Queen Cat

It is early.

We are at granny’s house.

The cat has spent large parts of the early hours of the morning breaking into the childrens’ bedrooms and prowling around, annoying the crap out of them.  If she has decided it is time to get up, she will not be swayed.  If you do not get up with her when she sits on your chest and affectionately chews your ear lobe/pats your cheek with her paw/shouts down your ear, she just moves to the next bed along and starts again until someone caves in.  In extremis, when she is being thoroughly ignored she will tunnel into the bed and bite toes.  This really hurts, despite the fact that she looks angelic and just claims that she has only given you a friendly nip.  When you are awake but ignoring her, she will chew the corners of your book, eat your newspaper or stick her arse in your face, whichever works best.  She’s very flexible regarding ways to aggravate the crap out of you.

The children are easy targets when it comes to getting people up, as they’re not particularly fond of bed at the best of times, and it doesn’t take much to convince them it’s time to get up and trip the light fantastic.  This morning she was roaming around Tallulah’s duvet, hrrmphing and squeaking and nosing at her chin with her furry face.  Consequently we were all up at the crack of dawn, which is why I now have time to blog.

The cat is becoming increasingly demanding.  It is like living with the furry version of J.Lo. 

She used to be my cat, back in the bad old days.  I got her and her sister when they were tiny bundles of fur, and trained them to be party animals.  Whenever my boyfriend and I went anywhere for longer than a few hours, we bundled them into the car with us, and they came along.  They learned to be very phlegmatic and adaptable.  They liked all night parties, curry and killing bits of moss.

Since moving in with granny and grandad (about fifteen years ago), and losing her sibling and step cats, she has become the Queen.  She rules this house with a rod of iron.

She is fed nine hundred times a day, tiny, delicious (if you are a cat) morsels of this and that, served on individual tea plates with a garnish.  She has her own glass of water by my parents bed, although she will drink out of anyone else’s if they put it down long enough. 

She is coddled and feted and generally carried round on a palanquin being fed peeled shrew morsels by hand.

It is not good for her.  She is a menace.

She shouts and commands and insists, and breaks into every room if you try to shut her out.  She absolutely hates being left out of anything.  This morning she had breakfast with the children, and then her own breakfast.  She came upstairs with us when it was time to get dressed. She helped Oscar put his pants on, stared quizzically at his socks, climbed into the bed while we were trying to make it, and then hared off to get the best spot in the bathroom so she could assist with brushing teeth and hair.  While the children were brushing their hair, she sat delicately on the mat and washed her fur until it was time for the next job to be done.

All the time this happens, she talks.  She is an incredibly talkative cat.  She has an entire and complex repertoire of noises.  She chirrups and trills, grumbles and shouts, ALL THE TIME.  She also likes a good conversation.  She does not just indulge in crazy old lady cat monologues, no.  She is good at dialogue.  We ask her a question, she answers it.  If you are talking about something and she has an opinion, she interjects.

You are never alone with the cat.

Although she is no longer a car type cat, she still likes the thrill of going out, and gets very excited when the kids bustle about putting their coats and shoes on.  When they are ready at the front door, she lines up with them.  If you do not stop her, she then comes out, herds them into the car and then endlessly circles it, which is absolutely lethal if you are trying to actually drive anywhere, rather than just all sitting there in state. 

It is too late to change her now. She is seventeen years old, which for a cat means that she should have received several telegrams from the Queen by now.  She is only going to get worse.

I await the day I turn up to mum and dad’s house to find her buttering toast at the table, while mum and dad crawl about on the floor eating small pouches of indefinable meat products out of saucers.

In the meantime I need to get the children in the car and to school without her assistance.  I think I will have to send her upstairs to aggravate grandad into waking up as a diversionary measure.

I expect many of you will have seen this before, but if you haven’t, and you want an idea of what the cat is really like, you should check out Simon’s Cat. I think he may have a later sibling of our cat in his care.  This all looks scarily familiar:

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Let us breathe…

breathe

and be calm.

CALM…hmmmm…mmmmm….hmmmmm….CALM

Nope.

It’s no good.

All my Zen gravel sweepings have gone up the wall.

I AM NOT CALM.

Item 1.

It is now 2.15 p.m. and the removal men are not here.

Why? Why are the removal men not here yet? I hear you cry.

I shall tell you why dear internets.

Because, BECAUSE my project manager type husband person forgot that he told the removal men to come round this afternoon and start at 2.oo p.m., thus only doing half a day of packing.

That is why.

I only found this out when at half past ten this morning, when I was running out of boxes, I rang Jason to see if they had called him to say that they had been caught in a freak accident with a combine harvester or some such thing.

He called me back an hour later to confess that he had forgotten that they weren’t coming until this afternoon.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR

This would not be so bad, lovely people except for:

Item 2.

As you know, I had lots of things to do today.  I had to take a load of stuff to the tip, and take a load of stuff to the charity shop, and take a load of stuff to granny’s house.

My husband had informed me that I must not do any of those things, because it would mean leaving the removal men unattended, during which time they would inadvertently wrap the landlady in bubble wrap and bring her to our new house, thus causing an apocalypse.

So, I made other arrangements.  I asked my dad to help.

Which he did.

Sort of.

GRRRRRRRRRR

Item 3.

Which is a continuation of item 2, but seems more professional than having only two items on my list.

Jason had asked me what I would do with all the stuff for the tip if it got in the way of the removal men doing their job.

I replied that I would put it in the garden.

He cautioned strongly against this, warning that it might get wet, and then heaven knows what it would do to the inside of my car when I finally got to take it to the tip.

I thought this was nonsense.

But, I try to please, so this morning I had a brainwave.

I moved all the things to take to the tip into my car, all ready to go.  All neatly cleaned and parcelled into the right types of recycling.  I was very proud of myself.

My dad came, and I handed him the keys to my car, so he could take all the stuff for me, while I readied myself to heave all the other things that needed moving, into his car while he was gone.

It wasn’t until a few hours after he got back, when I had to dash to the supermarket to buy Cillit Bang, that I realised that my dad had not only taken all my rubbish to the tip, he had also thrown away the bag of CD’s that I have in my car, which were not rubbish, and which I actually wanted to listen to.

About £200′s worth.

Including Florence and the Machine and Mumford and Sons, which I only bought a couple of weeks ago and haven’t listened to properly yet.

It is not really my dad’s fault.

Except that it is.

It is not really my fault.

Except that it is. (I should have thought to mention not to throw the cd’s away, shouldn’t I?)

It is not really my husband’s fault.

Except that it is.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

All is well

I did not get around to posting yesterday, not because I was in despair, but because I am frantically busy.

We got the keys for the new house yesterday morning, and I spent most of the afternoon sorting out boxes of things.

And the evening.

And this morning.

The removal men are coming to start packing today.  They do a damn good job, and will pack everything, but there are some things that I prefer to do myself, and some stuff that has to be carted to granny’s house, where we are temporarily holing up until we are sorted (thank you granny), and there will be many runs to the tip, and the charity shop.

Most of this I could have done earlier, but I have been rather much in the slough of despond, and have preferred to sit about on my bottom, whinging.

Hence the pace at which I am now working.

Still, it is all getting done, and I feel happier that this move is now actually a reality.

I know I should have felt that weeks ago, but that old saying; ‘There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,’ has been haunting my dreams, and we have almost left this house so many times, I did not like to take anything for granted.

Good things:

• We took the children to the new house yesterday evening when Jason got in from work.  They love it.
• I have explained to the house agent about the funeral on Monday, and the fact that I really don’t want to spend Monday morning having a stand up, knock down fight with the landlady beforehand.  She was suitably sympathetic.

We have arranged that our check out and inventory inspection will now take place on Saturday afternoon.

We are not telling the landlady.

She can turn up and do her own inspection with the agent on Monday, by which time we will be gone, gone, gone.

This works for me, and has taken some of the crushing weight off my shoulders.

It means I’m going to have to work like a slave to get the house presentable in time for the inspection, but I personally think it is worth it.

In slightly less good news, Jason is driving me crazy.

He is, yet again, up to his eyes in it at work.  He knew things would be hectic last week, but apparently things are even more hectic this week, which came as a bit of a shock.  He hasn’t got home before seven thirty for the last two days.  Tonight he might be later, he tells me.

He has Thursday, Friday and Monday off, to help with the move, so he is trying to deal with the unexpected surge in workload, and the fact that he was already trying to fit six days work into three.  It is not easy.

I sympathise with him.

However, he is now in uber project manager mode, and I am falling under his steely gaze.

He is worried that I will not manage the house today, with the removal men and all the things that need doing.

He is afraid that he will come home to find me lounging about eating doughnuts while the removal men have nicked off with half the landlady’s furniture and the turret.

He has fired questions at me as to how I will go about my day, and what I will do, when, and how I am not allowed to even take time off for a widdle in case something goes horribly wrong and I am not in control of it all.

I am finding it rather exhausting.

And, if I am honest, a tad insulting.

I know he does not mean to do it, and that he is actually worried, and being kind, and helpful etc, etc.  I do love him dearly, and in my rational mind I am thinking ‘ahhh! Poor man,’ and ‘Ohhh, how sweet!’

My irrational mind is going:

‘For fuck’s sake. I am 39 years old, and for the thirty odd years before I knew you I managed to move house several times, have two children, hold down numerous jobs and get dressed most mornings without putting on all my clothes inside out, and manage a husband who spent most of his time behaving like a giant ,spoiled child.’ (I say most days.  We will gloss over the early months of child rearing).

But now is not the time.

Now is the time to stare at strange lumpy things in the freezer and think about whether I want to transport them across the county or whether I want to take them to the toxic waste barrel bit of the tip.

And make sure that they haven’t packed all my clean knickers.

If you’re expecting funny, you need to look somewhere else.

I have, as you are more than aware, been extremely sad recently.

I still am.

It’s that kind of sadness that just hits you every now and again throughout the day as you go about your business, thinking that you’re doing alright, holding it all together. 

Then SMACK. It whacks you like a bit of two by four, right in the gut.

It makes everything you do hard work, because all the time, all the time you feel kind of sluggish and a bit grey.  You know that kind of feeling? Almost as if you are sickening for a cold, but you never get it.

It’s exhausting.

This type of sadness oozes up through the cracks in the carapace you erect against the rest of the world.  Every now and again, when something jars the run of the mill, day to day routine you are plodding through, it just explodes. BAM!

And you find yourself weeping, or shouting, or gesticulating, like those crazy people who clutch brown paper wrapped bottles on park benches, and people think you’re insane.

And sometimes, sometimes, so do you.

But you know what?

You’re not insane.

You’re just in the grip of some really profound emotions that are far too big for the body and mind you’re storing them in.

And they have to go somewhere.  Because if they don’t escape that tightly wound net of what people think of as ‘normality’, they stay with you.  Imagine that.  Imagine feeling like that forever.  It already feels like forever, and it’s only been a little while.  Such a small time to feel such big feelings.

It’s a symptom of the age that there is this feeling of guilt at not being ‘better’ yet, or ‘fixed’, or ‘normal’.

When something terrible happens, you have the right to feel sad, and express that sadness any way you see fit, and if more people did it, there would be less lonely, miserable, fucked up mental people in the world and people would live longer and be happier with their lot.

At least, that’s what I think.

The sadness is o.k.  Well, it’s not, but you know.  It’s doable.

The anger is the most confusing.  It just takes the smallest thing to make you furious.  Things that wouldn’t normally bother you make you see red, and things that usually make you angry, make you off the scale psychotic.

I think that this kind of anger is just another face of sadness.  It’s just that it’s much more socially acceptable to get angry than to display grief.  People still see grief as somehow embarrassing, or distasteful, whereas it’s fine to get angry.  When there is an opportunity to release emotion when your psyche is literally drowning in the stuff, you take any route that is offered.  Even if it means the red mist coming down because someone cold called you, or you stubbed your toe.

I have this theory that if you don’t let these feelings out eventually, they eat you alive, from the inside.

And then you really do go mad.

I got quite close to that once. It was not something I ever want to get near to again.

I have to remind myself of this when I find myself getting frustrated because I want to feel better now.

Doing this, feeling this, IS part of getting better.  It’s not a very nice part, but it’s a very necessary part.

I have been thinking about this sadness, trying to figure it out, trying to understand why this thing that has happened, which is really nothing to do with me except in the most tangential of ways, has affected me so deeply.

I think, and I may be completely wrong, that it is actually a very healing and healthy thing. 

When I lost all those babies in the past, I was sad, of course I was.  I was devastated to the point of madness in some cases.  I was also full of guilt, and fear, and anger, and rage and blame.  I was also, while dealing with some of those losses, parenting very small children, working and trying to hold my own in what was an exceptionally complicated and damaging marriage.

To say that the grieving process was muddied would be an understatement.

I have noticed, that in these last weeks, when I have been overtaken by sadness, that is all it is.  I am just sad.  I don’t blame anyone.  I don’t feel guilty.  I don’t want to go on a crusade about it, or point the finger.  I. Just. Feel. Sad.

I think I’m allowed.

I earned it.

I also know that it is not very easy, trying to live a regular life, whilst being this sad.  Everything gets distorted and difficult, and the urge to bottle it all up, and be British and stiff upper lip about it all is very, very alluring.  I know I can do it. I can just slam a lid on it all, and carry on with my day as if everything were fine, and dandy.

I did that before. 

That’s the time I went quite mad.

I won’t do it again.  I won’t do it, even when what I am expressing and feeling makes people uncomfortable and wish that I would go back to being jolly and funny and easy to manage.

I won’t do it, because it’s better to be spiky and tearful, and sad than it is to be mad.

Obi Wan

Last week, when Uncle Robber and I went to Sat Bains, we practised using Uncle Robber’s new Sat Nav machine.

It is a very handsome machine. Unlike mine, where I have lost all the important bits,  including the little suckery thing that sticks it to the window.  This means that when I am alone, I drive with it in my lap.  If I am driving in a fraught sort of way it appears that I sometimes clench my thighs together.  If I do this with the sat nav on my lap, it often slips between my thighs, and then, at the clenching point, I reset it in various different, and entirely unhelpful ways.

Not good.

Uncle Robber’s however, is state of the art.  It folds out of the front of his dashboard in a very space age way, and involves touch screen and other new fangled technologies of which I know nothing. Nothing at all.

All the way to Sat Bains, where we got hideously lost, despite the technical gloriosity of the Sat Nav, mainly due to the fact that the restaurant is on a dirt track under a hedge, and the rest due to the fact that Uncle Robber disagreed with it violently at every stage in the proceedings and started heading off across country in a free style and entirely manlike type way, I was bothered by the voice of the machine.

I knew I knew it, but I didn’t know where I knew it from.

If you know what I mean?

Anyway.

It nagged and nagged away at me, until we were on our homeward journey and I finally got it.

EUREKA.

The voice of Uncle Robber’s sat nav sounds exactly like Alec Guinness as Obi Wan Kenobi.

‘Turn left’

‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.’

‘Take the third exit.’

‘Feel the force, Luke.’

‘You have arrived at your destination.’

‘You can go about your business.’

Result!

spoons

When Jason and I got married, we ran off to Las Vegas and did it bling stylie.

Well, as bling stylie as you can get with three children tagging along with you.

It was a great deal of fun, and I would not have swapped it for the world.  Even now, the children talk about it quite often.  Tallulah was so taken with Las Vegas she has the firm belief that this is where she will be setting up home when she grows up.

I am not going to disabuse her of the notion.  With Tallulah, anything is possible.

Oscar was about eleven months old when we went over there.  He has no recollection of it whatsoever, but he likes to talk about it a lot anyway. 

When we were out there, he was somewhat obsessed by spoons.  He loved them.  If you wanted to keep him quiet, you gave him a spoon.  He was delighted with them.  He preferred tea spoons, as they were much easier to wield in his pudgy, little fists, but any spoon in an emergency would do.

We would give him a spoon, absentmindedly, if we were within easy reach of one and he was squawking.  Then he would stop squawking.

Bon.

The squawking would start up again.

We would give him another spoon.

We just automatically assumed that he had dropped the first spoon on the floor.

It turns out that this wasn’t always the case.

He would, for the most part, be in his buggy, while all this spoon fondling was occuring.

It had a kind of net basket under the seat, which was for me to put all the tonnage of crap you have to carry with you when you are transporting a small child about.

It turns out that it was also a very handy place to stash spoons.

At one point we had a spoon amnesty and found that we had amassed the grand total of sixteen spoons over the space of three days.

We left them in our hotel room.

I have no idea what the poor cleaning lady made of that.

After that, Oscar was known as ‘The spoon stealing baby.’

He looks back on this time with great fondness.  It is one of his favourite stories about himself.  He quite often commandeers one of us and demands that we tell him all about his spoon stealing ways.

At the weekend he was asking Jason all about it.  He wanted to know how come he got away with stealing spoons.

Jason said that it was his cuteness power.

Oscar was terribly impressed by this.  He likes having super powers.

He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to use his cuteness power to get us to give him things, or to try to get us to do things for him.

Sadly for him, I think this has worn off now.

Jason has warned him of this, and that if he steals spoons now, he will not be treated with such leniency.  Cuteness power has a shelf life, and Oscar’s is well out of date.

Alas.

Filler

Not much to report here at Chez Boo today, and no real inclination for blogging, but I’d had my fill of seeing the last post I wrote staring me in the eye every time I turned on the pc.

I broke the glass in one of my favourite pictures last night while I was packing it.  I had very carefully wrapped it up, and was just congratulating myself on a job well done, when I banged the edge of it against the radiator as I was lifting it up, and the whole thing went ‘CRACK’.

Pooh.

I shall take it to the framers to get them to repair it next week.

In other news, I watched Scott Pilgrim Versus The World on DVD with the kids this afternoon.  I really liked it.  I love Edgar Wright, who directed this, as well as the excellent Hot Fuzz and Sean of the Dead, and I adore Michael Cera, who co-starred in one of my top ten films, Juno, so I had high hopes for it, but there is always room for disappointment. 

Luckily, not today.

I can’t really think how to describe Scott Pilgrim.  It was quirky, funny and deeply odd.  It reminded me of Kick Ass, which I also loved, but not as gory and dark.  It’s sort of Kick Ass lite.

Umm, what else?

I finally got Kate Atkinson’s; ‘Started Early, Took My Dog,’ from the library.  I am very excited to read this, as Sharon has recommended it highly.  It will take a while for me to work my way down the pile to it, but the fact that it is on the pile at all is a rather lovely thing.

We took quite a bit of stuff to the storage unit today.  You can’t really tell when you come back into the house, which is still stuffed to the rafters with our crap, but you can definitely tell when you go to the storage unit.

I have taken down all my pictures in the MOD.  It looks very naked.

Not as naked as a naked mole rat, but fairly naked nonetheless.

In new house news, Jason went to see it for the first time yesterday.  He liked it.

Phew.

Also, when he went over there, he met a load of workmen who were fixing some broken tiles and generally tidying the place up.

That’s a good sign.

We went in to the agent’s office today to hand over large wads of cash and sign various papers.  We get the keys on Tuesday, along with the inventory.  This agent seems much more on the ball. Their inventory has photographs and is detailed.  The one for this house was fairly hopeless, and I ended up sending in twelve pages of things they had missed.  That’s quite a lot of things, right?

So, we get the keys on Tuesday and should be in the new place by Friday, giving us the weekend to scour the MOD and polish it until it shines.

Monday morning we hand the keys back, face the psycho landlady for the last time during the inventory, and then go to a funeral in the afternoon.  I think I will rename it ‘Black Monday’.

When sorrows come they come not in single spies but in battalions

The day after I posted that I hadn’t heard from my friend who lost her baby, I heard from her.  She texted me to tell me that the messages I had been sending were helping.

This is good news.  It’s only a small thing I can do, but that is better than no thing at all.

This morning I had to drop Oscar off at nursery.  Usually Jason does it, but he’s had early starts for the past two mornings, so I stepped into the breach.

I was just going to get into my car, when my friend arrived to drop one of her daughters off.

We hugged, and then she talked, and talked, and talked.  I think that she just needs to make this real for her, and that in telling people, it somehow becomes true, and not just a terrible waking dream.

She feels, rightly so by the sound of it, that the doctors and hospital let her down. When the funeral is over she intends to do something about it.  Good luck to her.  If that is what she needs to do to feel better, then she should go right ahead, and if by complaining about the kind of care she got, she can help save someone else further down the line, then maybe she will start to feel a bit better, and that this has not all been such a terrible waste.

She tells me that she had taken her son to the doctors sixteen times in the five weeks he was alive, and they dismissed all her fears, saying that he just had a cold.  The ‘cold’ that he had was so severe that it gave him septicaemia, dangerously low oxygen levels, and eventually stopped his heart.

The funeral is on Monday 21st.  She has asked me if I want to come.

She has said that she will entirely understand if I don’t want to.

Of course nobody ‘wants’ to go to a funeral, but that is not the point is it?

I have decided that I will go, as a mark of respect and support for my friend, as a farewell to her son, and on a personal and private level, to silently mark the passing of all the children who left me too early.

I am glad that I have seen her, and that she was able to share with me what she wanted to say.  She is keeping herself together way better than I think I would in those circumstances. She is being extremely brave, where I would be railing against the universe and howling like an animal.

Her sadness comes off her in waves, and every now and again her voice wobbles as she fights so hard not to lose control.  My heart has been aching for her all day.  It quite takes my breath away to tell you the truth.

It was not the time today, to talk about it, but when the time is right I shall tell her that you have been sending her your thoughts and prayers, and I hope they mean as much to her as they have to me.

Daniel Kitson

Yesterday evening Andrea risked life and limb with me at the wheel, so that we could go and see the stand up comedian Daniel Kitson do his show: ‘The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church’ at Warwick Arts Centre.

I had never seen Kitson before. He does very little television work at all, and although I used to be a keen follower of all things comedic, and go with UE to see all kinds of stand up, in recent years I have gotten out of the habit.  I cannot find the time in truth, what with my addiction to fine dining and regular theatre to attend to, plus seeing friends and family and nurturing three young minds.  Something had to give, and it was comedy.

I had heard stupendous things about Kitson’s work.  UE saw him do a show at Sydney Opera House when he was over in Australia a couple of years ago, and raved about it.  I have been hunting about for his name on and off for a few months, hoping that he would be touring something, and was very excited when this came up.

Kitson specialises in telling a story rather than a string of mother in law jokes strung together with ‘a funny thing happened…’ type lines.  This is the story of how he went to view a house, went into the loft and found over thirty thousand letters, most of which seemed to be suicide notes from Gregory Church.

It is the story of how Kitson acquires the letters and obsesses over them, piecing together the life and death of Gregory from his reading.

It is funny, witty and beautifully observed.  It is, as Andrea said, humane comedy.  Comedy with a heart that leaves you exhilarated, hopeful and happy whilst having had a damn good laugh.

The show is in mid tour, and our tickets were a mere £10 each, so if Mr. Kitson is heading your way, do go and see him.  You won’t regret it for an instant.

Sat Bains

Last night I finally made it to Sat Bains restaurant in Nottingham to make good on my promise to take my brother there for his Christmas present.  You may recall that we were supposed to go last week, but I opted to spend the day being crucified by a migraine instead.

I’m glad we finally got there in the end.  The food was GOOD.  Some of the food was EXQUISITE.

It is well worth the trip if you are interested in visiting Nottingham’s only Michelin starred restaurant.  It’s more worth it, if like me, you are a gluttonous pig, your curly tail is twitching, and you are more than eager to get snout down in the trough.

I read a few reviews to give myself a heads up about what to expect before we went.  The two key points of most reviews are:

1. It’s an absolute bastard to find.
2. It’s worth the effort.

I can do no more than concur with this neat appraisal.

It is stuck next to an electricity pylon, towered over by a bypass and on what is little more than a dirt track by an industrial estate.  Not the most salubrious of settings.

It’s a good job you are going for the sake of your stomach and not to satisfy your architectural leanings.

To get down to business then, for research purposes only, you understand, we had the ten course taster menu, which is £85 per head.  They do a seven course menu which I think is about £60 per head, and offer a five course menu  where you can choose from the dishes available on the other two menus.  You can also have the wine taster menu where the sommelier chooses appropriate wines for you for each course.

We could have made ours a twelve course menu had we opted to have the duck egg dish that Sat Bains got a perfect 10 for on the Great British Menu programme, and the cheese course.

Now, I am Greedy McGreedy of the Greedy clan, but even I thought I would probably need to stop at ten courses.  I’m glad I did, although I did see people enjoying the other dishes, which looked ravishing, and judging from their reactions, tasted ravishing.  As it was I left the restaurant sated but not bloated, and that worked for me.

You also have to bear in mind that quite often you get courses in between the courses you have ordered, as amuse bouches or samples the chef may be trying out, so the ten course menu is generally more than ten courses as a rule.

To prove my point, the first dish we ate was a warm up round which consisted of a kind of beetroot mousse, served with black cardamon, tiny cubes of beetroot and cream.  It was no more than a couple of mouthfuls to eat, but what mouthfuls.  I love beetroot, and the earthiness of the beets against the velvety cream and spicy hit was just ravishing.  It was an incredibly delicate dish, which is not a word you usually find associated with beetroot.

It came accompanied with a kind of prawn cracker, on which was piped tiny dots of squash mousse, with parmesan gratings.  It made a tangy, sweet accompaniment to the beet dish.

With this came bread and butter, but not any bread and butter.  We had small, perfect loaves of bread.  One was a white bread made with Guinness, one a black treacle bread.  They were served with poached, Lincolnshire butter.  The bread was so hot and fresh from the oven you could barely touch it. When you broke it open, the yeasty steam that rose from inside it made your stomach rumble with hunger.  You could taste the Guinness flavour, which enhanced the yeastiness of the bread and the saltiness of the butter.  The treacle bread was dense and had that bittersweet quality that black treacle gives it.  It smelled like bonfire night, and tasted like the Rolls Royce of Soreen malt loaf.

After that we had our first course proper.

This was organic salmon which was served in an oyster broth with pickled vegetables with miso and roasted black rice.  The salmon was fragrant, melt in the mouth and delicately flavoured.  The broth was creamy but not overpowering.  The pickled vegetables were crunchy and flavourful, and the pickled mushrooms in particular were stunning.  I am not a fan of pickled mushrooms in general. I hate slithery food, but they were just perfect, tangy accompaniments to the fish.  The miso was a kind of paste on the side of the bowl, which had been adorned with the roasted rice, and gave it an intense burst of flavour that contrasted beautifully with the delicate fish.

The next course was salt baked celeriac with winter truffle.

I think I have mentioned before that what always surprises and delights me about this kind of dining experience, is taking the risk with foods that you don’t think you like.  I am always willing to be persuaded that someone can show me a way to eat or prepare something that I have previously hated that will transform it into something I might want to eat every day for the rest of my life.

This is what happened to me with the celeriac dish.  It was basically a very simple dish.  It consisted of a kind of truffle gravy with pureed celeriac, on which balanced the salt roasted celeriac. On top of this were wafer thin shards of pickled celeriac.

It was my favourite dish of the night. It really was, and I had been dreading this course, truth be told.  The celeriac was not overpoweringly flavoured. The salt roasting brought out its sweetness and juiciness and the truffle sauce was heaven.

The next course was Goosnargh duck with orange and radicchio. 

I really was looking forward to this. I love duck with a passion.  As an entire dish it didn’t all work for me.  There were bits of it I loved so much they made me drool, and other bits I ate because they were there.  Radicchio does not set my world on fire, and here, pickled in thin slices, it failed to convert me.  The duck came in two guises, one as a parfait covered in a thin layer of orange jelly.  This was delicious.  The other duck element was a thinly sliced roll of duck which tasted like duck would taste if you turned it into Parma ham.  This was also delicious.  The rest of the plate had largeish croutons doused in a kind of marmalade reduction.  This didn’t work for me.  It’s the bitterness I’m not keen on.  Plus the croutons were too crunchy to scoop up effectively.  I tried everything separately and then everything together.  I would say that if you like the combination of bitter and sweet, fruity tastes together with the richness of duck it would work for you.  It just didn’t for me.

Interestingly, the duck dish was garnished with chick weed.  I didn’t know you could eat this as a human, but clearly you can.  It was actually a surprisingly interesting and complex flavour of green. You know what I mean, a sort of salady, leafy green that is more interesting than lettuce and less peppery than rocket.  I recommend it.  Chick weed. Not just for chicks.

The next course was pearl barley with belly pork and turnip.  The pearl barley and pork had been slowly cooked together with parsley to make a kind of hearty, Northern, winter risotto type dish.  It was decorated with tiny pork scratchings and a layer of pickled turnip.  A cream sauce added an extra layer of richness to everything.

This was interesting as a dish.  It was, to my mind, slightly overpowering on the pork front.  Everything tasted of PORK, and you had to search quite hard for the other, more delicate flavours.  The texture of the chewy barley and the slow cooked pork, which fell apart as you ate it, contrasted beautifully with the silkiness of the cream sauce and the tang of the turnip.  It was posh, peasant food made beautiful.

Then we had Waldorf Salad 2010.  This consisted of celery infused panna cotta with sultanas, grapes and apples and a reduction of what appeared to be Branston Pickle.  I didn’t think I would like the celery mousse, but it was actually an excellent palate cleanser after the richness of the pork, and made a perfect stop gap before the main course.

This was, as the menu says, ‘braised mutton with shallot ‘textures”.  I love menu speak.  Shallot textures indeed!

Anyway.  I wasn’t sure what I would make of mutton.  I find lamb as a meat fairly overpowering unless it is so rare, and so hideously expensive and beautifully cooked I can’t generally afford it, so I avoid it.  I imagined mutton, being lamb’s older, fiercer relation to be even more overpowering.

Actually it was lovely.  The mutton had probably been slowly cooked for about a week it was so tender.  It just melted in the mouth.  It tasted like the best, heartiest Winter stew you can imagine.  It was like the Platonic ideal of stew, the fiery shadow of which flickers at the cave mouth of Sat Bains underground cooking lair.

Shallot textures was just three different ways of serving shallots.  There was powdered shallot, pureed shallot and roasted shallot.  As I love shallots I was quite happy to eat them any which way, and their sweetness and caramel tones contrasted wonderfully with the richness of the mutton.

After this feast we had what was termed ‘The Crossover.’

This was a half way house dish which was supposed to help you with the terrible struggle between savoury and dessert dishes.  I can only imagine how hard some people find it, never having been bothered by this before, but hey, if there is more food in the offing, I’m not turning it down.

This dish was in reality, fancy cheese and pineapple with ham.  The pineapple had been concentrated to maximise flavour.  It had been sprinkled with feta cheese and thin slivers of toasted almond.  On top of this was a slice of Hungarian ham from the shoulder of the pig.  I think the waitress said it was called Shonka ham.

The flavours were great in this dish.  I am a child of the Seventies. Give me cheese and pineapple, preferably on some kind of stick, and I am a happy bunny.  The only thing that didn’t work for me was the size of the dish.  Everything else we had was served in perfect, tiny, delicate mouthfuls.  Here the pineapple pieces were large, and the ham lay in a floppy layer on top.  By this time we only had spoons and forks to eat with, and I struggled.  I would have preferred a miniaturised version of this, and maybe, maybe with a more traditional Parma or Prosciutta ham, something more oily and satiny to contrast with the juicy tartness of the pineapple.

After this we had our first dessert course proper, the Waldorf Salad 2011.

This is where it all went a bit tits up for me.

Despite the fact that it had all the same ingredients as the previous Waldorf Salad, I really, really didn’t like this.  I mean, didn’t like it to the point where I didn’t finish it.

This time there was a walnut ice cream on top.  This, for me, was too furry tasting. You know when you grind up nuts and sometimes they have that slightly fuzzy texture that makes you want to cough? That’s what this tasted like.  Underneath there was apple and pickled celery, both of which were fine, but the thing that finished me off was the puree in the bottom of the dish.  I think it may have been predominantly apple based, but whatever it was I really didn’t like it.  It was gluey and had a, to me, unpleasant sour/sweet taste that just didn’t work for me.

The staff were fantastic.  They were quite concerned that I didn’t finish it.  I was fine about it.  One course I didn’t like out of ten is not bad going, and it wasn’t that it was bad, it just wasn’t to my taste.

To cheer me up, which they totally didn’t need to do, they sent me out an alternative, rhubarb dish. 

It was divine.  You know I love rhubarb.  Oh My Good God. It was lovely.  The rhubarb was poached in hibiscus syrup and served with meringue, ice cream and a granita made of rocket and tarragon.  MMMMMMMMM.

Our penultimate dish was a glorious white chocolate ice cream, served with chocolate sprinkles and a cube of lime jelly with a pink peppercorn sauce.  It was divine.  The lime jelly was my absolute top new taste of the whole meal. I could have eaten an entire dinner plate full of it.  It was deep and sharp and rich and unbelievably fruity.

Finally we finished with a lemon parfait thing which was wrapped in thin slices of meringue and topped with shavings of pickled fennel and basil leaves.  It sounds disgusting, but it really wasn’t.  It was fresh and exhilarating and a triumphant end to a really, really complex and interesting meal.

We had coffee and hand made chocolates in the lounge afterwards to wake us up for the journey home.

And then I got invited to see Mr. Bains himself, in his kitchen.  I was far too nosy to say no, and went to pester him for five minutes. He generously allowed me to drool my thanks all over him, and signed my menu.

Glory Be.

I have to go back, when the bank balance has recovered.  I reckon this is a winter menu, so there is probably a summer menu to come, which definitely needs trying out, no? 

Also, if I get back there before this menu is finished I need to try the wild hare with braised nuts, pear and chocolate which was on the seven course menu, because the people at the next table were having it and it looked divine.