Food and verse

So, yesterday I went to Larndan with my brother for the Taste of London Festival at Regent’s Park.

I have pictures. I have not up/down/round loaded them yet.  It will happen.  Probably not today.

My brother bought the tickets for this event months ago.  It has been arranged and eagerly anticipated for about as long.  I, in my usual inimitable fashion, managed to be not very well.

We all waited with dread to see just how not very well I was going to be.  Well, I woke with a pounding head, grumbling ovaries, a killer throat and slight shakes. I get the shakes if I haven’t eaten enough, if I am too tired, if I am about to combust with a migraine.

I took shit loads of pain relief, ate everything in sight, filled my bag with all the rest of the pain relief we had in the house and set off anyway, having a stern word with myself on the way.  Having already been mightily pissed off about missing a play I didn’t get a chance to see last year and now missed this year, I was going to do this thing if it killed me.

And the way things were shaping up, it very well might.

We made London in good time and my pain meds were beginning to kick in.  Regent’s Park tube was fecked, so we got off at Baker Street.  It was only a five minute longer trot round the park and we got to see lots of tourists standing on each other’s heads at the doorway of 221B Baker Street wearing deer stalkers and having their photos taken looking like idiots.  It was worth the extra five minutes just for that, despite the fact that the heavens were about to open.

It poured on and off for the entire afternoon, which is not ideal when you are at an outdoor event.  Nevertheless, we are British, so we soldiered briskly on, ignoring the weather.  We shunned umbrellas, and people trying to sell us those rubbish rain macs like the ones you get on the Log Flume at Alton Towers.  We are made of tougher stuff.

We were very impressed at the number of women tarted up to the nines in pencil skirts and four inch nude heels, plodging round gamely.  I was glad I’d gone for jeans and Converse boots, although slightly sad that my previously pristine turquoise boots are now turquoise with more than a hint of mud.

Uncle Robber had paid for VIP passes.  This meant a free cookery book.  I cannot pass comment with a critical eye as yet, due to the fact that I have only looked at the pictures, but the pictures were very nice.

It also meant free champagne.  Laurent Perrier, which is not my favourite, but I forced myself.

I realise as I type this, how utterly pretentiously wanky and middle class I truly am now.  If you had asked me twenty years ago what my favourite champagne was I would have looked at you like you were a total twat, and probably smacked you round the head with a copy of Socialist Worker.  Now look at me. My fridge is full of Rachel’s Organic Greek Yoghurt, I have a cupboard full of cous cous, quinoa and bulgar wheat, I collect pottery and I have a favourite champagne (Veuve Clicquot yellow label, thanks).

How the soiled have risen.

I don’t know if the mighty have fallen. I haven’t risen enough to touch the hem of their garments.

I digress.

We got a free champagne tasting class too.  It was short but interesting.  We had three different types of champagne (all Laurent Perrier, obv.) and three different canape style foods to go with them, so we could see how to match champagnes to different courses with a meal.

Like that’s ever going to happen in my house.

I have not risen that far.

I did learn some cool stuff about champagne though.

• I like really dry champagne, and the first champagne we tried was the extra brut, which means extra dry.  It was crisp and sharp, which I liked very much. Apparently they cannot make extra brut every year because it depends how much natural fruit sugar is in the grape year on year.
• The champagne we had was a mix of different grape varieties, chardonnay and pinot grigio.  Despite the fact that pinot grigio is a red grape, you can still make white wine from it.  The red colour only comes from mixing the skin and pips of the grape in with its flesh. If you want it to remain white, you simply remove all the flesh and just use that.
• If you pinch your nose shut before you smell the wine you are about to taste, and then open  your nostrils as you are practically in the glass itself, it gives you a really intense hit of all the flavours in the wine.

It was really fun.  I didn’t anticipate it being so much fun. It has made me want to find out more.  I can’t really afford to get into serious wine tasting at this point, but it may be something for my later years when I am not in charge of three small children and a car.

After our wine tasting we went off to try some different foods, and soak up the wine a bit.

As well as stalls selling their produce, of which there were plenty, there were also stalls which were micro versions of famous restaurants like Gordon Ramsay’s Maze, Marcus Wareing’s Petrus etc.  Each one did three different dishes which you could pay for with the currency of the show, known as crowns.

There were about forty or fifty different micro kitchens and we roamed far and wide. As you would expect the queues for the better known places were ridiculous.  I did see the top of Gary Rhodes’ head for about two seconds before a ravenous crowd descended.

We stuck to less well known places and tried some delicious foods.  I had a glorious strawberry mousse type dessert with basil sauce and mini candy floss at a place called: ‘The Modern Pantry’.  Uncle Robber had suckling pig with truffle shavings in a bun at; ‘Launceston Place’.  We ate Jamaican jerk chicken at a place I can’t remember the name of, which is a shame because it was delicious.

I had Heston Blumenthal’s salted caramel and popcorn ice cream from the Waitrose ice cream cart.  That was good. As was the Italian frozen yogurt lollipop covered in pink chocolate in the shape of a heart I ate.

We tried some glorious aged Parmesan from one stall. They had three different ages, all of which were amazing in their own way.  We tried to buy some, but they seemed horrified and told us that they were only there to promote it.

Weird.

We also tried toffee vodka, which was really rather delicious, albeit fierce.

I nearly succumbed to an amazing Lavazza coffee machine. It made a mean espresso and you could have the machine in any one of about forty different colour ways, which impressed me even more.  I wanted a purple one.  Plus they were really dinky, slightly larger than the average four slice toaster.  What wasn’t to like?

I only didn’t because I couldn’t be bothered to drag it round all day.

So, we had a great time, and left slightly early to avoid the crowds.

On the way home we went to the British Library and visited their fabulous Science Fiction exhibition, which had a Tardis in it, which I touched (squeal!).  I also designed my own alien which then beamed up onto a huge projection on the wall (double squeal), and got to send virtual space postcards to lots of people (triple squeal).  After a small rest and a drink at Peyton and Byrne’s tea room, which is right by the most impressively beautiful book stacks, that even my non-reading brother thought was cool, we sloped off to St. Pancras.

We were early for our train and I side tracked us into Foyles, where I picked up a copy of Being Human which is the third volume in the Bloodaxe poetry anthology which begins with Staying Alive and Being Alive.  The first two are two of the most precious and lovely books I own, and I was totally unaware of the fact that they had published a third volume, so when I found it I was at the till as quick as a wink.

As an aside. I paid £12 for my copy in Foyles.  I’m not sorry about this, as I enjoyed it on the train home, but if you buy it on Amazon it is currently £7.90, and if you buy all three volumes you can have them for about £23, which is a steal.

If you have these three books and The Rattle Bag and The School Bag edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney you really have the entirety of what is fantastic about poetry in your house.  If I had to choose just one it would be Staying Alive, but then I haven’t done more than dip excitedly into Being Human yet, like a demented, word loving wood pecker, so I’ll get back to you on that.

Then a truly delightful thing happened, which is when you meet someone who feels the same way that you do about a book.  The man behind the counter was as delighted to sell me the book as I was to buy it from him and we had a great five minute chat about the other volumes and how they were the best thing that has ever happened to modern poetry.

We both went our way feeling more joyful and generally buoyant.

So, it was a good day, despite the quantities of pills I had to eat to maintain my equilibrium, and when I got home I started my period, which, despite the discomfort of today, has been a blessed relief, and means that the end is in sight for the next two weeks at least.

I am practising gratitude for that.