Nothing like a wet (or two)

Surname of the nearer player is Twelvetrees

Younger daughter’s husband is Gloucester born and bred and has supported the city’s rugby club since the year dot. He talks wittily about being a fan to the point where I mentioned I’d like to join him some Saturday afternoon. 

Why? I’m not much for crowds even at symphony halls. I understand rugby but am far from obsessive. Perhaps because my major interests – writing fiction, learning to sing, speaking French, reading – preclude social contact. This Christmas I received tickets for the local Derby – Gloucester vs. Bath - from daughter Occasional Speeder who promised to drive me, find parking and sit by me for comfort.

I was ill before the game started, got more ill as it progressed, and went straight to bed when I returned home to sleep for a full twelve hours. Enriched by what I had seen.

The second half was lively and Gloucester won. I’m glad they did but in one sense the result was incidental. The memorable action occurred on the terraces. I knew rugby supporters drank during the game but had no idea to what extent. Just before the game started, the empty seats nearby rapidly filled with middle-aged men wearing Gloucester’s cherry-and-white, who had clearly been whiling their time at the bar. Each carried two quart-capacity plastic jugs full of beer (ie, half a gallon per man). Enough to get them to half-time, I surmised. How wrong I was. Within twenty minutes they were getting up, disrupting the seated fans and off for refills.

One wearing what he claimed was a pith helmet (It wasn’t.) managed to miss one of Gloucester’s tries.

I should have been irritated but perhaps mild delirium made me less judgmental. Cheerfulness reigned and nobody got hurt. It occurred to me I lead a very Casaubon life.

A classic case?

Irony can be tricky to understand:

● Use of words to express a meaning other than the literal meaning and, esp., the opposite of it.
● Incongruity between actual circumstances and the normal, appropriate or expected result.

Examples

● A marriage counsellor files for divorce
● It's ironic that computers break down so often since they're meant to save people time.

And then there's me.

A recent combined cough, common cold, feverish state, left me with a disturbed stomach. But today was singing lesson; I was there on the dot. V produced the score of Schubert's, An die Laute (To the Lute), a song I have never heard, never even heard of. After 60 minutes I sang the two verses in tune, on the beat and adding interpretation. Several big firsts. V nodded, then said: "Good on you. But what you did took it out of you. Look after yourself."

At brunch back home there are rillettes, fatty and a firm favourite. They are intended as a treat. Normally I'd gobble them in a minute but I can't face them. Wrote this as therapy. Don't tell me I'm better off 'cos that'll cause me to grind my teeth, good news only for the dentist.

Blessed surcease

It's Friday, VR's art group day. This afternoon I'll drive her 11 miles to the village hall in ultra-middle-class Ewyas Harold, two hours later I'll pick her up. Since I'll have the car out of the garage we'll pay a morning visit to Tesco for any necessary weekend shopping. A Friday like hundreds of others since we moved to Hereford over twenty years ago.

I get up slowly to ensure I don't enrage my lower back. I'd like to pretend I may get up without reflecting on my age but my back prevents this. Yup, I'm old! Even though going downstairs slightly eases unwelcome messages from the Malign Kingdom of the Lower Lumbar Delta. God rot them all down there.

One cannot consciously forget one's age but one may - temporarily - replace that awareness. How? By doing something new, never attempted before. There's a general election in the offing and I could vote Tory. Risky! Very risky! My left hand would reach stranglingly for my throat as my right hand wielded the pencil.

I could Google the rules of lacrosse. Read a whodunnit by P. D. James. Count backwards from a thousand. Try to play Wiegenlied on the keyboard with my toes. A multitude of novel experiences.

In the kitchen is a fruitcake, cooked yesterday and scattered with almond flakes. It's VR's cake day at the art group. I could bake a cake, that would be new. I imagine the procedure. Obtain a mixing bowl, yeah I know where that is. Then... what? Crack an egg. Then....? Beyond is only a void.

But never mind. For the first time ever I've imagined baking a cake. Forgetting my age. And the MKLLD messages have become fainter.

Simple really.

Holiday scrapbook

End-on view of marvellous Millau viaduct on drive to Creissan.
British architect, Norman Foster, designed it and all France is
pleased with the result. I reflect on this as Brexit grinds away
towards its meanly isolationist end. 

RR (resurrected as Mr Punch) and VR
regard the Bouzigues oyster beds,  knowing full well
 some Tone Deaf readers can't abide oysters.

 

Dialogue at St Chinian street market, Languedoc, France.

Butcher: Monsieur?
RR: Your lamb liver has a price tag, your veal liver hasn't.
Butcher: That's so.
RR: This suggests the veal liver is more expensive. Terribly expensive.
Butcher and wife roar with laughter at my deduction. I order a small slice of veal liver and the butcher puts it on his scale.
Butcher (shouting): Two hundred euros! (ie, $220.77)
All three of us laugh.

NOTE FOR US READERS, NOTORIOUSLY SUSPICIOUS OF OFFAL. I fear this is the way things are in France.

When the reading exceeds 40 deg C where else would you go?

Creissan cemetery. Some graves, randomly adorned, look more
like a garage sale. (Below) Others await paying customers.

The ratio of its circumference to its diameter

Several contributors to Tone Deaf get their spouses to do the cooking; for them this post might just as well be written in Urdu. Think of it as seed that fell on stony ground (Biblical quote).

VR has cooked for me for nearly 59 years. By common consent I've recently urged her to be less ambitious. Cooking takes time and I'd much rather she fulfilled her avowed aim, announced on her retirement twenty years ago, to read, and read and read. Some times a couple of novels a day, in all about 230 a year.

Even so there are regular bursts of culinary inventiveness.

What makes a good cook? In my opinion: three qualities. All recipes are regarded as a suggestion not a rigid prescription. Leftovers are a challenge, to be transformed into a dish quite distinct from the original format. And going the extra mile.

All are contained in the above pic.

It required no recipe at all and it is a savoury pie - much more of a treat than a dessert pie. The contents, enhanced with bits and pieces I've now forgotten, were remaindered from a brisket casserole created a week or two ago by grandson Ian, another inventive cook. The superfluous pastry was turned into a touch of wit which you may now observe.

My contribution to the pie was to over-eat it, to the point where I felt quite uncomfortable yesterday evening. I shouldn't have done, of course. I'm an adult who understands cause and effect. On the other hand my discomfort was an inarguable tribute to the pie's onlie begetter.

VR served the pie. I'm not sure my over-developed sense of aesthetics would have allowed me to violate its decorated crust.

Dining in tandem

Jokily I ended my previous post (Ping-pong for one) like this:

But I had a conviction - possibly delusional - that if I thought hard enough I could communicate with VR. Wordlessly.

Colette ended her comment to this post:

And if you are able to communicate wordlessly with VR, please let us know.

I responded:

Should telepathy occur you'll be the first to know.

Last night VR, who has been following these exchanges with mild amusement, reminded me such telepathy has already happened.

Thirty years ago I was invited by the London magazine, Theatregoer, to become its restaurant critic - an evening  job that didn’t interfere with my daytime editorship of a logistics magazine. Sounds like a dream commission doesn't it? It wasn't.

Go out for a normal meal and you spend the evening eating, drinking, observing and chatting. As a restaurant critic you have to fit in the surreptitious taking of copious notes, correctly spelled. Harassment descends and enjoyment is eroded. And there's a further distraction.

VR accompanied me to help cover up my suspicious note-taking. Also to test more choices of what was on offer at the restaurant. Very quickly I learnt to choose two quite separate meals and be prepared to ditch the one I really preferred. Quite uncannily VR always chose the same (as yet unannounced) meal I had in mind, forcing me to switch from, say, Escalope de veau à la Zagreb (see pic) to Filet de sole bonne femme. With subsequent adjustment to the choice of wine.

Does this qualify as telepathy? In fact this tendency still continues when we eat out normally. Although by now we acknowledge it laughingly.

OK, Colette?

Goodbye old cold friend

We bought the Zanussi fridge-freezer twenty years ago when we moved in to our present house. VR was allowed a free hand and seemed to have spent a huge chunk of cash. "It's self-defrosting," she explained, and I was to bless her regularly for that.

It still works but bits of plastic (shelves, etc) have broken off and the door seal is disintegrating. VR is convinced it will finally give up the ghost at the most embarrassing time - Christmas Eve, say. Better be safe than sorry.

Choosing the replacement (a Samsung) took ages. Is an open-door alert a deal-breaker? And how about a two-year warranty when most of the competition is offering only one year? (We've dithered so long the warranty has now risen to five years.). Self-defrosting of course.

But VR has assumed the greater burden in planning the gradual evacuation of the freezer compartments. "We can have the leg of lamb on Sunday," she said. I know enough about refrigeration to recognise that LoLs are the most intractable of all food. Luxury items like rib-eye steaks bought cheap, have come and gone. VR's zealous accountancy, pencilled on to plastic sheets kept in the freezer door pockets, ensured there were no "discoveries".

The Samsung spec included an outrageous £35 for installation. For plugging it in??? But only if the door hinges need switching. We both willingly agreed to pay £20 to dispose of the Zanussi. Given the manufacturer’s five-year warranty Curry’s (the supplier) have shown some ingenuity with their insurance plan which includes a yearly clean-up. Even so we didn’t bite.

The Samsung should have arrived yesterday but a timidly voiced girl (Nasty job for no doubt the youngest employee.) offered Wednesday instead. I forgave her.

First feature to be discarded: the laughable wine racks.

A real pro

Tone Deaf strives for originality. Original subjects are hard to come by but the old war-horses (singing, writing, life in the USA, wine, sexual desperation in youth, speaking French, faking it in journalism, etc) can be given a new set of clothes by polishing up the style or the approach. Thus, not just singing but rehearsing while travelling on buses, not just writing but pretending I'm Shakespeare.

Tell the truth I've never tried either of these two possibilities so I'm already in profit today. Whoopee! Could be I'm gee-ed up by the prospect of a singing lesson in 2½ hours’ time.

My wife, VR, likes to be original too but doesn’t have a blog. Which means her innovations arrive with a bang.

Coupla days ago we're in Tesco and VR's rootling through the bargain shelf. I'm mildly outraged when she comes away with two tiny "tails" of fillet beef. The cost of these fragments is about £7 and I can't see that as money well spent. But then I can't see as far ahead as VR.

There's an event imminent; now look at those fillet "tails". Individual Beef Wellingtons with our initials emblazoned! That's original!

Which causes me to reflect. Some years ago I sat down to a plateful of spag. bol., a staple when there's just the two of us. But this one's different, more piquant. Seems VR decided - off the cuff - to chuck in a few chilli flakes. Now I wouldn't want spag. bol. any other way.

Ice cream is a dull dessert but not when it's scattered with raisins marinaded in dark rum. Much more grown-up and another simple VR modification. Grandson Ian christens it Rumraisin.

Any fule can tweak words. Tweaking food needs expertise and the effects are more beneficial.

Batter tested

We'd gone to Edwards Plaice, our favourite fish-and-chip shop, frequently mentioned here; grandson Zach had perversely chosen battered sausages. Nothing would have deflected me from my haddock but I was left curious.

Sausages in batter are not haute cuisine but they're fiddly. VR continues to be a good adventurous cook but I urge her towards simplicity; I don’t like her spending long hours in the kitchen. This would be the exception. I did what I could to help.

The chip pan was last used years ago, its place obscure underneath the stairs. On my knees I retrieved it. The sausages were deliberately modest; VR had doubts about the project and wouldn’t put high quality bangers at risk. They were pre-fried.

Oil temperature was crucial (180 - 190 deg C), even I had a foreseen that. An opportunity for my electric cooking thermometer, a birthday gift from grandson Ian, another cooking enthusiast. VR admitted that without the device she might have started cooking the batter in oil that wasn’t hot enough.

The sausages, rolled in flour to ensure adhesion, were dipped into batter (milk, flour, egg) and dropped into the chip pan. The perturbation was fierce and encouraging and the batter was bubbly and crisp within three or four minutes. Since the sausages could only be done two at a time, the pairs were transferred to a plate (with paper towels) under the grill on low.

Everything had been done according to the rules and the batter consistency was perfect. But the batter brought no extra flavour to the sausages. What could have been added? “The sausages are pork, so possibly sage,” said VR using her formal voice. But both of us seemed tacitly agreed that the project could well have been a first and a last.

Chewing into oblivion

We had salad last night, we don’t often.

A few leaves of rocket, a small pile of varied beans in vinaigrette, slices of knobbly tomatoes and purple-skinned onion, a freshly made potato salad with chives, a spread-out fan of avocado – edible garnish for a luxuriant terrine of coarsely chopped meats in a style VR has evolved over  half a century.

There should have been stuffed eggs but these went as bitings-on for a novel form of kir royale: very cheap cava ameliorated with splashes of a boozy (15 proof) peach cordial. The latter purchased speculatively – and, it turned out, rewardingly – by younger daughter Occasional Speeder while we were in France.

What was missing from our salad? Ah, that was what gave it its extra quality.

For years in British caffs salads consisted of a mound with a skimpy decorative carapace: three microtomed slivers of tasteless tomato, two discs of hard-boiled egg, a radish sliced into twelve and, if you were lucky, a sardine. The mound? Lots of that very dark, very limp lettuce that tastes of, and chews like, silage. Because, you see, the lettuce is cheap. A fraudulent disguise.

To add to my woes cucumber may have lurked. I gave up British salads in the early fifties and was to discover that salads were always better in virtually all the countries I subsequently visited. Even, I think, Venezuela.

VR has wooed me back. There is some specious talk about eating healthily but it’s all for show. For me good salads start with an absence of lettuce and thereafter strike out into the Land of Inventiveness. Croutons perhaps, some strands of samphire, a detached mermaid’s ear.

Lettuce, strangely, has its addicts but I am beyond their exhortations. Lettuce is for rabbits, both the literal and metaphorical sort.

Same is bad?

SUNDAY Roast guinea fowl (plumper and denser than chicken; yearning to be a pheasant) appeared on our dinner table accompanied by new potatoes and green lentils in a savoury stock sauce. MONDAY 5/2 diet day. TUESDAY Guinea fowl leftovers in mushroom cream sauce encased in large square vol au vent. WEDNESDAY 5/2 diet day. THURSDAY We lunched out and only required a lightish evening meal - remains of cream sauce guinea fowl on slice of toast.

In households round the world this week's regime would never happen. I find all the reasons fascinating.

VEGETARIAN/VEGAN. Self-explanatory. Less obvious are those who eat nut roasts shaped as lamb chops. See The Guardian for current acrimonious debate.

THE SATED PALATE. That the body's gustatory preferences would somehow revolt if presented with variations of the same thing, despite diet-day separations. Yet these sensitive souls often drink the same brand of wine over and over provided it's cheap enough.

SOCIOLOGICAL GUILT. That the neighbours might regard this as evidence of poverty.

THE VERY AGED. Who remember the nutritional privations of WW2 when one ate what one had without grumbling, even cabbage five days on the trot.

TEENAGERS. Convinced their parents (all adults for that matter) are deceiving them.

Me? I hate waste especially when it’s speciously justified, as in: “We’ll put this out for the birds.” I appreciate VR’s ingenuity at dressing up food in different guises. I am prepared to argue that food may be transformed such that its origins disappear in the process. I hate myself less – admittedly in a marginal way – when the BBC as custodian of my soul reveals how things are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Yemen, tent cities occupied by the Myanmar, and small foundering craft crossing from Libya to the shores of mainland Europe.  

My life and welcome to it*

Wine's becoming a problem these days.

Tone Deaf readers who date back will know my wine education was backwards way round. As a youth I occasionally drank the best wines in the world, courtesy of my father, a claret enthusiast. Wines that would today cost a fortune (eg, Ch. Margaux 2008, £4783 a case). Since then I've had to aim lower, gradually raising my sights as I became wealthier.

I became "comfortably off" but never wealthy. Alas I could still taste my father's clarets. For decades I tolerated this gap, now at 82 I am growing more impatient. Not that I'm contemplating a remortgage to pay for Ch. Margaux, but I'm spending far too much time in the Land of Remembrance of Things Past. Last night, acknowledging the year is 2018, I went under the stairs.

The wine above is a Cahors. Cahors, in central France, is a mere 150 miles from Bordeaux where Ch. Margaux is created; oenologically speaking the distance is more like that to Mars.

Early Cahors is bitter - undrinkable in my view. The serious young man in glasses at the Cahors cave des vignerons warned me but I knew already. Back home the bottle went under the stairs to be forgotten.

Note the date - 2000. Back then I was still ski-ing. I pulled the cork and sniffed: rich, pungent, multi-layered. But bouquets can be treacherous. I didn't decant it, expecting sludge. After 90 minutes I tasted it and it was pretty good, if light-years away from Ch. Margaux.  A magnum of that vintage would cost £26 today, a bargain. Back in Cahors it probably cost £5.

There are seven “forgotten” bottles – all different – under the stairs. Two are whites and probably past it. I live in straitened times.

* Cribbed from SJ Perelman.

Perhaps it was a weed

Feeding me (aged 5 to 10) during WW2 was a nightmare. Not that I wasn't hungry - I ate morning, noon and night - but I was picky and there was so little to be picky about. Vegetables were the problem.

Carrots, parsnips - sweet, woody. Onions, leeks - slimy. Turnips - fit only for cows. Cauliflower - rare, bad karma since one had to eat the green bits. There wasn't much else other than dreaded cabbage.

These days I love cabbage: de-veined, chopped small, seethed in butter for a few minutes with caraway seeds. Then, there were no caraway seeds and anyway I was a suspicious little bugger; I'd have said my mother was failing to disguise cabbage's true and horrible nature.

Good grief, how my mother tried with cabbage. The deck was stacked against her since the only variety available was very dark green with thick leathery leaves and a rank un-vegetably flavour. No way I'd take it straight, even threatened with a light beating and I was normally a terrible coward when facing pain.

Covered with gravy didn't help. Grated cheese? Nah, cheese was rationed.  How about the “good” (ie, quasi-nutritious) water cabbage had been stewed in? No go; cabbage water is, unsurprisingly, cabbage flavoured.

Desperate to make cabbage water palatable mother added an Oxo cube (Ingredients: wheat flour (with added calcium, iron, niacin, thiamin), salt, maize starch, yeast extract, flavour enhancers (monosodium glutamate, disodium guanylate), colour (ammonia caramel), beef fat (4.5%), autolysed yeast extract, dried beef bonestock, flavourings, sugar, acidity regulator (lactic acid), onion powder.

Dig that ammonia caramel!

“Drink it quickly,” mother advised. As far I can remember I did. What followed I’ve forgotten. But then WW2 did finally end and ten years later proper food appeared in the shops.

Nobody said it'd be easy

As 2017 dawned V said lessons would become more serious. We started with four bars of  Agilita (agility) from Panofka's 24 Vocalises. A vocalise is dully defined as "a singing exercise using individual syllables or vowel sounds to develop flexibility and control of pitch and tone". Another definition includes "other meaningless vocal sounds" as if to emphasise the dullness.

Whereas vocalises are often used by pros, V among them, to warm up before recitals. One, by Rachmaninov, is so beautiful it has entered the international repertory.

Scales with a difference and much harder than they appear on the score.

You want hard? I've got hard. Recently I've been picking apart Mozart's song An Chloë, note by note. Somewhat faster than any of the twenty-plus songs I've previously tackled, also more obviously Mozartean, liberally speckled with curlicues. Here's Rouchswalwe's favourite (see pic), the sadly late

Lucia Popp

chosen because she takes it slightly slower. V has sung An Chloë publicly and Consonants! is pencilled on the score - with good reason. Hard yes, but gorgeous and that helps.

QUITE DIFFERENT Want a terrific wine at £12 (at least from The Wine Society)? Try Ventoux Epicure, Ch. Valcome. Vineyard in the lee of Mont Ventoux, graveyard of some in the Tour de France.

2016 ends on a high

“Let’s find a chippie where we can sit down.”

Thus spake Professional Bleeder, urging her aged parents to overturn the myth that Brits may only eat fish-and-chips on the move and out of rolled-up newspaper. As it happened, Hereford, rarely to the fore in anything (incest, simony, coprophagia, even book-reading, have all been civically tried and discarded), had something new to offer. Those hysterical contributors to TripAdvisor were of one voice: Edwards Plaice (definitely no apostrophe) on Grandstand Road was THE place.

The menu was esoteric - listed among the Extras was vinegar at £1.10. Other prices were modest: were they really charging a quid for a sprinkle of Sarson’s? No, that sum bought a whole bottle. New to me; PB insists it’s a tradition.

For me the batter on cod properly deep-fried should be three-dimensional, standing away from the fishy flesh in a thick structure built up from layers of large crusty cells. Edward clearly knew his batter.

Conversely the chips must be limp and flavoury, ideally done in low-boiling-point dripping. They should encourage me to eat them with my fingers; a fork would ruin the tactile experience. Greatly daring I ordered a pickled egg.

To drink, a 500 ml bottle of Butty Bach premium beer by the South Wye Brewery, my preferred libation from the pub pump. Since the bottled version didn’t differ one iota from the draught, I was a contented gorger.

The bill for three came to £27 and change. PB, equally contented, and whose treat this was, dropped £35 on the saucer and waved away the difference. The staff were astounded, perhaps even slightly appalled. But in shrunken, mean-spirited and inward looking Britain one grabs at contentment where one can.

Gliding's preferable

SIPs - simple inexpensive pleasures. An occasional series.

This post is not about butter and/or bread it's about my personal attitude towards buttering bread. Margarine has a brief walk-on/walk-off part and can be dealt with quickly. During and immediately after WW2 margarine (Hard g or soft g?) may have been smeared on bread in our household, I wouldn't know. It may have been unpleasant to taste, I wouldn't know that. What I do remember is that margarine-smeared bread carried intense social stigma. Only cads and those living below the poverty line ate it.

Aged about eight I was allowed to spread my own bread - long before the introduction of sliced bread (proof of moral degeneracy according to Daily Mail readers) or microwaves. I didn't enjoy this task. Applying rock-hard butter  to roughly hacked bread resulted in a plateful of crumb-covered greasy balls. Yes there were techniques but adults weren't telling. And don't let's talk about sticking butter under the grill; one always left it there too long.

Toast became even more popular since it better resisted spreading. I think, but cannot be sure, I took the line of least resistance and gave up bread-and-butter for several decades. Marriage seemed to coincide with the ready availability of spreadable butter that was also palatable. Our favoured brand has a sick-making name: Lurpak. But we're not slavish. Kerrygold (above) was on offer. The bread is Polish and is one of the best arguments for retaining EU freedom of movement.

No one has written an ode to spreadable butter and I don't intend to start. No doubt there are atavists who swear by intractable butter. Me, I swear at it.  Spreadable butter has removed a minor irritation which, cumulatively, might have driven me to the grave by now.

Let's laud Lurpak.

Liquid dynamite

SIPs - simple inexpensive pleasures. An occasional series.

It's no use, I just can't remember the difference between "sensuous" and "sensual". I've looked it up a dozen times, solicited help from bloggo like-minds, but it just doesn't stick. So you'll have to take my first paragraph today as read.

As the descent into oblivion gains speed, here's one thing that keeps my family from booking the Humanist Society guy who does eulogies. A bottle of alkaline-flavoured fizzy water always at the ready in the fridge. It used to be 1½ litre capacity but now I prefer this pinch-waisted 1 litre shape; its ergonomics fits my sense of aesthetics.

Do you snore? I probably do but it's like quantum mechanics; waking up to check  disturbs the experimental conditions. When I do wake my throat suggests I snore for England; children could use my guzzard as a sandpit. Downstairs I go.

The bottle rests in the fridge's door shelf, that's an absolute must. There's a hiss in the dark as I unscrew the cap and already I feel slightly more human. I swig from the bottle-neck because, after all, it's my bottle. What follows is not drinking as such but an all-out ICBM attack on my dryness; fizz plus bitterness plus chill combine in a shocking pain. It's too much, I tell myself, it's... ecstasy! No other form of hydration (not even the 1945 bottle of Richebourg which cost £500-plus) comes anywhere near. I am simultaneously Smokin' Joe Frazer and Alan Rickman. I am Dick 3 who, as we all know, is himself again.

A litre of Buxton costs 60 p. My soul remains doomed but my body's ready for more work on Opening Bars, my take on singing lessons, another source of ecstasy. Words done: 10,592; target: 25,000

Weihnachtsmarkt 2. Nosh

It's either the Ch. Musar 2003 or 2008 at Beirut
restaurant in Cologne. A noisy, happy evening

A spiritual journey to Cologne? Nah, we were there for fressen, se gaver de or, in English, making pigs of ourselves. Things started off badly en route, in the delightful Belgian town of Leuwen where I cocked up VR's tournedos and my rib-eye steak by carelessly ordering them à point (ie, drained of all life). Oh the shame!

But Beirut, a Lebanese restaurant in Cologne, made up for my booboo. It was packed and we were seated temporarily with the wine list which reminded me why we’d reserved Beirut in the first place. Lebanon is home to Chateau Musar, a great vineyard, and source of a huge dilemma for me: the 2003 (€69) or the 2008 (€55)? My deliberations brought forth the proprietor who chose our meal by ordering a plate of everything on the menu and signalled his approval when I - slightly against my instincts - picked the older wine. The 2003 was magnificent though just about to dive off the edge of a cliff; ordering the 2008 afterwards solved the dilemma and confirmed my instincts.

Am I a lush? An eighty-year-old lush?

We ate meat, tons of it, at Brauhaus Sunner in Walfisch the following evening, where, as mentioned, the star turn was the feisty shouty waitress (left) - super competent, did a good Marlene imitation. Beer, what else?

At La Paix, in Lille (in France) on the way back I ordered blanquette de veau honouring France's greatest culinary tradition - home cooking in a restaurant. An elegantly re-created brasserie which worked.

Just forgot. Starting out we stayed at the Burlington in VR's home town Folkestone in Kent. Ate at the hotel's Bay Tree Grill, where VR's Dad was chef immediately post-WW2. Sentimentalists the lot of us.

VR and Occasional Speeder: Gluhwein mit Rhum

A bit/lot of cheer

HAPPY TIMES! Champagne (that's real champagne - not the sparklers known as cava, prosecco, cremant, sekt, etc.) is cheaper than at any other time in my life.

Why was it so expensive? Not to complicate things: labour-intensive and time-consuming manufacturing procedures.

Was real champagne worth it? Up to you, but the French think so. When, decades ago, some Spanish vineyards sold "Spanish Champagne" the French sued, causing them to desist. Now, if it says "champagne" on the bottle it's been made in eastern France, near the city of Reims, by the traditional method (méthode champenoise).

Let's talk prices. Until fairly recently the lowest going price was about £25 (US: approx $40) a bottle. The big names (Mumm, Pol Roger, Heidsieck, etc) still charge this but may be disposed to deal a bit. What's changed significantly, in the UK at least, is the emergence of smaller, but legitimate, brands going at £10 a pop. (Thanks to Aldi, the German supermarket chain, who led the charge - see pic.)

Is it OK? Who'd ever believe me? But now you can afford to make up your own mind.

Hardline Hope, a novel (6665 words)

(Gayle said) But before that something personal. Your glasses.”

Lindsay sighed. “My glasses. Ah yes.”

“I take it you’ve been asked before.”

“More than once.”

Gayle looked serious. “Do you mind? Do you know what I’m going to say?”

“More or less. I assume you’re as blind as a bat. I assume you wear contacts and hate ‘em. And for two reasons. First because you always know they’re there. Second because you’re ashamed of being a wuss about wearing contacts.”

“I’ll give yew this, Lindsay. You talk straight.”

Note. TD will now be unproductive for a week or so.

From dullness to something else

Other than haslet (a sausagey blob from the sweepings of a butcher’s floor) the dullest sandwich filling is bog-standard, supermarket Cheddar cheese. Piquancy expectations are low; take a bite and you’re into negative values. Yes you can add onion but then it’s a cheese-and-onion sandwich; same with pickled cabbage. With that thinking why not go the whole hog and say the tastiest cheese sandwich is a pork pie?

Assuming you’re claiming to eat a cheese sandwich (a modest claim) the answer lies in a small dab of this or that, so that the structure (two slices of bread and filler) is visibly unchanged. Take this as your starting-point rule. And VR reveals a new twist; to ensure cheese sandwich authenticity, integrate the dab with the butter smeared on the bread. Brilliant!

Yesterday was diet day so no tests. What am I thinking? Crushed chilli paste mixed with the butter! So little paste! The sandwich’s physical integrity remains intact.

Bear in mind: we’re aiming for a flavoured cheese sandwich, not a layered monstrosity which betrays the concept.

Hardline Hope, a novel (5847 words)
Jenson, edging towards them, had now arrived. “Can I help you ladies?” he asked, the expression on his face hopelessly wrong.

Gayle surveyed him eye to eye. “Rickon a Shimatsu (supercar) suits... ladies?”

“Sure. We sold one to a Man City defender’s wife.”

“Who’s famous for being married to a soccer player?”

Jenson simpered which surprised Lindsay. Whatever his oafishness he was supposed to be ace at selling. Jenson said, “Well, yes.”

“Yuh’see Jenson, I’m sort of famous myself. And not for being married to anyone. Seems you’re selling hairy chests here, and not changing the story for those of us who wear bras; or sometimes nothing at all in that department. Get my meaning?”