A London Weekend

However long you live here, London always throws up something new, surprising and fabulous. It’s diversity doesn’t stop at having the largest number of foreign communities resident - every Londoner’s specific interests are catered to in depth as well, allowing for wonderful crossovers, mashups and discoveries.

So this last weekend was a bit of a London mash-up for me. It started, as all good weekends do, on Friday evening. A friend treated me to a play at the National Theatre: This House by James Graham. This is not the sort of play I am usually interested in - contemporary, and about 70’s politics and House of Parliament procedures. My usual theatrical interests are Classics (deep!) and Stars (shallow!) - I recently took in James McAvoy’s Macbeth, covering both - so This House was completely off my radar until I saw a trailer for it at the cinema. It looked amazing! It turns out that it’s a National Theatre hit and had returned for a second run at the larger Olivier theatre.

We were lucky to get great seats in the auditorium. The staging has a block of parliamentary style benches on stage, and some lucky audience members get to sit on these - the blocks are on two of the Olivier’s revolves and swivel round for scenes set in the House for parliamentary votes. Most of the time they are flat on and the front of the stage becomes the Whips’ offices as they plot and scheme (Tories) or desperately try to keep things afloat (Labour).

The play covers events from the fall of Ted Heath to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, through the eyes of the Whips. The Tories are blasé, urbane, worldly, and have seen it all before. Born to rule. Witty, but prone to bullying their newbies and snobbish. They become increasingly nervous of the top dog as Thatcher entrenches her leadership (initially portrayed as a weird fluke they expected not to last).

The Labour side show mainly working class types and accents (and the only women MPs in the play). The men swear like sailor’s parrots and then apologise to the women, who get annoyed by the apologies. Wilson’s government had a wafer-thin margin and was expected to fall within weeks - however, it lasted 4.5 years, and the play shows the desperate lengths the Labour whips went to to keep it all together (and the lengths the Tories went to to take them down). It’s all very funny and engrossing but one is aware that Thatcher wins in the end and changes everything (the play ends with a recording of her famous victory speech in 1979).

We repaired afterwards for a debrief and cocktail at Skylon’s bar. I’ve not eaten in this restaurant in its current incarnation (I did before when it was run by a celebrity chef) - the room itself is so much more beautiful and glamorous now after the Royal Festival Hall refurb. It also benefits from the fifties revival trend. We quaffed fab cocktails, surrounded by Italians - so many of them around in London at the moment. Our discussions turned on the Parliamentary news of the moment - the spectacular and catastrophic fall from grace of Coalition minister Chris Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce, dubbed “the Clytemnestra of Clapham”. Indeed this is a greek tragedy, with both parties being sentenced to a jail term for perverting the course of justice today (over a speeding ticket in 2003!), but all their family dirty laundry has been fully aired in the press over the last few months. The Huhnes’ marital home was actually quite near to me, I’m familiar with their street in a “would love to live there’ kind of way. I also lived for many years with someone who went back and forth to Europe frequently, and would no doubt have known the stretch of road Huhne was caught speeding in (luckily, my housemate had a driver to ferry her to and from the airport so speeding was never an issue).

So far, so usual for me but Saturday would see me yanked right out of my usual tracks.

My niece is in a women’s eights team (Cantabridgian juniors) and was booked to race in the Womens’ Eights Head of the River Race (WEHORR) on Saturday. I’m vaguely aware of the Oxford/Cambridge boat race at the end of March but it appears that the whole of March is a big racing month on the Thames for rowers. My knowledge of rowing is not extensive (I called them ‘paddles’ and was put firmly right by a rowing mother - they are correctly called “blades”).

I met my brother and sister-in-law at the Battersea Affordable Art Fair where they had just made a purchase, and we taxi’d to the finish line at Putney Bridge just as the first boats arrived.

There were around 330 boats taking part. A ‘head’ race means they aren’t all actually starting at the same time - they are let go in batches in number order, so are racing against the clock. Coxes and teams use “Cox Boxes” to monitor their progress. The race goes downstream from Chiswick to Putney (the Oxford/Cambridge race goes upstream but timed to start on an incoming tide).

There was a great atmosphere amongst the crowds of supporters, and the sight of all the boats on the Thames was magnificent. we were treated to watching them sprint for the finish line in front of us and then double back past us to where they disembarked.

It took hours though for them all to come through, and the temperature noticeably dipped throughout the afternoon. After my niece’s team sailed past (they did well and were rightly proud of their achievement in their first big race, even with a broken cox box), we supporters all repaired to The Duke’s Head pub for a very late lunch.

The Duke’s Head is a quintessential rowers’ pub, and makes the most of its prime position on the start line of the Oxford/Cambridge boat race with a magnificent dining room - soaring ceiling and massive windows on three sides overlooking the river - and racing paraphernalia as decoration. The pub nails its colours firmly to the mast with its walls a Cantabridgian light blue.

Lunch/dinner was a hugely welcome wild boar burger with triple fried chips and a bowl of “allotment vegetables” - chanterey carrots, savoy cabbage and french beans. I toasted my niece’s team’s performance with a glass of sauvignon blanc, even as said team was whisked back to Cambridge thoroughly exhausted from their 4 hours on the icy river.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

Onwards and upwards: it's our annual chance to forget all the troubles of the past year, start anew and to dream big again. May it bring happiness to us all. It looks like it's going to bring the long-awaited Abba Museum to Stockholm, which is another reason to visit Sweden again (along with the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö this May).

My new year was very mellow, as I didn't feel like venturing out of the warmth into rain-drenched London town to see the fireworks or do any parties. Instead I paid culinary tribute to my half-Polish origins by making a batch of placki kartoflane (pronounced PLAHTZ-kee kar-taw-FLAH-neh) and washing them down with Winter Pimms (this representing my English half). The pancakes were a huge treat when I was a child - I remember it was my dad's job to grate the onions; my mum would then mix the grated onion with grated potatoes, a tablespoon or so of flour, salt, pepper, and an egg or two and then fry the batter in a deepish slick of hot oil until the pancakes were crispy golden brown on the outside and meltingly soft inside. I think the grated vegetables allow more mixing with the fat and therefore possibly an even higher fat content than French Fries (the pancakes also take quite a lot of salt).

These days I drain them on kitchen paper before eating, and limit myself to one batch a year - usually in the winter when one needs a bit of mental and physical insulation.

I also pace myself - two medium-size baking potatoes' worth of placki go quite a long way, although they are very moreish. So the batter sits by a pan all evening - heating up the pan and frying a batch of three placki is the work of minutes (getting rid of the excess poundage from one's waistline will of course take months).

With friends and relatives spread out now across the globe, new year greetings, texts and calls started coming in at 2pm (Australia), followed by India, Zanzibar, South Africa, The Netherlands, and then finally Los Angeles. It was fun to feel the New Year wash over the globe like a gigantic wave. The world seems a lot smaller than when I was a child.

Now, of course, cities compete on YouTube for the best fireworks display - with Sydney and London being the most competitive. London's was extraordinary, if slightly spoilt by all those Tory voiceovers. New Year's fireworks as State propaganda. Oh well, at least it was over in 12 minutes!

A Christmas Feast

At the beginning of December I attended a lecture at the British Museum on the origins of our modern Christmas celebrations in the ancient Roman feast of Saturnalia. Basically, the early Christians stole Christmas lock, stock and barrel from the Romans (December 25th was the birthday of the god Mithras) and it is surprising just how much a Roman coming back today would recognise - feasting with family, parties with friends, gift-giving, “peace on earth goodwill to all men” - but even silly hats, jokes and japes, cakes, puddings and nuts, and (remarkably) gingerbread men. The idea of the ‘king of the feast’ - surviving in the form of a coin hidden in the Christmas pudding or the fève a lucky guest discovers in a galette des rois - comes directly from the Romans.

It made me think about how cultural traditions work - both in terms of the larger culture as a whole and in our individual lives. Repetition never repeats entirely exactly - traditions and lives evolve - but the repeated attempt at the ideal encourages comparisons and brings back memories of how it was when.

I am a hardened traditionalist, and I wholly concur with Felicity Cloake’s assertion in the New Statesman that “December 25th belongs to the birds”: a ringing defence of all things turkey and sprouting.

To be fair though, it is has become a traditional pursuit in itself to defend the Christmas turkey - the bird is entrenched in our tradition but it has always had its doubters. In their favour, turkeys are out of the ordinary (and therefore ideal for special celebrations), large (ideal for feeding multitudes), fairly bland meat (again, ideal for feeding multitudes) and relatively low-fat. Their downfall is a tendency to dry out in cooking. In my childhood the cure for this was to wrap the turkey in bacon and tin foil; these days soaking it for 24 hours in a brine bath is the fashionable option. But there are those who depart from the turkey route flagrantly - I remember as a child being totally shocked by a friend’s mother serving prawn curry as the Christmas meal. This was all the more outrageous as our family, good expats, stuck with resolute rigidity to the prescribed Christmas formula - even down to the brussels sprouts, which were a particularly exotic and hard-to-find vegetable in the 30˚C heat of an African midsummer.

This year, as I found myself alone on Christmas day, a turkey was out of the question, and I didn’t think a chicken would be Chistmassy enough. I decided to go for quail (which I’ve never cooked before) and went with a traditional pot-roast Spanish recipe: brandied quail with caramelised onions. But the accoutrements were the same as for the traditional English feast - bread sauce and roast potatoes, sprouts with roast carrots and macadamia nuts, and a gingered parsnip purée. I love sprouts but am not a fan of parsnips. I made an exception this year because (a) they’re traditional and (b) I have recently become a fan of ginger and a recipe for gingered parsnip purée intrigued me (it may have converted me; I will do this again). The recipe claimed it was a replacement for ‘outmoded’ bread sauce but I love bread sauce so had both.

My starter was a plate of smoked salmon on rye topped with home-made gently pickled cucumber slices and dill, snacked while watching the Christmas special Doctor Who, and to finish I had Passion fruit puddle pudding. I kept myself liberally quenched with poinsettias - Cranberry juice and Cointreau topped with Prosecco. Merry Christmas all!

Halloween

Halloween has really taken off as an annual event and Claphamites celebrate it with gusto - here is my random selection of creepy ghouls and beasties prowling the clubs and bars of South London.

Pancake madness

The Telegraph has a real bee in it’s bonnet about the UK’s growing fascination with pre-made pancake mixes and pancakes. It’s had a flurry of articles, some admiring the healthy growth of shop sales but most contemplating the [presumed dire] social significance of the phenomenon - the funniest being this satirical effort.

To me pancakes are one of the pleasures of a trip to France, where they seem to be a traditional part of street-food and fast food outlets. In the UK, we mostly ignore them until Shrove Tuesday when they become a big thing, despite most of us being extremely lapsed Christians. It’s all about the food, isn’t it?!

Why are we buying pre-made pancakes? Possibly because, like all cultural traditions, they have accumulated a mystique consisting of all kinds of conflicting rules and theories, guaranteed to confuse the low-skilled time-poor domestic cook.

Even Delia Smith, the patron saint of easy domestic cookery, rabbits on about sifting flour in piles, breaking eggs blah blah blah. In this regard I always remember my friend Mark’s approach - just bung all the ingredients (flour, milk, eggs) in a blender and flip the switch. Hey presto - pancake batter in seconds!

The next debate is whether or not to ‘rest’ the mixture. I’m with the resters - if the mix is in a blender jug it can just stay there for an hour or so until you are ready to start cooking.

Delia helpfully suggests using a soup ladle to ladle the mix into the hot frying pan - this is a really good idea and helps you gauge how much mix you need to cover the bottom of your pan. The first pancake is traditionally the sacrificial practice one, but no matter how disastrous looking always still tastes good!

And they really are pretty fantastic items - amazing that such relatively simple ingredients can achieve such a culinary peak experience. Crispy and golden, yet also meltingly yielding; fragile but with the tensile strength to wrap around a variety of fillings.

My pan is deep with sloping edges and a quick dipping motion is enough to get the pancake to flip. But it’s easy enough to use a spatula to flip them as well.

It was pancakes all the way last night - so I started with savory Roquefort cheese and spinach pancakes and moved on to the traditional lemon and sugar ones (still as amazingly good as when first made for me by my mum many years ago; pancakes have a real affinity for sharp citrussy flavours). The Nutella jar was eventually put away unused - too rich for me - but I experimented with a passion fruit decanted onto a pancake. Recommended.

The downside is they are very calorie-laden beasties, and like all fast food very more-ish - you can’t just have one or two. I had nine all told, which tots up well in excess of 1000 calories. Back to the diet today!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy love-fest to all you loved-up couples out there! Some photos of the Valentine's celebrations in Clapham and London: a veritable orgy of balloons, hearts, cake and pink.

Birksen Florists in Clapham Old Town always have the most ravishing seasonal windows.


Love is a four letter word: cakes from Konditor and Cook in Borough Market

Ceramic Valentines from North Street Potters, Clapham

You know you want me: cards from Scribbler, branches all over London

Chinese New Year

Kung Hei Fat Choy! Happy Chinese New Year! I went on a photo-walk in Soho and here are the results.




It is the year of the metallic rabbit.I hve mine already! And if I'm very good I'll get to enjoy it at Easter :-)

Tate à Tate: Arshile Gorky, Theo Van Doesburg, Henry Moore and Chris Ofilli

A post which went lost and missing earlier this year!

April was a lovely month for visits from far-flung friends. One of my
very dearest friends was in London on a lap of honour the last couple of weeks before a significant milestone. It was fantastic spending time with her and catching up. We had excellent, sociable meals here and here. She was whisked away to a country spa for a few days, but was back in Londres for an afternoon of hitting the Tates.

I had not seen any of the temporary exhibitions, so it seemed like a plan. We decided to start at Tate Modern and take the Tate-to-Tate boat upstream to Tate Britain.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

To be honest I couldn’t really remember much about Arshile Gorky from my Art History studies – other than he seemed to be a second-ranking Abstract Expressionist. This show bears that impression out – it contains copious quantities of rather dull and derivative surrealism-based abstraction – all bar one room, which is by far the most impressive.

Poor Gorky had a desperately unhappy and tragic life – his father left Turkey for America when the future artist was little more than a baby; he and his remaining family had to flee Turkey during the Armenian Genocide and in the aftermath his mother died of starvation in Russia while Gorky was still a teenager.

Many years later he came across a photograph of himself and his mother from this time and used it as the basis for a series of portraits and paintings: without doubt masterpieces all. Tender, sombre and tragic – a supreme memorial. I responded to these so much more than to the abstracts – several of which were beautiful, but mostly just seemed professional and competent. One wonders if Gorky was in the wrong place at the wrong time – he was a brilliant figurative artist in a New York art world in thrall exclusively to Abstraction.  And it turns out my half-memory was wrong – it was Gorky apparently who lit that Abstract Impressionist fuse. But in retrospect his artistic heirs overshadow him.

Arshile Gorky
Tate Modern
10 February - 3 May 2010

Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World

Van Doesburg was a founder member of the Avant-Garde and crossed swords with the Bauhaus (before the Bauhaus succumbed to his vision). The title of the show definitely describes it well - his ambition was definitely to construct a new world. The exhibition contains examples of his typographic work, furniture design and architecture as well as painting. The typography still looks modern. This show is hugely fun and very absorbing.

Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World
Tate Modern
4 February - 16 May 2010

Chris Ofilli

Both of us are Chris Ofili fans and were looking forward to this one with anticipation. A retrospective, especially a first one, is a tricky event for an artist - can the body of work sustain the hype?

Ofili is undoubtedly the real thing - stunning paintings and ambitious ensembles; very sensitive drawings too.

Chris Ofilli
Tate Britain
27 January - 16 May 2010

Henry Moore

This show looks very handsome - the sculptures are arranged against beautiful coloured walls. It’s very refreshing to see Moore’s more intimate pieces.
Henry Moore
Tate Britain
24 February - 8 August 2010

Adventures in Wonderland

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Alice arrived in a Clapham wonderland earlier this month as Trinity Hospice welcomed Londoners to its garden open day in aid of the NGS.


The afternoon was themed as an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ family fun-day with entertainers, including magicians and costumed stilt walkers for children, stalls to browse and drinks and light refreshments. All in the setting of the magical and beautiful English country style gardens.

Present shopping

I raced around London last Saturday morning - had to get to Whole Foods in High Street Kensington to buy John Master's Organics Blood Orange and Vanilla body wash as an early birthday present for my friend Sue, who was visiting from Cape Town. I picked up wrapping paper and ribbon from Scribbler at High St Ken too - having very amusing interactions with their staff there - and then tubed to St Paul's where I gulped down a quick sandwich and wrapped the present next to the fountain, being very careful of pigeons, wind, and splashes from the fountain. The result isn't one of my best but nevermind. Then I toddled off to Tate Modern to meet Sue.

crafty me

This Spring has seen a veritable renaissance in creativity at Hedgie towers, especially in the textile arts.

Many years ago on the bus to college my dear friend Ingrid taught me to knit. Ingrid was a free-form jumper knitter – she never followed a pattern and just seemingly randomly used different colours. The results were always amazing; true works of art.

So recklessly I threw myself into knitting jumpers – not a traditional start for the novice knitter. Of course unlike Ingrid I always followed a pattern religiously. The repetitive knitting experience soothed the stress of studying for exams. My first jumper ended up miles too big – tension issues – and I didn’t like the cut of the neck of the second.

Then I moved to the UK to complete my education and was seduced by a Kaffe Fassett exhibition at the V&A. I launched into his Persian Poppy pattern vest.


The colour work I took in my stride but Kaffe’s basic sweater patterns follow the divide-for-neck at armhole level formula that I hated in my second sweater. Altering a pattern to raise the neck was a bit daunting, Ingrid was a continent away, and work on the sweater was abandoned at this point. Some twenty years ago.

However, a rare attempt at spring cleaning recently revealed the wool stash and on a whim I just starting knitting a scarf – quite the easiest thing to do.


This led to me looking at the poppy vest again. I plotted every stitch on a graph sheet, and hopefully now have an altered neckline that will work. So the poppy vest is going to be finally completed! Woop!

Meanwhile, my freeform stripey scarf led to me trying a stripey hat to match – less successful, but still quite fun. I want to do stripey gloves now to finish the ensemble.

All this knitting activity was egged on marvellously by web 2.0: YouTube helped with knitting primer lessons and a twitter friend referred me to the
Ravelry site – networking for knitters! It’s speeded my progress up amazingly.


But, that’s not all! My textile activities are expanding . . . but that’s another post . . . .

Birthday Cake: Chocolate Mint Cupcakes

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The time of year to think about birthday cakes has rolled around again. I know cupcakes have been all the rage ever since Sarah Jessica Parker visited the Magnolia Bakery in NYC in an episode of Sex and the City almost ten years ago - cupcake boutique bakeries have been springing up in every major city the world over - so I though I'd better embrace this trend before it was over (bound to be any day soon now).

In my internet researches I had bookmarked this recipe for Chocolate Mint Cupcakes - it looked fairly straightforward yet utterly tempting so I thought I'd give it a bash. Chocolate and mint are two of my favourite things. And I love combining them.

Here are the ingredients. All impeccably free range, organic, fair trade etc etc etc. I decided to take Nigella's advice on using 00 grade flour and I think it did make a big difference.



Basically, you sift the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl. In another bowl, you whisk the eggs, sugar and peppermint extract. Melt the chocolate, butter and mix with cocoa. Then combine all the ingredients and spoon into cupcake cases.




The cake dough seemed far more fudgy in texture than I'm used to (but tasted divine). It was difficult to get an even loading in the cases, so I left the blobs pretty au naturel. But they rose spectacularly well - I would class this as the best result I have had from this oven (for some reason i really battle with baking in my oven - roasting meats though it takes in its stride, so I don't quite understand the problem. It may well lie on the other side of the apron).

Before:

After:


Cupcake display is crucial to achieve the right elegantly twee retro 50's teatime effect. Alas, storage considerations in Hedgie Towers preclude the use of a cake stand, but last winter I spotted a brilliantly improvised one in the windows of Zeitgeist on the Pavement, Clapham Old Town. You balance plates on wineglasses - and I have just the right decoratively shaped glasses! Hoorah!




I frosted the cakes with ordinary buttercream icing flavoured with peppermint extract. This was delicious. Prue Leith has a recipe for Crème au beurre meringue icing, where you beat egg whites with icing sugar over a simmering pan before adding soft butter and the flavourings. This icing gives a superlative result and if I made these again and I would try that.

I do recommend these cakes as they are easy, slightly unusual and very good. Lesley said they reminded her of eating an After Eight mint chocolate, so if you like those, you're bound to love these!

Last year's birthday cake: Chocolate Nemesis.

Merry Christmas

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Salt dough goodness inspired by Kirsty Allsopp's homemade Christmas! I used satin finish white spray paint from Paperchase to coat them. Was going to finish them off with silver doodlings, but felt they look quite good as they are!


More homemade Christmas - Nigella's iced Christmas tree decoration biscuits and a festive batch of Christmas fudge!

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas!