A cure for insomnia

I was going to call this blog "Seventh Level of Hell" but that really would have been doing Tuscany an injustice. I mean, I had a really good time in Tuscany last weekend. But then, I've never been a particularly harsh critic, unlike Huy who came out with the Seventh Level quote in the middle of the 14th (of around 53) hair-pin turn on the (scenic) route from Calci to Lucca.


You see, a group of 6 of us had set out on hired bikes from Pisa on Saturday morning in search of rural scenes, (gentle) adventure and gastronomic fulfillment. Only, in hindsight, we should probably not have left the navigation to the hard-core fitness freak German residents in our party. If the indolent Londoners in the group had been in charge, we probably wouldn't have chosen the longest and steepest route to Lucca. But then, if the indolent Londoners in the group had been in charge, we probably wouldn't have gotten much further than the first pizzeria in Pisa. Anyway, as things turned out, we spent a fairly large (and grim) part of Saturday struggling up a series of mountain passes trying to remember what it was like to have a sense of humour.


Needless to say, there was a fair amount of pushing mixed in with the cycling. In fairness, the conditions weren't exactly in our favour. For one thing, the bikes we hired were perfectly decent town bikes, but not exactly made for climbing up mountains. Joyce's was a particular stubborn beast that refused to change below third gear and kept on dropping it's chain at the most inopportune moments. And the paniers and front baskets may have been useful for carrying things, but they did make it a little more difficult to balance and made us look faintly ridiculous next to the multitudes of serious cyclists powering up the mountain in their fluoro-pink lycra and carbon-fibre racers. They may have been going quicker than us, but at least we were keeping it real.


Fortunately, once we'd crossed the peak and had a well-deserved picnic of bread, cheese and salami, we were able to roll all the way down to Lucca. While the cycling got a little easier, our troubles weren't quite over, as a small break-away developed near to Lucca and managed to leave the peloton far enough behind to cause some navigating confusion. Search parties were duly dispatched, tasked with locating the peloton somewhere "near a church with a green roof". Given the number of churches in Italy, this wasn't the most helpful of clues. But the combined deductive reasoning of 6 university educated minds overcame this small problem and we were soon ensconced in Lucca's oldest restaurant, admiring the copper pots and sinking Tuscan red late into the night, well, at until at least 10pm at least, at which point we were all dead on our feet. For all you insomniacs out there, a hard day in the Tuscan mountains followed by a bottle of red should fix you right up because I can't remember ever sleeping as well as I did on Saturday night.


I cleverly managed to forget my camera at home, so I didn't take any photos. But Tim had the trust SLR to hand and took some great shots, a sample of which I am pleased to present below.

My week

It's Sunday night, which is my usual blogging time and I'm short of inspiration. I'm searching for a stand-out event of the past 7 days to write about, but I'm drawing a blank. In fact, I was speaking to my parents earlier this morning and was struggling for topics of conversation as nothing much seemed to have happened this week. But really, looking back on it, there are a few things worth writing about.

On Wednesday, I went to the theatre with Yalin to see "In Celebration". I've never been a regular theatre-goer, but there's so much out there in London that it's hard to avoid. In fact, I'm really growing to like the theatre and I almost prefer it to the cinema these days - for one thing I seem to have less of a problem staying awake when the actors are standing live in front of you. Anyway, although my opinion of theatre generally is rising, this particular production was a total bomb. The play itself was really quite dull - it's essentially an extended family melodrama, set in Yorkshire in the 60s and revolved around 3 brothers coming home for their parents' 40 year wedding anniversay. There's obvious tension between the family members but you never learn what the underlying cause is and it is never resolved. Everyone gets a fairly extended opportunity to have a philosophical rant about life in general and to accuse each other of vague misdoings. And then the lights go out and the audience is expected to clap. A total anticlimax. The most frustrating thing about it was that it made no sense from a production point of view. I mean, it "starred" Orlando Bloom and you would have thought the director would try and capitalise on his Hollywood profile. But instead they dressed him in a daggy brown cardigan and fake moustache and then got him to spend most of the play crying in bed. Very odd.

For the rest of the working week I had my head down at work doing a due diligence exercise and attending extended negotiations. Having meetings all day really makes it hard to get things done. I hate the feeling of being away from your desk for 8 hours in the middle of the day and then returning at 6pm to actually start working on all the things you've been discussing. But that's life I guess.

Next week looks like it will be busy again, but at least this weekend has been a good one - for some reason London seems to have been holding back the sunny weather during summer so that it can spend it all during the autumn. Which is lucky for the organises of the Thames Festival, which was on Saturday, because they'd basically organised a big series of outdoor events that would have tanked if it had been raining. For one thing, the fake beach on Southwark bridge would have turned into a muddy mess and the dancers with the flamenco-cross-hawaiian guitar band may have been a little chilly. Anyway, the sun was out and it was all good. In the evening I went to Brick Lane to check out Huy's new flat and ended up sticking around to help him move a bit of furniture around and eat some Vietnamese food. I have to say, I really liked the area around Brick Lane. It's very cool in a very self-conscious way. I'm not sure if it's ironic or not, but either way it's amusing. I think I may need to make a move east sometime in the next year or so.

And today I woke up late and then spent the day sitting in Kensington Palace Gardens having a picnic with friends and talking about crap. The perfect way to spend a Sunday - there is no need for pointless exertion on the day before you have to head back to work. And that's basically the end of my week. Interesting, huh?

Dublin

So this is my first post in a while. I think there must be something wrong with my diet as my appetite for blogging and even writing emails seems to be waning. I suspect it's all the pesto I've been eating. Pesto with pasta and canned tuna is my standard quick meal these days. It's bad on two fronts: (1) apparently people have been known to overdose on pesto and die (apprently pine nuts are toxic when taken in massive quantities). Urban myth? Possibly; and (2) basil and tuna are generally considered (at least by the respondents to a casual survey I took this afternoon) a vile taste combination. I must have seriously damaged taste buds, because I don't mind it myself.

Anyway, I took a break from the pesto this weekend while I was visiting my friends Bec and Frank in Dublin. Frank is a master chef and put together a magnificent slow-roasted lamb dinner for us on Saturday and I am still dreaming about it some 3 days later. Let's linger on the subject of lamb for a minute. Three weeks ago, I ate a sublime roast at my mate Nick's place. A couple of weeks later I made my own first ever lamb roast (a Jamie Oliver inspired, Italian-influenced number, which has anchovies as it's killer secret ingredient). And now Frank comes along with his own interpretation of the theme. I wonder who will make roast lamb for me this weekend ... any takers?

Back to Dublin. It's a great town and I managed to see a fair bit of it thanks to my two dedicated and charming hosts. From the historic (Kilmainham jail) to the cultured (literary pub crawl) to the tacky (Bono's house), we had it all covered. For those who haven't been before, Dublin is a nice town. It's got some nice buildings - Trinity College is beautiful. It's got it's own instantly recognisable land mark - the millenium spire - in Frank's words "epic", in my words "plain". And it's got a decent night life - think Irish pubs, Guiness and Irish whiskey. But the highlight for me was spending a weekend surrounded by a nation of people who love to talk but manage to do so in such a way that the rest of the world can't understand a bloody word of what they're saying. I had thought that the Welsh spoke the most impenetrable English in the world, but I now think they have strong rivals in the shape of the Irish. If you're thinking about going, I recommend bringing a pad and pen and asking people to write things down for you - it's so much quicker that way.

On a final note, I took my beautiful new camera to Dublin with me but only managed to take one picture - a half-hearted snap of the city centre taken just before I hopped on the bus back to the airport. I used to love taking photos but I seem to have lost the passion for it. Taking photos just seems like so much trouble these days. Which is strange, because pushing a button is hardly difficult. Maybe it's something to do with my diet ...

My latest painting

This is my latest painting. It is the first (and most likely the last) from my "dots" phase. The dots seemed like a good idea at the time, but I was pretty sick of them by the end. In making this painting, I was inspired by a number of aboriginal artists that I've been looking at online. In particular, I was inspired by the paintings of Kathleen Petyarre and Dorothy Napangardi.

Too easy? Not likely.

Where some people are able to make hard things seem easy, I seem to be uniquely able to make easy things hard, as my experience of the last weekend shows.

First of all, softball. It's not the most traditional Enligh sport, but softball seems to have quite a following amongst English law firms. At Bird & Bird, we have a team that plays in a league each year and also enters the annual legal industry softball tournament. The 2007 edition of this tournament was held on Saturday and was a full-day event structured in such a way as to give almost every team a 75% chance of leaving with a trophy of some sort (lawyers are very bad losers, so it's best to try and make everyone feel like a winner). Despite this, an the fact that we showed some considerable style and panache (particularly with the bat), we managed to walk away with nothing except our (slightly wounded) pride. Our lack of success can be attributed to two main factors: (1) the fact that other teams had drafted into their ranks specialist squads of semi-professional Canadian softballers, who had been training for the tournament 12 hours a day, 7 days a week since February this year; and (2) our unfortunate tendency to pull out our worst plays just as we were on the verge of victory - like the time we were leading comfortably and only had to dismiss one more batter to end the opposition innings and then proceeded to concede 10 consecutive runs through an amazing series of dropped catches and wild over-throws. Despite our plentiful supply of natural talent, we really did make winning seem like hard work. At least there's always 2008 ...

Secondly, tennis. After a long lay-off (I think the last time I took the court in anger was sometime in the first half of 2006) I've been playing tennis again. My hitting partner is a guy called Anthony who's come off an even longer lay-off than me (something in the region of 8 years). However, unlike me, Anthony has the advantage of having real tennis-playing talent and was heavily involved in the sport during his university days. So while I can just about keep the ball in the court with him when we're rallying, it's an understatement to say that we're slightly mis-matched. On this particular occasion, we played on some carpet courts in the Harbour Club, which is a newly refurbished fitness centre on Harrow Road and about 15 minutes walk from my flat. The carpet is a nice quick surface that suits both our games, but the complex itself is a massive heat-trap with poor ventilation, and feels a little like you're playing tennis in a Turkish bath. After 5 minutes we were both dripping in sweat but decided we'd push on through and keep playing. It was great, but an hour or so of scrambling from side to side trying to track down Anthony's massive groundstrokes left me absolutely shattered. Today my legs are so stiff that I can hardly walk. I dropped a pound coin on the ground earlier and when I bent down to pick it up it felt like my hamstrings were about to snap.

Finally, the inaugural Tranzie degustation dinner. The five of us who shared lunch at the Fat Duck last weekend decided that anything Heston could do, we could do better and so decided to put on our own degustation feast, with each of us supplying a course. Jenny and Brendan, the consummate hosts, kindly volunteered their dining room for the occasion and also prepared menus, hilarious personalised profiles of each chef and a brief, but amusing, wine list. Having had advance notice of the event and always desperate for validation from my peer group, I put a fair amount of effort into my contribution - a palate cleansing sorbet. I've actually got some sorbet making experience, and a mango & passionfruit combination is my trade mark dish, but being so eager to impress I thought I'd try something different. My first attempt was a kiwi fruit number that turned into an unmitigated disaster. The sorbet turned brown and tasted terribly acidic. And a hairy half kiwi fruit filled with a pile of brown slush doesn't exactly look appetising. Not a good start. My next combination was apple and cinnamon and this one turned out OK, but for some reason it came out too icy. I know - sorbet is meant to be icy but this one was TOO icy. I can't explain it any better than that. Let's move on. My next combination was lime and basil. No good. One of my taste-testers said it tasted to her "like icy pesto". Tragedy. So after 2 weeks worth of experimentation, I went back to the trusty mango & passionfruit option. It did the job OK, but was completely overshadowed by the offerings of my more talented friends. Jenny's san choi bao was my personal favouite, followed closely by Brendan's interpretation of a dish known as "Fiona's Surprise". It was sublime.

Well done, Mr Blumenthal

NOTE: In order to achieve a full "multi-modal" experience, I recommend listening to The Grey Album by Danger Mouse while reading this blog posting. A prize goes to the first person to correctly guess the significance of this choice of soundtrack.*

Now, to set the scene, it's worth stating upfront that in my early years I was a picky eater. The list of things that I would refuse to eat was worryingly long. In fact, my mum had a very limited range of ingredients that she could use if she wanted to make a meal that I would deem acceptable. I'm not sure how she managed to feed me a well-balanced diet using only: fish fingers, peanut butter, dried apricots and sultana bread. But somehow she did. And one of the strategies she used with great success was disguising ingredients so that I didn't realise what I was eating. For many, many years I wolfed down plate after plate of beef stroganoff without ever realising that it was full of mushrooms (which, at the time, I was sure would made me puke if ate one). Well done, Mum. And well done, Mr Blumenthal, a man who is continuing (to much acclaim) this fine tradition of making amazing food that isn't quite what it seems. This is Mr Blumenthal's story. This is the story of lunch at The Fat Duck.

The occasion was Jenny's birthday. The attendees were Jenny, Brendan, Joyce, Huy and me. Lunch lasted 4 hours. There were 16 courses. I ate 10 pieces of bread (the magic proportion - one part butter to two parts bread - that's a lot of butter). We had two bottles of wine (at which point our money ran out). The total cost was, well, that's enough statistics... let's get on with the real story

On arrival at the second best restaurant in the world (ie The Fat Duck) we were greeted by a small and unassuming building. We were soon seated in a small and impeccably decorated dining room (room for around 40 diners only, bespoke, slightly disturbing, yellow paintings lining the walls - inspired by egg and bacon ice cream? possibly) and presented with what appeared at first to be the Consolidated Oxford English Dictionary Volume A to E but turned out, on closer inspection, to be the wine list.

Traditional wisdom says the safest choice on a wine list is the second cheapest bottle. Joyce challenged this, saying the third cheapest is safer (as restaurateurs often try and shift bad wine by placing it in the second cheapest slot). At The Fat Duck the third cheapest wine cost 150 quid, so we decided to ignore convention and go for the cheapest wine instead. A rash move? Hardly, as the sommelier said, everything is quality at The Fat Duck. With wine ordered, food was next and that was easy. We all wanted to try Heston Blumenthal's tasting menu. Straight from his underground laboratory, Mr Blumenthal's tasting dishes are famous for being strange and fantastic. He didn't disappoint us. I won't go into detail about every one of the 16 different creations we tried. But here is just a sample:

• Oak Moss - The smoky, woody essense of oak moss served as a plastic breath-freshener strip and followed by truffle toast. A square bed of moss is placed on your table and liquid nitrogen is poured on top to release the smell of the forest. Smoky tendrils of gas cover your table. It's like you're eating something out of a fantasy novel. It's brilliantly theatrical. And the truffles were truly out of this world.

• Snail Porridge - Sounds awful, tastes delicious. It really is porridge (there are oats in there) but it looks nothing like what you imagine. A bright grass-green pool of porridge serves as a base for the thinnest saltiest strips of cured ham and delicious bite-sized pieces of snail topped by thin ribbons of fennel. Creamy and salty and meaty. It's great. This one was my favourite.

• Sound of the Sea - As Huy knowledgeably told us, this was the ultimate "multi-modal" dish - providing pleasure for all the senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and well, ok, maybe not touching but I'm sure the staff would be discreet if you tried to eat the dish with your hands. Served on a glass plate, you get what looks like (but obviously is not) a small pile of sand, foam and seaweed. In front of you is a conch shell housing an iPod mini. Put the headphones on and you hear the sound of crashing waves and the screech of seagulls. When you start to eat, what you're tasting is the sensation of being at the beach. It sounds bizarre, but it works and will blow your mind.

• Bacon and Egg Ice Cream - This one's a long-time Blumenthal favourite. The bacon is already in the eggs when they are brought to your table (just like the lime is in the coconut in the old Harry Nilsson song). They're cracked right in front of you and out pours a beautifully smooth custard into a copper pot. More liquid nitrogen and a bit of stirring later, and hey presto you have egg and bacon ice cream. Served up on your plate on a bed of the lightest french toast and a caramelised wafer of bacon, it is the strangest and most wonderful dessert finish to a meal you can imagine. Sweet and savoury. Breakfast and dessert. Incredible.

The food looked like nothing I had ever seen before. Or, actually, it did look vaguely familiar, but I didn't always recognise it as food. But the taste was special in the truest McAvaney-esque sense of the word. In fact, my taste buds are stimluated even as I'm typing now. Come to think of it, I have both eggs and bacon in the fridge. Now all I need to do is get the bacon inside the eggs and find some liquid nitrogen. This could take a while....

* There will be no prize.

Park life - It's nice

So summer's finally made it to London, a few months late admittedly, but better later than never. This weekend it's been all sunshine and blue skies and I've been trying to make up for lost time by cramming all my favourite summer activities into two days: swimming, eating ice cream, making banana smoothies, tennis, beer in the afternoon, reggae and dance-hall music and of course, that most English of summer activities, sitting in the park. I've just come back from a couple of hours lazing in the sun in Paddington Rec and I have to say it is simply delightful. And my favourite part is the simplest thing of all - the grass. It's not the hard, dry, scratchy grass that you get at home - it's soft, sweet-smelling, springy green grass like they draw in children's books. Lying on the grass in Paddington Rec is like lying on a goose-down quilt, except it's outside and it's free. Perfection. And the locals love it - half of Maida Vale must be out there playing frisbee or sun-bathing or kicking a football or just generally lazing. But it's not crowded enough to spoil the fun - it's just right. Park life? Not bad, I must say.