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Culture

A flask of wine, a loaf of bread, – and thou

Apparently, if you ask wine experts to match the tasting notes to the wine, not only are they unable to identify them on the basis of other people’s notes (beyond obvous things like ‘it’s a sauvignon blanc’ or ‘it’s oaky’), they are unable to identify them on the basis of their own tasting notes from a few months ago. In other words, all that stuff they come out with (“I’m getting a slight hint of candle-stubs and grass”) is too impressionistic to be really informative.

Presumably the same would apply to a lot of poetry reviews.

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pasta in three cheese sauce

It’s just turned cold and autumny here over the past few days, which may have been what persuaded me that pasta in cheese sauce was a good idea, since it’s an Italian equivalent to cheese on toast – comfort food.

Anyway. I cooked some penne, chucked in butter, olive oil, chopped stilton, chopped dolcelatte, grated parmesan and a pinch of smoked paprika, then stirred it until it formed a sauce. At which point the tubes of pasta looked like sections of artery clogged with fat. Tasted good, but very rich indeed and a touch salty.

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okonomiyaki

I went to Abeno for lunch, near the British Museum. It claims to be the only specialist okonomiyaki restaurant in Europe. Okonomiyaki is a Japanese omelette-y thing that is cooked in front of you on a hot-plate at the table. I had one with pork and kimchee (spicy Korean fermented cabbage), which was topped with dried bonito flakes. It was nice, though not as good as the rice dish I ordered – rice with green tea poured over it and dressed with nori. Yum. And then I had that flaked ice dessert the Japanese do – in maccha flavour (i.e. the powdered tea used for the tea ceremony).

I recommend it if you’re going to the BM.

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Culture Other

Bob Denver & Americana

Bob Denver, the star of Gilligan’s Island, has died. Gilligan’s Island is one of those bits of Americana which feel familiar but I actually know entirely via hearsay. It’s one of the most frequently used pop culture references in other US pop culture – they mentioned it on House just last night – but I’ve never actually seen an episode because I don’t think it’s been shown on British TV in my lifetime (ever?).

Similarly, when I went to the US I felt it was very important to eat a Twinkie, to try and find out what it was about this confectionary that made it iconic. Answer – well, it’s certainly different. Bizarrely artificial and liable to send you into diabetic shock. The O. J. Simpson trial was odd, too. The whole thing was covered in detail in the UK news, partially because they tend to follow big US news stories anyway, and partially because the moment he was chased down the freeway on TV, it was a great story. But somehow, the whole point of the thing was missing; the premise of the story was that a Very Famous Man was accused of murdering his wife – but in a country where few people care about American football, he wasn’t actually famous before the trial. He’s famous now, but famous for being accused of murder.

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Culture Me Nature Other

I’m back.

I’ve come back from Perigord to the grim news from New Orleans. I don’t really have anything to say about that, for the moment.

I did manage to listen to the cricket on Radio4 LW via a buzzy little radio. I ended up having to hold it out of an upstairs window and nearly had a heart attack when I thought the Aussies were going to win the thing. Fingers crossed for the Oval. I have a ticket for the fifth day, so my ideal result would be an England win on Monday. But I’d also accept five days of rain.

Not much on the bird front in France; a distant hoopoe was the best bird. The swallows and martins are gathering on the telephone wires and in the treetops. They take off in great twittering flocks and flutter around chasing insects before settling again somewhere else. It’s such an evocative sign of the changing seasons; one which I generally miss, living in London. One day soon they’ll take off and head for Africa.

Swallowtail, tiger swallowtail, lots of butterflies. My favourite insects though were the hummingbird hawkmoths, which I could happily watch for hours. Minutes, anyway.

Lots of booze, lots of food – duck carpaccio, duck paté, confit of duck gizzards, duck pizza. A morning of very hung-over canoeing, which made me feel like I was going to die. We visited a C12th church carved out of the face of a cliff, complete with a necropolis, a C9th font for total immersion baptism, and a reliquary modelled on the tomb Joseph of Aramathea had built for Christ in the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem – as seen by one of the local nobles who’d been there on the Crusades. It even had a temple to the Roman god Mithras which they found under the main church. So that was pretty fab. We played the Lord of the Rings edition of Risk, as well. There may be something in life that makes you feel more geeky than saying “I’m going to invade Fangorn” and then pushing a little plastic orc onto your opponent’s square and rolling a dice to see who wins. But I don’t know what it is.

I finished The Victorians by A. N. Wilson, which is OK. One volume isn’t really enough to deal with a 70 year period, and his opinionated comments sometimes seem a bit dubious, but it’s readable enough. I was more impressed by The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, which was last year’s Booker winner. The central character is a gay PhD student writing about the style of Henry James while living in the house of an up-and-coming Tory MP in the 1980s; he (the student) becomes involved with a wealthy coke-snorting playboy who eventually dies of AIDS. It is in fact something of a satire of that period, but it’s handled with a much more sensitive and nuanced touch than that summary would suggest. Hollinghurst is an impressive prose stylist himself.

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Duck with cassis

Joint some duck legs into drum-sticks and thighs. Brown them (you can do this is a dry frying pan; you’re really not going to need any extra fat). Transfer the duck to a casserole, just saving enough to brown some sliced onion. Put the onion in with the duck. De-glaze the pan with sherry, and add some chicken stock and a generous slug of cassis to the casserole before cooking it at 170C for about an hour and a half.

It’s very rich – sweet and fruity – but nice, and not overpoweringly blackcurranty.