking swinger in town. I give up which is a relief to both of us. It's only later at work when Publicista notices my rubber ink pad hand and says - 'Oh, you have a nightclub stamp!' that I realise it could have been worse.
A nightclub - comeawwwwwn...
'No, no - it was a g..." I protest, but the word sticks like a claustrophobic to my open lips. Unlike me, it just won't come out.
23 February 2010
Silent Scream
I've seen everything at the cinema that I want to see, and it's half term, so unless I line up for Alvin and the Chipmunks - The Squeakwell, current multiplex offerings are pretty much exhausted. And so I find myself on the BFI site buying tickets for 'the most romantic film ever made' - Letter from and Unknown Woman which I suppose is romantic if your idea of a hero has Herman Munster sideburns enhancing the Grecian 2000, and a penchant for anonymous one night stands with women who are instantly forgotten afterwards. Sounds like a date on Guardian Soulmates to me. Nevertheless I clicked and bought for Friday night.
'Oh, and there's an Ozu festival on,' urges Editorial swooningly, after he'd finished raving about how wonderful the other film was. 'Go and see Tokyo Story...'
Un(fortunately?) - it wasn't playing when I wanted to go. 'They only have Late Autumn...'
'That's amazing too - see that instead.'
As my mother used to say when I invoked priviledges other friends were allowed which I was denied '...if they stuck their hand in the fire would you do that too?'
Good point mother, but it was one which I remembered too late, after I had taken advice from the resident Editorial film critic and yet again, like a gormless sheep on the eve of Ramadan, clicked and booked.
This is how I come to find myself drowsy and hungry after a very, very late Saturday night and extremely early Sunday that began with a 6am fire-alarm that had me huddled on a cold street in my hastily donned clothes outside a hotel, sitting in the back row of the tiny studio cinema at the South Bank being hugged claustrophobically tightly by over-enthusiastic central heating and the collective carbon monoxide produced by two dozen highly excited film buffs.
Lights dimmed.
The credits rolled.
I am gripped with European-supermarket, empty-trolley excitement (oh yes, the unexplored world of foreign films also fills me with the giddy anticipation of a new date with silver-templed, Guardian Soulmate Lothario types who may, yet, turn out to be almost normal...) watching the interminable opening sequence of Japanese ideographs projected on a hessian screen, as Late Autumn unfolds at the speed of a double amputee doing origami.
And let me tell you. Ice melts faster.
My eyes start to droop. My head sinks towards my slumped chest and startles me awake. I think about dead babies, world hunger, Haitian earthquakes, war in Afghanistan, Mossad Spy Rings, the opening scene from the Hurt Locker - anything with explosions - all in a vain effort to wake myself up - but still the actors on screen are sitting exactly where they had been five minutes or three days earlier, the women smiling eerily like Stepford Wives, answering the beetle-like men in high reedy, complaisant voices.
Lukewarm sits silently beside me, like a mourner at a funeral for someone he didn't like - his big footballer thighs struggling to stay daintily within the confines of his seat.
Poor b******.
He takes me to a Chelsea match and I take him to see Japanese paint drying - okay beautifully shot, classic, cinematic, arty, seminal, Japanese paint, but nevertheless, paint: slow - slow - slow drying matte magnolia paint.
The rest of the audience is immobile, whether because they've been turned to stone by boredom or from rapt attention, I cannot say. I'm afraid to look at Lukewarm to see how he's reacting in case he is dead. Instead I tough it out and go back to continue my fight against sleep, pinching my skin on my inner arm to jolt myself awake.
About a decade later one of the smiling Japanese women that we've been trying to marry off in real time announces with a happy expression of cowlike acquiesence that she has decided, after all, not to get married (sorry about the plot spoiler) at which my heart shrivels to the size of a walnut. After all this now, now, you've changed your mind!
I don't think I will be taking Lukewarm to any more films.
To anything, in fact. I mean, how less enthusiastic can you get than lukewarm?
'Oh Marion, what prompted all the self improvement?' says Nel, my Bafta-winning, film director friend. 'I remember sitting through all these things at film school pretending that I understood what made them so brilliant and just feeling stupid. I felt stupid for most of my twenties now that I come to think of it. Ozu has made one good film and that's Tokyo Story.. I've got the whole boxed set if you want to borrow it.'
I consider taking exception to the implication that my foray into the beard-stroking film world is an anomoly in my viewing history, but the risk of having the ruddy boxed set thrust into my hand is sufficiently prohibitive to strike me mute.
And this weekend? Well, Alv-in, Si-mon, The-o-dore... I mean, how bad can it be?
'Oh, and there's an Ozu festival on,' urges Editorial swooningly, after he'd finished raving about how wonderful the other film was. 'Go and see Tokyo Story...'
Un(fortunately?) - it wasn't playing when I wanted to go. 'They only have Late Autumn...'
'That's amazing too - see that instead.'
As my mother used to say when I invoked priviledges other friends were allowed which I was denied '...if they stuck their hand in the fire would you do that too?'
Good point mother, but it was one which I remembered too late, after I had taken advice from the resident Editorial film critic and yet again, like a gormless sheep on the eve of Ramadan, clicked and booked.
This is how I come to find myself drowsy and hungry after a very, very late Saturday night and extremely early Sunday that began with a 6am fire-alarm that had me huddled on a cold street in my hastily donned clothes outside a hotel, sitting in the back row of the tiny studio cinema at the South Bank being hugged claustrophobically tightly by over-enthusiastic central heating and the collective carbon monoxide produced by two dozen highly excited film buffs.
Lights dimmed.
The credits rolled.
I am gripped with European-supermarket, empty-trolley excitement (oh yes, the unexplored world of foreign films also fills me with the giddy anticipation of a new date with silver-templed, Guardian Soulmate Lothario types who may, yet, turn out to be almost normal...) watching the interminable opening sequence of Japanese ideographs projected on a hessian screen, as Late Autumn unfolds at the speed of a double amputee doing origami.
And let me tell you. Ice melts faster.
My eyes start to droop. My head sinks towards my slumped chest and startles me awake. I think about dead babies, world hunger, Haitian earthquakes, war in Afghanistan, Mossad Spy Rings, the opening scene from the Hurt Locker - anything with explosions - all in a vain effort to wake myself up - but still the actors on screen are sitting exactly where they had been five minutes or three days earlier, the women smiling eerily like Stepford Wives, answering the beetle-like men in high reedy, complaisant voices.
Lukewarm sits silently beside me, like a mourner at a funeral for someone he didn't like - his big footballer thighs struggling to stay daintily within the confines of his seat.
Poor b******.
He takes me to a Chelsea match and I take him to see Japanese paint drying - okay beautifully shot, classic, cinematic, arty, seminal, Japanese paint, but nevertheless, paint: slow - slow - slow drying matte magnolia paint.
The rest of the audience is immobile, whether because they've been turned to stone by boredom or from rapt attention, I cannot say. I'm afraid to look at Lukewarm to see how he's reacting in case he is dead. Instead I tough it out and go back to continue my fight against sleep, pinching my skin on my inner arm to jolt myself awake.
About a decade later one of the smiling Japanese women that we've been trying to marry off in real time announces with a happy expression of cowlike acquiesence that she has decided, after all, not to get married (sorry about the plot spoiler) at which my heart shrivels to the size of a walnut. After all this now, now, you've changed your mind!
I don't think I will be taking Lukewarm to any more films.
To anything, in fact. I mean, how less enthusiastic can you get than lukewarm?
'Oh Marion, what prompted all the self improvement?' says Nel, my Bafta-winning, film director friend. 'I remember sitting through all these things at film school pretending that I understood what made them so brilliant and just feeling stupid. I felt stupid for most of my twenties now that I come to think of it. Ozu has made one good film and that's Tokyo Story.. I've got the whole boxed set if you want to borrow it.'
I consider taking exception to the implication that my foray into the beard-stroking film world is an anomoly in my viewing history, but the risk of having the ruddy boxed set thrust into my hand is sufficiently prohibitive to strike me mute.
And this weekend? Well, Alv-in, Si-mon, The-o-dore... I mean, how bad can it be?
19 February 2010
Chuckie Cheese
Journalista, Publicista and I are sitting on a bench by the front door of La Ubertrendeecheeserie (whose name I don't want to mention so that the Google search doesn't pick it up, less I sound ungrateful) surrounded by crates of the world's most expensive lemons and neat little parcels of spices wrapped up in muslin and tape, held in place with what looks like sealing wax. I have that feeling in my chest that I get when I'm in love in the midst of all this food - it's a sort of tight, fluttery, tension that I can barely contain - excitement and longing and - best of all - the ability to indulge it. Sad, isn't it - when walking into - say Green Valley (the Lebanese store next to Marble Arch Synagogue) or Selfridges Food Hall, or Ottolenghi, or Fifth Floor at Harvey Nichols, or any supermarket in any city anywhere outside the United Kingdom (or even Waitrose at a pinch) fills you with the trembling joy other women feel for Manolo's or Johnny Depp - which probably accounts both for the size of my thighs and my dreary love life.
But I do love food, not just eating it, but buying it, owning it, having it in the cupboard waiting patiently to be consumed, or even more likely, never actually opened but kept there in perpetuity looking fabulous and seductive for long after its sell-by date - like the pickled lemons I bought so many years ago that they are, by now, probably fossilised . I do cook with pickled lemons, but these ones are in such a pretty jar. This brings me to my other love - packaging. I'm a sucker for packaging and therefore I'm a total walkover for beautifully packaged, aspirational food. I want crates of leafy lemons in my kitchen, and ropes of smoked garlic, and necklaces of chilis, and fist sized jars of cinnamon sticks. I want iced cupcakes under a bell jar, and artisan cheese on a marble slab. I want a jug of violet flavoured lollies and everything with French or Italian labels, preferably with hand-painted watercolour illustrations. In essence, I want to live in a food shop and in La Ubertrendeecheeserie where I've come for a freebie dinner with Journalista, I just want to fill my pockets, my handbag, my life with pretty comestibles.
A waitress passes by with tiny cocktails which my menu cribsheet tells me are rhubarb infused gin with maraschino and pink grapefruit. I have a second, and attempt to spear a friable bread cube to dip it into the welsh rarebit fondue. Cheese drips all over my skirt. This is why it's better to dream about food and place it artfully on the shelves of your kitchen than it is to attempt to eat it.
Journalista is looking a little pale and is unusually quiet, but Publicista and I make up for it, until we are shepherded to the long communal tables for supper. La Ubertrendeecheeserie run these supper evenings, usually producing a meal based around - wouldn't you have guessed it - cheese but they are, for my modest wallet, rather expensive and so it was wonderful to be invited along as Journalista's guest. I am starving. I haven't eaten all day. I've held back on the tiny croutons coated with unctious melted cheese, but it has been a struggle.
At the table there are speeches. Oh god, there are speeches. There is no such thing as a free lunch, or supper, because the food has to be explained to us course by course, and then the overly complicated drinks which have more ingredients than shampoo, and smell not dissimilar, because the theme of the night is matching food with cocktails. Yep, you heard right. We are going to knock back a cocktail with every course. This is what you mean by a mixed drink.
Wait staff stand behind us holding a plate in each hand while the ancient mariner tells us the story of blending tequila with pink lady apple and serving it with smoked salmon - you could probably smoke it faster than the explanation - and Richard Corrigan's soda bread. I'm almost fainting by the time it is set before us. It's a small piece of bread the size of a credit card - okay, well, go on then - a large credit card, covered in fat, sliced, salmon. I have eaten it before the speech giver has drawn his chair underneath him. I knock back the tequila in one shot. As you're supposed to. No?
Journalista, in the meantime, has disappeared. I mean, I know that talking about food is a bit like listening to ballroom dancing, but the speech wasn't that bad - nevertheless she has gone, and remains gone for most of the first course. I eye her plate longingly, but refrain from touching it. It's too close to Publicista who has struck up a conversation with Fay Weldon's nephew, aghast because she had just had lunch with Fay the other day. Darling. We luvvies, huh... I just had lunch with a cup-a-soup (tomato and vegetable - with twenty two ingredients, most of which are chemical in flavour) but you don't hear me name dropping.
The evening flowed on. I stopped drinking at cocktail number three - Honey vodka, which was a mistake, because cocktail number four, five and six were whisky based and made shampoo sound appealing, and that's before we get to the port flip with egg yolk. The food however - sigh... Despite the fact that it took longer to arrive than a third world train and had the portion control of Cucina Lilliput, it was delicious - more assemblage than cooking, but gorgeous nonetheless. Black pudding, potato and apple mash, Dublin Bay prawns, roasted beets, goats cheese and, my favourite, wood pigeon on toast where the juices had seeped into the crunchy bread and infused it with earthy, caramel loveliness. If only I had the appetite of a bird, I would not have been quite so pecked off. Rich people just don't have appetites and there is no sum too great that they will pay for food which they do not actually eat.
Journalista didn't touch most of hers. She is a vegetarian, but still... I was a tad envious of her ability not-to-scoff which, as you know, is a trait prized amongst women to their faces, and talked about in a derisory fashion behind their scrawny backs. But Journalista is not rich. She's not skinny. She's not in lust, love or languishing in heartbreak as far as I know. What's wrong with her?
I saved myself for the final course. We are, remember, in a cheese shop. Surely there will be some wonderful cheese. I can't wait. I'm also going to have the final drink. I'm fantasising about a glass of red wine which I notice the proprietor of the shop is quaffing with Mark Hix, our joint host for the evening, but no - instead another teeny glass is set before me. Eagerly I go to lift it to my lips and - phoar - stop when the antiseptic smell assails me.
Oh for for peat's sake, if bloody whisky - Ardbeg malt whisky - where I spent all my childhood holiday's living in my uncle's corrugated iron house next to the distillery in Islay, and whose charred, bonfire aroma reminds me of hospitals and rusty nails. It tastes like TCP and I don't know whether to drink it or gargle with it. I chose to do neither. It also contains creme de peche and old fashioned bitters. Don't these people know that the point of a cocktail is to disguise the taste of the alcohol, not to enhance it - why else did I spend my adolescence drinking this stuff, decanted into lemonade bottles and watered down with everything from Irn Bru (ah it's the girders, that's where the rusty connotation comes from) to Limeade, and it still tasted like the most disgusting way to get drunk ever invented.
One word. Yuck. But with an F.
But there was still the cheese. And unfortunately the introductory speech - honestly, I spent less time introducing myself to the person on either side of me than they did on the food:
This is a Montgomery cheddar, matured for 12 months and we've chosen this because the cheesemaker had had a little problem with his cheese mites, and cheese mites, as you know,
(Did you?)
...are little parasites that all cheese makers have
(They do?)
...and which grow on the rind of the cheese and help to develop the flavours
(Really, they do?)
...but in this case the mites had got out of control
(They did? - Journalista and I both look at the huge hunk of unadorned cheese lying on our plates for evidence of swarming mites.)
...which improved the texture and depth of flavour enormously.
Journalista excused herself again.
Turns out she had food poisoning and was going next door to the pub to throw up.
Funnily enough I didn't fancy the cheese after that either.
But I do love food, not just eating it, but buying it, owning it, having it in the cupboard waiting patiently to be consumed, or even more likely, never actually opened but kept there in perpetuity looking fabulous and seductive for long after its sell-by date - like the pickled lemons I bought so many years ago that they are, by now, probably fossilised . I do cook with pickled lemons, but these ones are in such a pretty jar. This brings me to my other love - packaging. I'm a sucker for packaging and therefore I'm a total walkover for beautifully packaged, aspirational food. I want crates of leafy lemons in my kitchen, and ropes of smoked garlic, and necklaces of chilis, and fist sized jars of cinnamon sticks. I want iced cupcakes under a bell jar, and artisan cheese on a marble slab. I want a jug of violet flavoured lollies and everything with French or Italian labels, preferably with hand-painted watercolour illustrations. In essence, I want to live in a food shop and in La Ubertrendeecheeserie where I've come for a freebie dinner with Journalista, I just want to fill my pockets, my handbag, my life with pretty comestibles.
A waitress passes by with tiny cocktails which my menu cribsheet tells me are rhubarb infused gin with maraschino and pink grapefruit. I have a second, and attempt to spear a friable bread cube to dip it into the welsh rarebit fondue. Cheese drips all over my skirt. This is why it's better to dream about food and place it artfully on the shelves of your kitchen than it is to attempt to eat it.
Journalista is looking a little pale and is unusually quiet, but Publicista and I make up for it, until we are shepherded to the long communal tables for supper. La Ubertrendeecheeserie run these supper evenings, usually producing a meal based around - wouldn't you have guessed it - cheese but they are, for my modest wallet, rather expensive and so it was wonderful to be invited along as Journalista's guest. I am starving. I haven't eaten all day. I've held back on the tiny croutons coated with unctious melted cheese, but it has been a struggle.
At the table there are speeches. Oh god, there are speeches. There is no such thing as a free lunch, or supper, because the food has to be explained to us course by course, and then the overly complicated drinks which have more ingredients than shampoo, and smell not dissimilar, because the theme of the night is matching food with cocktails. Yep, you heard right. We are going to knock back a cocktail with every course. This is what you mean by a mixed drink.
Wait staff stand behind us holding a plate in each hand while the ancient mariner tells us the story of blending tequila with pink lady apple and serving it with smoked salmon - you could probably smoke it faster than the explanation - and Richard Corrigan's soda bread. I'm almost fainting by the time it is set before us. It's a small piece of bread the size of a credit card - okay, well, go on then - a large credit card, covered in fat, sliced, salmon. I have eaten it before the speech giver has drawn his chair underneath him. I knock back the tequila in one shot. As you're supposed to. No?
Journalista, in the meantime, has disappeared. I mean, I know that talking about food is a bit like listening to ballroom dancing, but the speech wasn't that bad - nevertheless she has gone, and remains gone for most of the first course. I eye her plate longingly, but refrain from touching it. It's too close to Publicista who has struck up a conversation with Fay Weldon's nephew, aghast because she had just had lunch with Fay the other day. Darling. We luvvies, huh... I just had lunch with a cup-a-soup (tomato and vegetable - with twenty two ingredients, most of which are chemical in flavour) but you don't hear me name dropping.
The evening flowed on. I stopped drinking at cocktail number three - Honey vodka, which was a mistake, because cocktail number four, five and six were whisky based and made shampoo sound appealing, and that's before we get to the port flip with egg yolk. The food however - sigh... Despite the fact that it took longer to arrive than a third world train and had the portion control of Cucina Lilliput, it was delicious - more assemblage than cooking, but gorgeous nonetheless. Black pudding, potato and apple mash, Dublin Bay prawns, roasted beets, goats cheese and, my favourite, wood pigeon on toast where the juices had seeped into the crunchy bread and infused it with earthy, caramel loveliness. If only I had the appetite of a bird, I would not have been quite so pecked off. Rich people just don't have appetites and there is no sum too great that they will pay for food which they do not actually eat.
Journalista didn't touch most of hers. She is a vegetarian, but still... I was a tad envious of her ability not-to-scoff which, as you know, is a trait prized amongst women to their faces, and talked about in a derisory fashion behind their scrawny backs. But Journalista is not rich. She's not skinny. She's not in lust, love or languishing in heartbreak as far as I know. What's wrong with her?
I saved myself for the final course. We are, remember, in a cheese shop. Surely there will be some wonderful cheese. I can't wait. I'm also going to have the final drink. I'm fantasising about a glass of red wine which I notice the proprietor of the shop is quaffing with Mark Hix, our joint host for the evening, but no - instead another teeny glass is set before me. Eagerly I go to lift it to my lips and - phoar - stop when the antiseptic smell assails me.
Oh for for peat's sake, if bloody whisky - Ardbeg malt whisky - where I spent all my childhood holiday's living in my uncle's corrugated iron house next to the distillery in Islay, and whose charred, bonfire aroma reminds me of hospitals and rusty nails. It tastes like TCP and I don't know whether to drink it or gargle with it. I chose to do neither. It also contains creme de peche and old fashioned bitters. Don't these people know that the point of a cocktail is to disguise the taste of the alcohol, not to enhance it - why else did I spend my adolescence drinking this stuff, decanted into lemonade bottles and watered down with everything from Irn Bru (ah it's the girders, that's where the rusty connotation comes from) to Limeade, and it still tasted like the most disgusting way to get drunk ever invented.
One word. Yuck. But with an F.
But there was still the cheese. And unfortunately the introductory speech - honestly, I spent less time introducing myself to the person on either side of me than they did on the food:
This is a Montgomery cheddar, matured for 12 months and we've chosen this because the cheesemaker had had a little problem with his cheese mites, and cheese mites, as you know,
(Did you?)
...are little parasites that all cheese makers have
(They do?)
...and which grow on the rind of the cheese and help to develop the flavours
(Really, they do?)
...but in this case the mites had got out of control
(They did? - Journalista and I both look at the huge hunk of unadorned cheese lying on our plates for evidence of swarming mites.)
...which improved the texture and depth of flavour enormously.
Journalista excused herself again.
Turns out she had food poisoning and was going next door to the pub to throw up.
Funnily enough I didn't fancy the cheese after that either.
Here come the goals.
Ah, so this is where they are!
I have never seen so many men in my life. They are everywhere, swarming like large black ants, the dark mass moving up Fulham Broadway relieved only by the odd flash of white striped with royal blue. I wish I hadn't worn my pink coat - not quite football appropriate garb, I realise as I stand at the mouth of the tube station and let the other Chelsea supporters flow past me. I can't see Lukewarm anywhere and I suddenly panic when I realise that I can't actually remember what he looks like.I phone him and he tells me to wait outside the stadium and I scan the crowd in vain looking for a familiar face until his head appears a few yards away, distinguished from the stern-faced, bulldog masses by a wide, delighted smile. Thank god, he's not dressed in head to toe Chelsea, and isn't wearing a strip shirt over his jumper, I think moments before he bends to kiss me and I simultaneously turn my cheek.
It has been years since I've been to a football match. The last time I came to Chelsea I was accessorised by two small boys, both with Zola emblazoned on their shirts, which - for those of you who know how long it has been since he's played - will give you an idea of the timeframe. In those days I was instructed not to sing, not to comment, not to shriek, and not to cheer. In short I was to be invisible and refrain from embarrassing them but they were quite within their rights to insist on this as I did, and still do not, have any grasp of the rules of football. I had a tendency to do heinous things like: buy tickets in the QPR stands when they were playing Chelsea - unwittingly join in with the other teams chants - boo for the wrong team, criticise the ref when he hasn't done anything wrong and get cross with the players on our side when they foul, even though I don't really know what a foul is.
Today, therefore, it seems safe to assume that those same guidelines still hold true. I am going to be on my best behaviour. Absolutely no singing. No opening of mouth at all, in fact. Unlike the last time I attended when I reviewed Fishnets, the restaurant -in - cringingly appropriate hosiery - I have not worn a skirt. I am in sensible flat shoes. I have layered up against the cold and even brought a hat and gloves.
Shame about the pink jacket, though - that was a grave error of fashion judgement - especially as it's oh-so-nearly not pink but red. I can probably be seen from space.
Can't miss you in that pink jacket - you'll probably show up on the television, says Lukewarm, nervously, taking my hand and then dropping it. I'll look for you during the highlights replay.
As I say, I can probably be seen from space.
After we've gone through the 'lucky' turnstile, in which -thank you god- I did not get stuck, we sit in the lower stands, seven rows from the pitch. It's absolutely freezing and my two pairs of tights, two pairs of socks and three shirts are not doing much to beat the cold except making it very hard for me to bend any of my limbs. I am slightly perturbed by the man next to me who is getting incredibly fed up with Joe Cole who keeps on messing up his passes and starts swearing at him in a tannoy voice of the sort used to evacuate public places in event of a terrorist attack: You're p***ing me off you f***ing w***er b***ard. He shouts, right in my ear, complete with saliva - though without the asterisks. It's fair to say there are absolutely no asterisks in a football stadium. His wife, a demure pensioner with frosted permed hair and a neat little frilled choirboy collar on her white blouse, meanwhile, is calmly taking video shots of the match on her camera. A lone woman in a page boy and puffa jacket sits in front, shivering, as she sings along with the Chelsea anthem, complete with actions. I watch Lukewarm anxiously out of the corner of my watering-from-the-cold eyes. Please don't sing, please, please, no arm movements, I pray, silently, and see him watching me, the same thoughts passing all too visibly across his face. I sit on my hands to reassure him, and to keep them warm.
There's a goal which momentarily silences the rival Cardiff fans who are banging out a tattoo on the metal frame of the stand and singing 'John Terry is sh***ing all your wives'. John Terry isn't playing - he's gone abroad to patch things up with his wife, Lukewarm tells me. Yeah, good luck with that, darling... The Chelsea fans sing back: 'He's sh***ing all your sheep' which hardly casts John Terry in a better light. In the third row there's a posh looking man in one of those quilted jackets that boys wear to prep school, with an expensive blow-dried wife who has one of those haughty, I've-really-got-much-better-things-to-do-than-be-here slumming-it expressions, and a straw-headed child sandwiched between them. He cheers loudly then turns to the Cardiff crowd and opens his arms wide in a taunting gesture and gives them an open handed, two fingered salute while very RP expletives roll from his mouth.
Reader, I feel like Alice in Wonderland. It really has been a long, long time since I have been to a football match.
We win 4-1. Note the we. In the course of 90 minutes I've become a member of the tribe.
Lukewarm and I walk to the pub. I've relieved we won. Otherwise I would have been tainted henceforth by the defeat and the lucky turnstile would be no more. So, did I behave myself well enough? I ask, tentatively, because though I feel I have cheered in the requisite places and kept my commentary to a minimum, one can never be sure.
You were lovely. He says. You didn't sing and you didn't chant and you didn't taunt the crowds. You can come again. Just maybe not wear the pink jacket.
I have never seen so many men in my life. They are everywhere, swarming like large black ants, the dark mass moving up Fulham Broadway relieved only by the odd flash of white striped with royal blue. I wish I hadn't worn my pink coat - not quite football appropriate garb, I realise as I stand at the mouth of the tube station and let the other Chelsea supporters flow past me. I can't see Lukewarm anywhere and I suddenly panic when I realise that I can't actually remember what he looks like.I phone him and he tells me to wait outside the stadium and I scan the crowd in vain looking for a familiar face until his head appears a few yards away, distinguished from the stern-faced, bulldog masses by a wide, delighted smile. Thank god, he's not dressed in head to toe Chelsea, and isn't wearing a strip shirt over his jumper, I think moments before he bends to kiss me and I simultaneously turn my cheek.
It has been years since I've been to a football match. The last time I came to Chelsea I was accessorised by two small boys, both with Zola emblazoned on their shirts, which - for those of you who know how long it has been since he's played - will give you an idea of the timeframe. In those days I was instructed not to sing, not to comment, not to shriek, and not to cheer. In short I was to be invisible and refrain from embarrassing them but they were quite within their rights to insist on this as I did, and still do not, have any grasp of the rules of football. I had a tendency to do heinous things like: buy tickets in the QPR stands when they were playing Chelsea - unwittingly join in with the other teams chants - boo for the wrong team, criticise the ref when he hasn't done anything wrong and get cross with the players on our side when they foul, even though I don't really know what a foul is.
Today, therefore, it seems safe to assume that those same guidelines still hold true. I am going to be on my best behaviour. Absolutely no singing. No opening of mouth at all, in fact. Unlike the last time I attended when I reviewed Fishnets, the restaurant -in - cringingly appropriate hosiery - I have not worn a skirt. I am in sensible flat shoes. I have layered up against the cold and even brought a hat and gloves.
Shame about the pink jacket, though - that was a grave error of fashion judgement - especially as it's oh-so-nearly not pink but red. I can probably be seen from space.
Can't miss you in that pink jacket - you'll probably show up on the television, says Lukewarm, nervously, taking my hand and then dropping it. I'll look for you during the highlights replay.
As I say, I can probably be seen from space.
After we've gone through the 'lucky' turnstile, in which -thank you god- I did not get stuck, we sit in the lower stands, seven rows from the pitch. It's absolutely freezing and my two pairs of tights, two pairs of socks and three shirts are not doing much to beat the cold except making it very hard for me to bend any of my limbs. I am slightly perturbed by the man next to me who is getting incredibly fed up with Joe Cole who keeps on messing up his passes and starts swearing at him in a tannoy voice of the sort used to evacuate public places in event of a terrorist attack: You're p***ing me off you f***ing w***er b***ard. He shouts, right in my ear, complete with saliva - though without the asterisks. It's fair to say there are absolutely no asterisks in a football stadium. His wife, a demure pensioner with frosted permed hair and a neat little frilled choirboy collar on her white blouse, meanwhile, is calmly taking video shots of the match on her camera. A lone woman in a page boy and puffa jacket sits in front, shivering, as she sings along with the Chelsea anthem, complete with actions. I watch Lukewarm anxiously out of the corner of my watering-from-the-cold eyes. Please don't sing, please, please, no arm movements, I pray, silently, and see him watching me, the same thoughts passing all too visibly across his face. I sit on my hands to reassure him, and to keep them warm.
There's a goal which momentarily silences the rival Cardiff fans who are banging out a tattoo on the metal frame of the stand and singing 'John Terry is sh***ing all your wives'. John Terry isn't playing - he's gone abroad to patch things up with his wife, Lukewarm tells me. Yeah, good luck with that, darling... The Chelsea fans sing back: 'He's sh***ing all your sheep' which hardly casts John Terry in a better light. In the third row there's a posh looking man in one of those quilted jackets that boys wear to prep school, with an expensive blow-dried wife who has one of those haughty, I've-really-got-much-better-things-to-do-than-be-here slumming-it expressions, and a straw-headed child sandwiched between them. He cheers loudly then turns to the Cardiff crowd and opens his arms wide in a taunting gesture and gives them an open handed, two fingered salute while very RP expletives roll from his mouth.
Reader, I feel like Alice in Wonderland. It really has been a long, long time since I have been to a football match.
We win 4-1. Note the we. In the course of 90 minutes I've become a member of the tribe.
Lukewarm and I walk to the pub. I've relieved we won. Otherwise I would have been tainted henceforth by the defeat and the lucky turnstile would be no more. So, did I behave myself well enough? I ask, tentatively, because though I feel I have cheered in the requisite places and kept my commentary to a minimum, one can never be sure.
You were lovely. He says. You didn't sing and you didn't chant and you didn't taunt the crowds. You can come again. Just maybe not wear the pink jacket.
18 February 2010
On the bread line
So where are the compensations, you might be asking?
Everyone thought it a great scandal when one of the paternal uncles went to the cinema on the afternoon of his father's azzah. I don't quite know what they would have made of our family outing to see Shrek on the eve of my own father's funeral or, coincidentally, Shrek 2 after we had the service for my mother (you can see we were fairly worried when Shrek 3 was released, but luckily, that time nobody died...) In Beirut, after we spend the day mournfully dressed in black, we went back to the hotel, re-dressed in black and the went to the Buddha Bar, had dinner in a sushi restaurant and then stood in the aisles or The Music Hall and danced until four in the morning, then got up the next day and did it all again. This time with a hangover.
It doesn't sound very respectful to the dead, admittedly, but this all took place some months after the actual death, and had my mother-in-law had the choice of which occasion she attended, she would unhesitatingly have chosen the night club.
I'm thinking about all this in a coffee shop in Notting Hill Gate with my husband who has just bought me the first carbohydrate I've eaten in several weeks. We've just come back from my neighbour's funeral in the Methodist church where her husband was once a vicar. The biodegradable coffin looked like a large laundry basket and was decorated with spring flowers and ivy picked from her garden and we sang a few recognisable hymns. As British funerals go, it was fairly bearable, but still I would rather have had a double vodka and jumped up and down to a dubke band (which, apart from running away from them, is the only other option) than a cheese and ham baquette and a decaf skinny latte.
My neighbour, though once a missionary in India and married to a vicar, was also divorced when I first met her. She was in her early sixties when we moved into the house next door. I was a young bride with a toddler and a three month old baby and she was retired, learning Bengali so she could go back to India and work as a volunteer. To my shame I thought she was old. Now there's only about ten years between the age she was then and the age I am now now. I can't quite shake off the sadness at the contrast between the young, optimistic girl I was then, with two of my children as yet unborn and my life containable in a double pushchair and a couple of trips in my father's Ford Siesta, and failed spectre of it all now . My children are mostly grown and the marriage is over and when her house is sold and the inevitable new family move in, I'll be the old dear next door. It's like a part of my life is over too. However, I take heart in how well she and her husband seemed to have negotiated their divorce and maintained an amicable relationship afterwards.
So, with my usual genius at picking exactly the right moment to broach these subjects, I turn to my mute husband who has been sitting beside me silently for the past hour of hymn singing and reminiscences, resolutely not joining in with my walk down Nostalgia Lane, and say: Don't you think it's time that we made some sort of decision about what we are going to do?
What do you mean? He asked. I need to get back to work after this...
So do I, but I'm not talking about now, I'm talking about 'us'. Shouldn't we decide what we're doing. It's been two years now and it's not like you are planning on coming back home, so ...
He interrupts me: I don't know, he says, and he looks pitifully at me, as though I'm the one who has just had a terrible bereavement needs to be consoled. I don't know what I'm doing. He repeats.
Damn it, of course you know what you're doing - you're not coming back because otherwise you would be back. I refrain from mentioning that I don't necessarily want him to come back, but the fiction that he might return is one that he's been maintaining, as much for his benefit as mine. I mean, it would get a bit crowded with the new, new man hanging around the house at the weekends.
He gives me that look again, the really, really sorry to hear you have a terminal illness, expression, shrugs, and says: I'm content as I am.
Content?
He smiles ruefully. Yes, I'm content.
Content? I'm somewhat taken aback by the choice of words. Happy, I could have dealt with - at least it's a positive statement. Confused - yes, I feel that too. Upset, depressed, regretful - bring it on, I know those words, but I'm sitting here mourning the death of our marriage and our grown up kids and my lost youth and my lost husband and he's 'content'?
All my mature , let's settle this reasonably and equably goes straight out the window of Paul's and blows off down Holland Park Avenue. There's something about the bland, smugness of the word 'content' that drags my heart out of my chest on to the plate in front of me and saws it into two ragged pieces like the baguette I no longer feel like eating. How can he be content, I think?
Because he isn't living with you, I tell myself.. Unnecessarily brutally, I thought - even for me.
I've lost my appetite. No bread since December, and I cant face it. What a waste of a bloody good baguette.
Everyone thought it a great scandal when one of the paternal uncles went to the cinema on the afternoon of his father's azzah. I don't quite know what they would have made of our family outing to see Shrek on the eve of my own father's funeral or, coincidentally, Shrek 2 after we had the service for my mother (you can see we were fairly worried when Shrek 3 was released, but luckily, that time nobody died...) In Beirut, after we spend the day mournfully dressed in black, we went back to the hotel, re-dressed in black and the went to the Buddha Bar, had dinner in a sushi restaurant and then stood in the aisles or The Music Hall and danced until four in the morning, then got up the next day and did it all again. This time with a hangover.
It doesn't sound very respectful to the dead, admittedly, but this all took place some months after the actual death, and had my mother-in-law had the choice of which occasion she attended, she would unhesitatingly have chosen the night club.
I'm thinking about all this in a coffee shop in Notting Hill Gate with my husband who has just bought me the first carbohydrate I've eaten in several weeks. We've just come back from my neighbour's funeral in the Methodist church where her husband was once a vicar. The biodegradable coffin looked like a large laundry basket and was decorated with spring flowers and ivy picked from her garden and we sang a few recognisable hymns. As British funerals go, it was fairly bearable, but still I would rather have had a double vodka and jumped up and down to a dubke band (which, apart from running away from them, is the only other option) than a cheese and ham baquette and a decaf skinny latte.
My neighbour, though once a missionary in India and married to a vicar, was also divorced when I first met her. She was in her early sixties when we moved into the house next door. I was a young bride with a toddler and a three month old baby and she was retired, learning Bengali so she could go back to India and work as a volunteer. To my shame I thought she was old. Now there's only about ten years between the age she was then and the age I am now now. I can't quite shake off the sadness at the contrast between the young, optimistic girl I was then, with two of my children as yet unborn and my life containable in a double pushchair and a couple of trips in my father's Ford Siesta, and failed spectre of it all now . My children are mostly grown and the marriage is over and when her house is sold and the inevitable new family move in, I'll be the old dear next door. It's like a part of my life is over too. However, I take heart in how well she and her husband seemed to have negotiated their divorce and maintained an amicable relationship afterwards.
So, with my usual genius at picking exactly the right moment to broach these subjects, I turn to my mute husband who has been sitting beside me silently for the past hour of hymn singing and reminiscences, resolutely not joining in with my walk down Nostalgia Lane, and say: Don't you think it's time that we made some sort of decision about what we are going to do?
What do you mean? He asked. I need to get back to work after this...
So do I, but I'm not talking about now, I'm talking about 'us'. Shouldn't we decide what we're doing. It's been two years now and it's not like you are planning on coming back home, so ...
He interrupts me: I don't know, he says, and he looks pitifully at me, as though I'm the one who has just had a terrible bereavement needs to be consoled. I don't know what I'm doing. He repeats.
Damn it, of course you know what you're doing - you're not coming back because otherwise you would be back. I refrain from mentioning that I don't necessarily want him to come back, but the fiction that he might return is one that he's been maintaining, as much for his benefit as mine. I mean, it would get a bit crowded with the new, new man hanging around the house at the weekends.
He gives me that look again, the really, really sorry to hear you have a terminal illness, expression, shrugs, and says: I'm content as I am.
Content?
He smiles ruefully. Yes, I'm content.
Content? I'm somewhat taken aback by the choice of words. Happy, I could have dealt with - at least it's a positive statement. Confused - yes, I feel that too. Upset, depressed, regretful - bring it on, I know those words, but I'm sitting here mourning the death of our marriage and our grown up kids and my lost youth and my lost husband and he's 'content'?
All my mature , let's settle this reasonably and equably goes straight out the window of Paul's and blows off down Holland Park Avenue. There's something about the bland, smugness of the word 'content' that drags my heart out of my chest on to the plate in front of me and saws it into two ragged pieces like the baguette I no longer feel like eating. How can he be content, I think?
Because he isn't living with you, I tell myself.. Unnecessarily brutally, I thought - even for me.
I've lost my appetite. No bread since December, and I cant face it. What a waste of a bloody good baguette.
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