Tag: Coffee

Camping and Clapton

“We’re going camping for the weekend!” Alison had announced a week or two ago.  So I did have some warning, but nothing quite prepared me.  Alison and Sebastian collected me from the City Airport in the Passat Estate, which was packed to the gunnels with all manner of camping equipment, and some equipment not conventionally associated with camping.  Like king size duvets, for example.  “I don’t really do camping,” my sister explained.  There was barely room for my luggage.  I was glad I had decided to travel light.
Camping on the south coast of England is somewhat different to my previous camping expeditions in Scotland and Ireland.  The ground, not to mention the air, is somehow drier and warmer.  After a pleasant lunch of baguettes and pork pies, Angela and I set to work on putting up the tent, while Alison blew up the airbeds and made a cafetière of coffee.
Later I poked my head into the tent to find my sister kitting out the beds with organic Egyptian cotton sheets.  Like she says, she doesn’t really do camping.
But we all did it, and survived.  Despite a decent thunderstorm threatening to rip the tent away from its moorings in the early hours of Monday morning, apparently.  I was oblivious to it all.  Ah, the value of good earplugs.
We retreated back to London yesterday, once the tent had dried out a bit.  I showered and changed and shot straight out again.  I had tickets for Eric Clapton, and I didn’t want to be late.  I wasn’t, as it turned out, and it was a great night.  I was there with my friend Iain, who also accompanied me to see Clapton this time last year, in Hyde Park.  This time round, it all felt a little more… civilised… which was, I suppose, entirely reasonable and to be expected given that it was in the Royal Albert Hall.  A magnificent venue, and we had brilliant seats, but all in all I preferred last year.  The band was slightly different this time, Doyle Bramhall II having been replaced by Andy Fairweather-Low, who was curiously subdued throughout, only getting a solo spot once, towards the very end.  In my experience, a band feeds off its audience to a large extent, and with a crowd of well-behaved mostly forty-to-sixty-somethings, all sitting down, as compared with last year’s younger, sunshine-and-alcohol-fuelled crowd, nothing was going to get set alight.  And with Clapton on the seventh night of an eleven night stint, I suppose the band were going to be on auto-pilot to a certain extent anyway.  ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ was certainly an unwelcome addition to the set-list from where I was sitting, and the acoustic version of ‘Layla’, while great in its own right, is not quite as, um, electric as the original.  Anyway, it was a good experience, and I’m glad I was there.
Today was a chance to recharge the batteries a little, although I ventured into the East End in the afternoon.  Got a little lost, and found myself passing the end of St Mary Axe, a street which houses the organisation that regulates my profession.  I considered popping up to their offices to see if any of their staff were doing enough work to merit our scandalous retention fee, but opted to try and find a record shop instead.  I ended up in a hip coffee shop on Brick Lane.
“Black coffee, please.”
“Americano or filter?”
“Americano.”
The girl hesitated as her eyes fixed on my t-shirt.
“Can I read your t-shirt?”
The strap of my man-bag was obscuring the anti-Starbucks logo.  She was clearly concerned that it was an actual Starbucks t-shirt I was wearing.  I moved the strap.
“Oh, that’s cool.  We like that.”  Her colleague behind the counter chuckled.
Phew.  I was relieved that I was considered ok to drink coffee there.  I glanced up at the board on the wall above the counter to discover  “Chav Coffee (filter)” in the list of drinks available. Phew, again.  I settled down at a table with a left-behind copy of the Guardian, and tried to look nonchalant.
Tomorrow sees my second visit to a renowned London arena in three days. This time it’s Lord’s, for a Twenty20 thrash between Middlesex and Kent, where the newly-installed floodlights at the home of cricket are set to be used for the first time.  And I get to catch up with another old friend.  This holiday lark is just the thing.

Coffee and my Granny

I’m fed up drinking tea. I finally cracked yesterday morning, while I was in town getting my ski boots attended to. I needed some breakfast, and having still 40 minutes of Edinburgh George St rip-off parking still paid for, decided to go across the street to Cento Tre rather than my usual West End haunt. Regardless of where I ended up, the prospect of having a cup of tea with my breakfast was really too dismal to contemplate. I miss coffee so much, having given it up for the sake of my stomach over a year ago.

Tea is so… featureless. So insipid compared to coffee. At least at breakfast. Tea has its place, but it’s not beside a croissant on a breakfast table. And you can’t get a decent cup of tea in town anyway.

So I marched across the street, full of resolve and determination, with The Guardian clutched under my arm. My sister had texted me earlier this morning.

Get guardian today page 83 of magazine.x

Just like that. No capitalisation. No punctuation to speak of.

I’m not usually a Guardian reader, in fact I don’t normally read newspapers at all. When I do buy one, it’s the Telegraph, which is more an indication of my crossword preferences, rather than any political leanings. The Guardian crossword, on the odd occasion that I’ve attempted it, has remained defiantly inscrutable.

I looked up page 83 of the magazine to find the Food section. And did a sharp double-take. It’s not every day you open a national broadsheet’s magazine to find your granny featured in the text. The writer was a chef friend of my sister’s, who was promoting one of his recipes which combined potatoes and pasta. Our granny was name-checked as someone who, being Irish, was unable to eat a meal without potatoes. I’m not entirely sure that gran would have approved of Mr Ottolenghi’s potato lasagne. Might have been a bit new-fangled for her. And despite being born in Co Donegal, she might even have disputed the ‘Irish’ tag, as someone who deliberately chose British citizenship over Irish after the Partition in 1921…! But I daresay she would have held her hands up and acknowledged that no meal is complete without some potatoes.

I sat back with my black coffee and almond croissant and reflected on what our granny would think of my lifestyle today. I can still see her shaking her fist at me, usually when she was baby-sitting us and I wouldn’t shut up and go to sleep. When she wasn’t shaking her fist she was often waving her walking stick in a vaguely threatening manner. When I wasn’t playing golf with it, that is. It was a very nice blackthorn walking stick, and its shape bore a strong resemblance to a driver, at least to me. I have no idea what she would make of me driving into town yesterday when I could have walked, having my ski boots adjusted in preparation for a ski holiday in the French Alps next month, and settling down to a continental breakfast in an Italian eatery while reading the Guardian. And no porridge or potatoes to be seen anywhere.

How times have changed.

Oh, and the coffee? It was AMAZING.

The exciting life of a single man

Allow me to introduce my good friend Paul. Paul has expressed an interest in hearing about the exciting life of a single man. This is because he is married, and life is, as you can see above, somewhat devoid of excitement. So much so, that for kicks he sometimes wears a Superman thong. On top of his trousers.

Admittedly, tonight I am not setting new records in Friday night excitement. However, sometimes a cup of coffee and an Empire biscuit are all that’s required. Add Van Morrison to the mix, chuntering away in the background about a throne of Ulster day, and Wiseman on the (other) sofa setting the world to rights, and … jings I could be married. I have served Mark his coffee in the mug with ‘BIRD’ emblazoned on the side. It’s good for the mug to get an outing every now and then, even if it’s not a real bird using it. I must get out more myself.

Last night I got out, although only as far as John Sneddon’s for tea. Johnboy is the King of blue. He owns more blue clothing than an acolyte of the Temple of Darkness. He is also an excellent cook, and treated me to a great meal, after which I availed myself of his blue bathroom. He informed me that he had recently had a clearing out of his flat, and ditched a couple of pot-plants that weren’t quite up to scratch. One suspects that their demise was hastened by an inability to produce blue flowers.

It’s been a relatively quiet week. Managed to get my car washed, visit Stephen and Louise for the first time since they got married (in April!), give blood, and put some poison down for the mice, since the little darlings have made a reappearance. It has remained untouched for the last 24 hours, which is unlike them, but am not too worried as on this occasion the mice have chosen not to run around under my floorboards in the middle of the night. Which makes for a more restful night.

Tomorrow, Dunfermline await the might of Holy Cross 2nd XI. We lost last week, I eventually discovered, by 10 runs or so. Must win tomorrow. Am also working tomorrow, in the morning. Feels like I’ve worked every Saturday in the summer, probably because I’ve been away a few weekends recently, and so whenever I’ve been in Edinburgh at the weekend I’ve had to work. Normally it’s one in three or so. Had a look at the diary this week and realised that I haven’t had a full week off work for over a year now. Still, my week off in September is looming larger on the horizon. I think I’ll be ready for it when it comes…