Potato(e!) Stall in Sheffield

What a Wonderful Mess

A baked potato stall photographed in Sheffield on 24 March 2010. How not to present your product. But the visual image is terrific, complete jumble, right down to the shirt hanger lying on the pavement.

In more detail:

And two people march past on their mobiles, you can just see them in the original:

Two mobiles, two taxis and a posting box. There’s a way of walking with your mobile clamped to your ear. I’m almost sure that the two would not be walking with such a forward-leaning gait if they were not on the phone. More research needed on this.

Triple-Barrelled Puzzlement

Christmas Dinner in Ravenglass – December 2009

We are intrigued by who goes to an upmarket hotel for Christmas, what they do and what they are thinking – in a hotel owned by the triple-barrelled Gordon-Duff-Penningtons.

On Christmas Eve we had booked for dinner in the hotel in Ravenglass, quite an upmarket hotel, called the Pennington Arms. Much of the area around Ravenglass is owned by the Gordon-Duff-Pennington’s (triple-barrelled) who live at Muncaster Castle. Muncaster Castle is their ancestral home and a very fine castle it is, in very fine grounds ablaze with rhododendrons in the early summer, and even containing a small church. That I know all this about the Gordon-Duff-Pennington’s home is because straightened circumstances in the form of a crumbling, very expensive-to-fix building have obliged them to open their house and grounds to the paying public.

The Gordon-Duff-Pennington’s have also begun renting some of the houses on their estate to visitors, and it was one of these that we hired for a weekend last April for a family party. On the Sunday evening the boiler failed, and we called the help number and round came Iona Gordon-Duff-Pennington to try and sort it out, which she was unable to do so she called the local handyman and he couldn’t fix it either, so she opened up the adjoining letting property for us so we could shower. Dealing with household emergencies on a Sunday evening in April is one of the necessities of life, if you are a Gordon-Duff-Pennington whose fortune has its limits. Iona is probably in her early forties.

Anyway, the G-D-P’s have recently refurbished to a fairly high standard the long-closed pub in Ravenglass, called as it always was called, The Pennington Arms, and opened it as an upmarket hotel, which since they owned the building and the land it stands on, probably made sense.

We’ve looked into the dining room of the Pennington Arms on previous occasions and it has always looked rather empty, so we booked to eat our dinner in the bar, but when we arrived we could see that the dining room was fairly full, if not exactly jolly-looking, and the bar completely empty, and the manager lady suggested we eat in the dining room for extra ‘atmosphere’, so we agreed.

This was at 7.30, and to our surprise, most of the people in the dining room were onto at least their main course. In fact apart from two gay men who arrived shortly after us, we were the last in.

It became clear that most of these people were staying at the Pennington for Christmas, just one other table appeared to be solely diners.

So who is it that goes to the Pennington Arms in Ravenglass for Christmas?

Two couples there as a foursome, one of the men in a wheelchair, with little to say to each other and probably in their 60s.

One of the Kaczynski brothers (the twin brothers who were president and prime minister of Poland and who are famous for each being unkindly described as looking like a potato) and his wife – not him of course, just someone who looks like him – and these two, man and wife, had absolutely nothing to say to each other.

A couple in maybe their forties, he with a ponytail and she slim and dark-haired in high-heeled shoes, also with nothing to say to each other.

A sixsome, seventy years-old or more, one of the men dressed in a business suit and tie.

The two gay men, one in his fiftes the other possibly younger. In suits but no ties. Rather gangstery-looking.

A few other forgettable couples.

And no one very jolly.

The food was very good. Hilary started with a terrine (ie a forcemeat, or mixture of ground lean meat pressed together) of chicken and duck wrapped in bacon with an apple and pear chutney, and I started with scallops sitting on a slice of black pudding and that on a mound of pea puree (which all went very well). Then we both had lamb shank on colcannon (Irish mashed potato with cabbage), with an ‘anise and rosemary jus’ – actually there was a taste of star anise and of rosemary, which was nice, and then I had a well-made panna cotta and Hilary some chocolate and coffee ice cream that appeared to be homemade. All quite classy and with a bottle of Argentinean red wine and a bottle of Willow mineral water came to £72. Not cheap, but not absurdly expensive for what it was.

And, as with so many including the BBC website sometimes, they spelled panna cotta as panacotta, which for we congenital proof-readers and stern guardians of the language jars horribly. I don’t at all mind the words being run together, but I do mind panna being spelled as pana. Panna cotta is literally translated from the Italian as ‘cooked cream’, which is essentially what it is.

And not only a spelling mistake, but no discernable ‘atmosphere’ in the restaurant.

The following day, Christmas Day, we took a walk through the woods and circled back round by the Pennington Arms, arriving just as the diners were being served their turkey. We peered in the windows as surreptitiously as possible, being glared at by Lech Kaczynski so needing to be brief. The roast potatoes didn’t look all that appetising.

Did these people have a jolly Christmas at the Pennington Arms? What did they do? Did they ever manage to talk to each other? These things we shall never know.

We, meanwhile, ate well, drank well, walked well, got plenty of sleep and read lots. Maybe the people at the Pennington went home saying the same, though we didn’t see any of them out walking.

And by Boxing Day lunchtime, they all seemed to have disappeared. There was no one in the dining room when we passed at 1.15, and no one when we passed again at about 7.30 that evening.

I subsequently looked at the Pennington Arms website, which now wants to call the Arms the Pennington Hotel. The people we saw were, it seems, actually there on Boxing Day, they had gone to Muncaster Castle with a packed lunch for a ‘Festival of Lights’, whatever that is, and were due to eat dinner again at 8pm.

More about happenings in Ravenglass at A Railtour Comes Upon Us.

A Rainy Day

This page has now been moved to landofsomehope.blogspot.com.

Slop-Squelched Sandwiches

The Office-Worker’s Lunch – October 2009

Office workers’ eat the most extraordinary things for their lunch, or at least the shops give them the opportunity to. There is a serious academic study to be done.

I have alluded before to the way in which the lunch eaten by office workers in London changes with the times; it evolves, according to what is the current norm, what is available, and how the shops that sell a worker’s lunch can set up a USP, a Unique Selling Proposition. London will tend to lead the way where others come to follow not too much later.

In Strutton Ground market, Westminster, in October 2009 I was looking at what is on offer in Simply Sandwiches – a shop that is clearly owned by someone whose family originates from India, Bangladesh or Pakistan. Among the filled baguettes on offer are:

‘Chilli BBQ Egg Salad’ and

‘Falafel and Chilli Mayo’.

Both would be far too sloppy for my liking, but then I am not an Westminster office worker. The flavours sound a bit post-modernist, they may well be a portent of things to come. I shall keep my eyes peeled, whenever I can, for what the office workers are consuming, and to see whether, in terms of pure yeach!, Chilli BBQ Egg Salad can be bettered.

More on sloppy sandwiches at Squelch Up Your Lunch, Children.

The Charming Town of Calais

Lunch in Calais – September 2009

We like Calais. You can get a good lunch or dinner there.

We drove into Calais and were immediately struck by how clean and prosperous it looked. This was in marked contrast to almost everywhere else in France we’d seen recently, and it could just be that Calais is a very busy port so that the people actually are for the most part quite prosperous; places like Laon in particular (where we’d stayed the night before) probably don’t have much to offer by way of work.

We parked up and were spoiled for choice of what looked to be agreeable restaurants, settling upon a fish restaurant near to the seafront, which looked quite busy. We decided to sit outside in the smokers’ area, for there was only one other couple there and we could stay just about far enough away from them when they lit up, as they did quite frequently. The outside area was shielded from the wind by a transparent screen, and though it was a very blustery day and we had to make sure that nothing was left unweighted-down, it was sunny, and actually quite pleasant, and we could thus watch the world go by.

The restaurant was one where you could go for quite a grand dinner, but we chose from the menu the Formule Express at eleven euros – probably the waiters thought, these tightfisted Brits always go for the cheapest, but we’d decided we are old enough now to order what we want, and the Formule Express fitted our wants exactly; just one course and a glass of wine. Hilary had a giant saucepan of mussels and a plate of chips (moules frites, typical of the northern coast of France), and I had a rouget, which is red mullet, with tomato, on skewers, with a buttery saffron sauce. Hilary’s moules were done with lots of herbs, bay, thyme and rosemary, which was interesting. And that for us was perfect and most cheering. Service was traditionally French very slow, but we had just enough time after having eaten for, as is usual in France, an excellent coffee.

Calais is supposed to be awash with illegal immigrants trying to get across the channel to Britain, but we saw little or no evidence of them. There were two men who walked by that might have been such, that was all.

Then after lunch we went to the port, to watch, among other things Waberer’s Optimum Solution pass.

Laon – Could Do Better

A Visit to Laon – September 2009

Having pulled off the motorway to top up with diesel last year and, seeing the amazing cathedral atop of the hill and having read that it was a medieval city of great historical interest and charm, we decided to spend the night in Laon. So we checked into the Etap in the retail park and then drove up the hill to the medieval city to look for some dinner.

Look was all we did, and at great length. Laon was shabby. Certainly it was a medieval city and certainly it had all the makings for the charm, but for me the enduring image is of a grubbily-dressed man with a dog on a string, who could not raise a good evening, entering a patched wooden door to one of the historic buildings to an undecorated hallway that smelled of wee. There were a couple of noisy bars, including one for ageing heavy metal fans in leather jackets, in a street of bars and restaurants, all the restaurants empty and at many of them the proprietor standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette. One of the restaurants had a few customers, but the window positions being taken up with the owner’s bicycle and some upturned chairs, we decided against. There were a couple of more up-market places, but again empty and looking more pricey than pleasant. And in the end, being unable to see anywhere that looked even half appealing, we decided to drive to the new town, which is signposted as the Centre Ville, and try our luck there.

No luck. A few restaurants but all empty, for example there was a Franco-Belge restaurant, ablaze with lights, that looked promising, but look inside and it is glaring and empty and shabby and there is a sign saying, pizzas.

So in desperation we drove back to the Etap and went into the restaurant of the Ibis hotel next door, which wasn’t very good but at least had some people in – quite a few people indeed and it was getting late, we were a bit worried they might have stopped serving. We were by this time tired and almost past eating so Hilary just had some salad and chips and I a beef stew. The chips were OK, but not like proper French fries we’d eaten the night before in Alsace.

In Britain, a town like Laon would not be so shabby. It has the second-oldest cathedral in France, or so we were told, which is a kind of prototype for Rheims, and in much the same style, and it has a medieval walled city with all the making of the picturesque. In Britain it would be verging on the chic. It would be a well-known national heritage and tourist site. Not so in France, in fact so many towns and cities in France seem run-down. France seems to be finding it hard to move on.

The following morning we drove again up to the medieval city, believing that there must be somewhere bearable enough for breakfast, for Hilary wanted to look round the cathedral and I wanted to take a look inside the tourist information centre to try and find out what the Chemin des Dames was, or is (It’s a battle area of the First World War, equivalent for the French army to what the Somme was for the British. The Chemin des Dames was a ridge that was held by the German army and the French suffered immense casualties in trying to capture it. Its name as a walk for ladies dated from much earlier, the road having being built to accommodate the desires of a couple of aristocratic young women in the 18th century – we had seen numerous signs to it on driving toward Laon on the B-road from Rheims).

The bar café opposite the cathedral seemed to be opening up so I walked in and asked the man if he could do us some coffee. Oui. And something to eat, a croissant maybe? Non, there’s the boulangerie just behind, you can get a croissant there. So I walked round to the boulangerie and did find a croissant and a kind of pain au chocolat custard tart, the boulangerie looking even more down-market inside that it did out, and we ate our take-away breakfast in the bar, with a coffee from the establishment that was, true to form for France, excellent.

A stage was being erected in the cathedral as the Laon music festival was to begin on the following day, and we met and spoke to the festival organiser, who was an enthusiastic man in a pullover who spoke excellent if strongly-accented English and who had been, he told us, a manufacturer of bicycle parts – not sure which parts – and who now was ‘out of work’ (though we read that to mean retired) and very excited about the forthcoming festival. I asked him how he came to speak such good English and he said that he had had to, going as he did to bicycle fairs and conferences in different countries where the lingua Franca was inevitably English. Though of course the real reason was that he’d chosen to learn it. Italian people quite often ask me how come (come mai – how ever) I speak such good Italian, which I don’t in fact but it’s very kind of them to ask, and I come up with some sort of story but the true reason is that I choose to learn it.

It felt a pity that we could not stay to attend some of the musical concerts. Maybe next year. And maybe the man might be able to recommend a restaurant.

The Pedaso Cozze Festival

The Cozze Festival at Pedaso, August 2009

During August, every town in this part of Italy holds a sagra or festa.

Strictly speaking, a sagra is a fair and a festa a party, though in practice there seems to be little or no difference between a sagra and a festa. Every town’s sagra focuses on a particular type of food; one we are intrigued by but have never been to is Altidona whose food focus is polenta and snails, but the sagra we go to every year is at Pedaso, where the subject is mussels.

At Pedaso, the festival of mussels

2009 was the 43rd sagra of cozze (mussels) in Pedaso, which means that the first was held in 1956. Every year since then, during the few days leading up to and including ferragosto (15th August), Pedaso holds its sagra delle cozze; some of the streets are closed and the tennis courts and football pitch are dedicated to the sagra. You buy a ticket at a shed that serves as the ticket office; precisely what’s on offer varies a bit each year but this year you paid €6 for a bowl of mussels, and/or €7 for a bowl of spaghetti with a marinara (chopped seafood and tomato), sauce and a bread roll. Every year it’s a bowl of mussels, a bowl of spaghetti marinara, and a bread roll, it’s just the price bundle that periodically changes.

You buy you ticket, then queue for your tray of dinner

When you’ve got your ticket you take it to the food dispensing tent, where you exchange it for a cardboard tray on which is placed a plastic container perhaps 8 inches by 6, piled high with mussels; a similar plastic container full of spaghetti and sauce; a bread roll in a transparent sealed plastic bag – this is a good idea as the roll can roll off the tray – and a paper wallet containing a plastic knife and fork; a paper serviette; and a lemon-scented hand wipe in a sealed envelope.

The mussels cookers stir big vats in the serving tents

The mussels have been cooked by being tipped from sacks into large heated vats, stirred by a man with a paddle. The vats will contain a little water and some oil and herbs, and when the mussels have opened and are lifted out you get a fair amount of the juice in the bottom of your little container. The spaghetti is cooked al dente, somehow they manage this on the large quantities, and is mixed with the sauce in orange plastic washing-up bowls before being ladled out into portions. The bread roll is a typical Italian bread roll, of heavily-processed white unsalted flour, and with a good crackly crust; for some reason only Britain seems to insist on bread with rubbery crusts, which is a pity as the bread itself is often of good quality, just badly let down by the pathetic apology for a crust (why is there no popular uprising against this?).

And da bere (to drink)

To drink, this year it was plastic glasses of white wine for free, or rather bundled in with the cost of the food, and litre bottles of sparkling or still water for a euro each.

Next, find a spot at a table

You take your food to one of the trestle tables that are laid with white paper tablecloths that cover about four place settings and are surrounded by white plastic moulded chairs, and you sit down and eat your dinner, and talk with your friends.

For dessert, cocomero (watermelon)

After you’ve eaten the mussels and spaghetti, you can buy a large lump of watermelon (cocomero the Italian word) on a plastic plate, together with a plastic knife, for a euro a portion, and for a further euro if you want it an espresso coffee in a paper cup.

Efficient clearing of tables

When you’ve finished, a man comes round and shoves all your leftovers, trays and all, into a black plastic sack, and when you’ve got up and left he does the same with your paper tablecloth and replaces it with a fresh one, ready for the next customer.

Efficient functioning of the whole event, amazingly

And it all works, surprisingly efficiently; surprisingly because efficiency is not something that Italy is famous for, but even more surprisingly given the number of people eating at any one time. It’s hard to estimate exactly, it will be at least a thousand, probably two or three thousand, may even be as much as five. This is at any one time. Serving starts at 7.30pm and goes on until about 9 or 10, and for most of that time there are few spaces available for someone to sit down; people are found wandering about with their tray looking for a free seat. It’s not too bad if you are a couple, you can usually find somewhere, a foursome generally not too much problem, but six or upwards can be a real struggle and they often have to split up.

The old fashioned screwing of the system

Since the Italians tend to arrive in largish groups, this difficulty of finding adequate places together presents a problem, so what many of them do is to send someone to find a place, who then reserves the seats alongside by telling anyone who comes along that they are already taken. No one seems to start a fight by disputing or arguing with this, even though they themselves might be hard-pressed to find anywhere to sit.

The next difficulty arises on account of the queues. A couple of thousand people needing first to buy a ticket, and then to collect their dinner from the dispensing tent, will inevitably create a queue. For much of the evening this is an immense queue, which moves, slowly, slowly, but snakes for a hundred yards or more. So the trick of certain unscrupulous groups is to send one person to find and bag some seats, another to queue for the tickets, while the rest stand in the food queue, so that with any luck the person buying the tickets will be able to get to them before they reach the food serving counter and so hand them the tickets. This sometimes works, but often it takes longer to buy a ticket than to queue for food, so you find a gaggle of people waiting by the counter, saying to others behind them, who have followed the procedures in a more public-spirited fashion: please, you go ahead.

The queue-jumping and general overall uncertainty puts some people off going, but we find it all part of the general theatre. Also we try to get there reasonably early.

You walk on a bed of linolem

All this movement of people might be expected to churn up the football pitch and make a pretty muddy experience underfoot, so to overcome this they lay down a floor. This year it was a kind of springy grey linoleum-like vinyl, a bit like we have in one of our bathrooms at home though a lot more bouncy. It’s therefore simple to clean and presumably gets chucked away at the end of the four days, since there will undoubtedly be the odd cigarette burn-mark, though actually the number of people who smoke at the tables is surprisingly low – I’d estimate about one in twenty.

Ancillary entertainment

After having finished your dinner and bounced your way on the vinyl past the still-queuing ever-hopeful diners, there are roadside stalls to see; sometimes – though not this year on the day we went – there are street entertainers, and there is a live band with dancing. You can take a stroll by the sea, and you can go to a café for a coffee or an ice-cream.

The stalls are a bit predictable: an African selling carvings; a grubby-looking girl with lank dark hair, smoking a cigarette and selling silver jewellery; candy floss and sweetie stalls; and this year, somewhat ominously, the Scientologists, selling books. We take a look at these; we watch for a few moments the people dancing to the band, though only for a few moments as the band, which this year consisted of a female singer, a male trumpet player, and a man playing an electronic accordion and simultaneously controlling the synthesised percussion machine, were a bit hard to bear for long.

A stroll by the sea

We walked by the sea and then went to the café for an ice cream, leaving eventually to drive home at a quarter to eleven. We went on the 13th August; had we gone, as sometimes in previous years, on the 15th, we could have waited to see the firework display over the sea, which begins at an Italian midnight, ie about twenty past twelve.

This is the fifth year we’ve been to the mussels festival at Pedaso and we have formed some observations about it:

1. All the standing in line, queue-jumping, reserving of seats at the tables, it has a feel of Britain in the 1950s. It probably has a feel of Italy in the 1950s too, but Italy hasn’t moved on. The Brits still queue at the checkout in IKEA, they still queue to get on the Ryanair plane, but they don’t like it, and I think they’d take one look at the queues in Pedaso and say: let’s go somewhere else.

2. No one stands on the sidelines. Everyone participates. I’m sure in Britain now you’d get groups of people standing about and looking while they make up their mind. This is another change since the 1950s.

3. There are no immigrants, nearly everyone is a working-class Italian. It’s not entirely true that there are no immigrants, as there’s us, but we’re most unusual. The first time we went to the mussels festival in Pedaso we looked around at these thousands of heads around tables there on the football pitch and said to ourselves: there must be some Brits here. But there weren’t, and there aren’t. The local Brits don’t go. Nor do the Poles, or Albanians, and there are certainly no black faces to be seen. The whole thing works because everyone is following a common cultural set of rules. Why don’t any of the many local Brits go to the sagra? Who knows?

4. Free wine works for Italians of a certain age. No one drinks too much. Many don’t drink any wine at all. Unlimited booze obviously wouldn’t work in Britain, and it probably won’t work for the younger Italians, especially in the cities, where there’s an increasing drink problem.

5. Italian children in this area of Italy eat mussels like sweeties. Next to us at the trestle table were two women and two children, a boy and a girl, the boy perhaps six-years-old, both children tucking in to the mussels as if they were a bowl of coco-pops. Which just goes to show . . . probably something about the power of mothers. We’ve seen children enthusiatically chomping mussels in Sardinia too.

6. One in twenty Italians smoking is a surprisingly small number. And even if it isn’t one in twenty, it’s not many; you’d almost look around and believe that no one is smoking at all. This must certainly be a recent change.

7. Five thousand people on each of four nights, each spending €10. It comes to €200,000 and will be an underestimate. The organisers will have to pay for the sacks of mussels and the pasta, for the staff of whom there are a fair number especially those clearing tables, for the vinyl flooring, for the personalised cutlery wallets, for the fireworks on the last night, for the band, for the (not very extensive) marketing. Do the sums stack up? Hard to know.

Chicken and Chips

A Chicken and Chip Dinner in a Hotel, July 2009

We’d booked on internet a Great Western hotel between Verona and Vicenza at what seemed like a bargain price. And so it turned out to be. Either new or newly refitted, and a great plus for us was that it had a swimming pool that you could swim in (as opposed to just pose alongside), in a pleasant garden with the main Verona-to-Venice railway line running past the end of the garden. So you couldn’t get bored, even while swimming. The hotel was obviously trying hard to attract custom by means of promotions, one of which we’d picked up on. And good luck to it.

The hotel was trying hard and one group of people it appeared to have succeeded with was Serbs, from Belgrade. There was an extended family of Serbs. It’s nice to know that Serbs are getting the opportunity to get out and about at last.

Dinner

Dinner was in an over-elaborate dining room presided over by a little chap with a moustache. He presented us with the rather extensive and fancy menu, which was in Italian and which we proceeded to peruse and come to some decisions. After a while the moustachioed man came to our table and said, ‘Sprechen sie Deutsch?’ This is not the first time in Italian restaurants that we are thought at first to be German. We replied in Italian that we spoke Italian and he said, in Italian: Benissimo, then may I offer some advice? It’s quite normal for an Italian waiter to offer advice, and even more normal for the customer to ask the waiter for his advice – the Italian word for advice in this context is consiglio – rather like the English word, counsel.

Moustachio advised that there was a special on tonight, two courses and coffee for only 15 euros. Tonight’s special consisted of spaghetti all’amatriciana (a sauce of tomatoes, onions and fat bacon) followed by chicken and chips. And may we add an antipasto from the buffet table? Si, for an extra five euros. So we did that. The help-yourself antipasto was extensive but fairly tasteless; the spaghetti all’amatriciana was not too bad (or, more grammatically accurate for fear of being ignominiously corrected by someone: were not too bad), and the chicken and chips tasted just like . . . chicken and chips.

Banking on the monolinguals

It seems that the restaurant had a big menu in a red folder to look swish, but was banking on no one who was not Italian being able to understand it, at which point the waiter comes along and explains in either German or English that he advises tonight’s special. There were some Italians in the dining room too, mostly also eating the special, though one somewhat elegantly-dressed slim blonde woman of about forty came in, evidently staying there on business, and ordered something we didn’t catch, and which turned out to be a sheet of brown paper full of shellfish, baby octopus etc, deep-fried in batter. A kind of shell fish and chips without the chips.

The woman spent the entire dinner either talking on or fiddling with her mobile phone, and picking at the deep-fried items in a rather unenthusiastic way. She ate about a third of it, and apologised to moustachio that it was just too much for her, and then went on her way. Apart from her – and we smelled the deep fried batter as the waiter brought the parcel to her table and it smelled rather considerably like deep-fried batter – apart from her everyone seemed to eat the special: chicken and chips.

And there’s nothing wrong with chicken and chips, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with anything. But if you’re going to do it, do it with panache. Quite hard to do chicken and chips in style. I’ll have to see if I can find an example where it has been done impressively.

Dinner with the Neighbours

January 2009

We were privileged to be invited to dinner with our neighbours. Privileged because they are a working-class Italian family, father, mother and three children aged about 21, 18 and 12, the youngest a boy and the older two girls. Mother was to make gnocchi, and Hilary said she’d like to see how it was done – to their bemusement, as everyone knows how to make gnocchi!

First, mother made a big ball of dough from mashed potatoes and flour, getting it to a consistency where it was kind of stretchy. She then took gobbits off this and rolled them into tubes on a flour-covered board. For gnocchi, you really do need a ‘tavolino’, a large wooden board that you can coat with flour to roll the dough out on. When she’d rolled out four or five snakes of dough, each about ¾ inch diameter, she put them side-by-side and cut off sections with a knife, each section ½ to ¾ inches in length. These she dropped into a pan of boiling water, and when the gnocchi rose to the surface, they were ready to eat.

While the cooking as going on, the father of the family took me into the dining room, ie the sitting room with a large table laid, for he wanted to show me a travel magazine. Brazil, Thailand, Cuba – these places should get a good exchange rate, no? He is ‘curioso’ to see the world, which given that he will only eat pasta, is kind of a slightly painful wishful thinking, but given his financial situation, as a manual worker in a shoe factory that is suffering increasingly frequent lay-offs, and with three dependent children, is also practical wishful thinking. We looked at the brochures. He would love to go places, in principle at least.

At dinner there was Hilary and me, father and mother, their three children, and daughter number two’s boyfriend, who carries about him the to us splendid name, though to him clearly the slightly embarrassing one, of Eros. Eros’ job? He drives a cement lorry. Like all cement-lorry drivers, Eros is overweight and his stomach hangs over his belt. He is in his early twenties.

Dinner began with gnocchi in a sauce of mushrooms and sausage. Daughter number two and 12-year-old son did not eat any of this; daughter because she does not eat vegetables, and son because he is an increasingly demanding 12-year-old who gets his own way with just about everything, and he does not eat vegetables either.

Following on from gnocchi with mushrooms and sausage, came gnocchi with ragù, ie a meat sauce. Gnocchi with ragù was popular all round, both number two daughter and son were able to tuck into this. Eros, to his credit, tucked into everything.

After this second gnocchi dish came polpetti. Polpetti are Italian meatballs. And with the polpetti, some salad. Our stomachs were pretty full, as the gnocchi, especially that with ragù, came in an enormous dish, from which we were encouraged to take second, third and unlimited helpings, and which was still half full long after we were nearly completely so.

The taste, from beginning to end, was beyond criticism. Squisito.

To drink there was just one bottle of red wine. No one had more than the tiniest of glassfuls. Italian families will typically drink a small glass of red wine, then do as Eros did, and when offered some more place his hand over the glass and shake his head in the certified fashion, with an especially determined and serious look on his face. We have not perfected this yet, but have learned to be politely abstemious.

There was talk of dessert, though nothing it seemed had been planned especially, but we had brought as a small gift a packet of chocolate ginger biscuits, so we all agreed that with some coffee we should eat some of these.

‘All’ here excluded number two daughter and 12-year-old son, who would not even contemplate trying something like ginger, that they were unfamiliar with. The others did try them, and Eros in particular was most complimentary about their subtle taste, which was fair comment, we had brought them from the UK and they were of expensive quality.

I asked Eros what his hopes and expectations were for 2009, and he seemed a bit taken aback by the question, but replied that he expected that 2009 would be an exact replica of 2008. And I suppose that probably, for him, it will, as it probably will for many working people all over the world, it was inconsiderate of me, coming as I was from my privileged position of professional-class choice, to ask it.

While the dinner progressed, the typically Italian circumstances prevailed of:

a. unbroken and multitasked conversation, and

b. the large-screen television on in the corner of the room; in this room’s case quite close to the table – 12-year-old son spent the best part of the meal with his eyes glued to this.

In addition, and in case we should find the walls too bare, there was a fish tank with a number of brightly-coloured fishes swimming about looking rather agitated. Some red ones and a rather spectacular and shark-like blue-black one. The fish tank is a recent family acquisition.

It was extremely kind of the family to invite us, and somewhat difficult to know quite how we can repay such hospitality.

Old Fashioned Potatoes

January 2009

In Britain, when you go up a hill, you can be fairly sure that when you get to the top, there will be before you another hill – aha but that's only on foot or by bicycle – eventually you get to the top of all the hills, and then you start coming down the other side.

Not so in the Sibillini Mountains area of Italy; there when you get to the top of the hill, there is quite commonly a wide plain – it reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where the explorer talks of climbing Kilimanjaro and says that it’s a fairly stiff slog until you get to the top, at which point it levels orf a bit. That’s exactly what happens in the Sibillinis.

These plains are high, and flat and wide; very hot in the summer and often extremely cold in the winter. It is here that they grow those crops not so well suited to the lower altitudes: potatoes, onions, flowers for cutting, and lentils. The high plain between Caldarola and Foligno, based around the town of Colfiorito, is famous for potatoes.

Alongside the road, in every layby and track, is a tractor and trailer, with a farmer, or possibly it’s a salesman dressed as a farmer, selling potatoes. We been across this plain before and for the first time this time we stopped and bought some potatoes.

Small red-skinned, potatoes, of a floury texture when boiled, and eating them, as we did mashed with some sausage and cabbage and on a subsequent evening baked with some monkfish and onion, is for me a kind of evocation, a taste of my childhood. Potatoes don’t taste like that any more. It’s hard to pinpoint. Of course it may just be the variety of potato, though it could have something to do with intensity of cultivation that we now suffer. I had not realised the change that has taken place, until I was so reminded of it.

A Throwback and Aus-Checken

Returning from our boat trip, we look for some dinner – August 2007

This follows on from Valhalla.

Greener on the other side

Back in Regensburg, we decide to cross to the other side of the river, where we’d read it was quite pretty, and to keep our eyes open for a possible restaurant. It was pretty. Lots of picturesque houses in picturesque lanes, and a party, could be yet another wedding or even the same one, going on on the ground floor of what seemed to be a building site with the builders still working. There was a traditional-style band playing but we thought it wouldn’t be right to do more than stand and stare for a short while.

Immediately over the bridge, we saw a kind of beer garden on our left, and we wondered if they might do food, but we saved this thought for after our exploration. Our exploration brought us to the same beer garden but from the main entrance, which was the grounds of the Spital brewery, and clearly they did do food, for there were people eating.

A throwback

This beer garden was like a throwback to the images of Berlin in the 1930s. Lots and lots of wooden slatted tables on metal legs, with chairs to match, under the trees, and with waiters and waitresses in traditional dress walking fast with jugs of beer and plates of food.

The beer came in either litre of half-litre glasses, and the food was essentially meat, bratkartoffeln, and salad. I had liver for my meat, by way of a change, and Hilary had the special which was meat in a melted cheese sauce. Just what we needed, and we sat overlooking the river, accompanied at the nearby tables by families, couples, groups of friends, groups of men playing cards after having eaten – no groups of only women in evidence though that may have been chance.

The weather in the Spital beer garden was perfect, a balmy still evening, though with worrying-looking clouds coming up, and it did start to rain rather seriously on our way home. If there’s an evening of rain, what happens to all the staff and food in the Spital brewery beer garden? For there must have been a couple of hundred seats, at least. Do the staff hang around smoking and the company write it off as an expense? Presumably they must do.

The famous eddies

We walked back to the hotel over the old stone bridge, watching the famous eddies swirl around in the river – which they do here presumably as a result of the bridge supports, though since the bridge has been there for centuries no one’s going to change it.

Aus-checken

The following morning we were to check out of the hotel and since we’d pre-paid I wasn’t quite sure what was required so I somewhat puzzled the man on reception with my question to him in German. To be clear, he asked, “Wollen sie aus-checken?”. So now we know, the German for check-out is aus-checken (which will need the hyphen so you pronunce checken the English way). I tried it some weeks later in a hotel in Würzburg and the receptionist understood it immediately. “Genau”, she said, in answer to my suggestion as to what we might do on checking out, “genau”. (Exactly – Germans say genau more than any other word, possibly).

The Sausage Stübe

In Regensburg – August 2007

This follows on from Two Nights in Regensburg

The sausage stübe

By the Danube in Regensburg is an ancient sausage stall, it’s like a hut with tables and chairs outside plus a few inside, and the kitchen cooks sausages over charcoal and boils up big pots of sauerkraut. Also you can get beer and other drinks, which come from the bar that’s part of the hotel alongside and are served by a different waiter. This sausage stall is advertised to tourists as being an attraction, so when we arrived it was busy, and we thought that if we were to find ourselves some places at the tables, we’d probably end up cutting it fine for the boat, but you could obviously queue for a takeaway so we decided to do that. Queuing for a takeaway turned out to be a wise choice, as it was probably more fun.

The famous sausage stübe is called the Wurstkuchl and has a website (in German) at http://wurstkuchl.de.

The queue for takeaway led from the kitchen of the hut, and out through the door where the waiter was gallantly pushing past to serve people, at a rate of knots though staying mostly cheerful. In the queue with me were part of a party of schoolchildren – it seemed that not all the children were getting a sausage in a roll from the Wurstkuchl, possibly it was just those that had some money to supplement their packed lunches. A teacher was orchestrating the relevant sections of the queue.

While queuing you could see the folks getting served at the tables, and there were a fair few foreigners among them, possibly they were all visitors, including a group of about twelve speaking English. Tour party maybe?

It did seem to be much more comfortable standing in the queue, and the other advantage was that the service point for the takeaway was actually in the kitchen, so you got to see the sausages being cooked.

Three women dressed in pink check traditional-style dresses with bib and long flowing skirts were topping up the charcoal, putting and turning sausages on the grill, and boiling up pots of sauerkraut. Do they do this every day? Every day cooking sausages in a smoky room, you must go home at night dreaming and smelling of sausages.

Ohne senf, ohne kraut!

One pink-check server was dealing with the takeaway orders, which consisted of a sausage in a roll, with or without either or both of sauerkraut and senf – German sweet mustard. The schoolboy in front of me was being instructed by the teacher, “Ohne kraut, ohne senf!”, she was shouting to him, which she was telling all the children, whether because they had a minimum budget, or perhaps more likely because she didn’t want to deal with the parents complaining of stains on trousers later, I thought it too forward to ask. The sausages were fairly straightforward pork sausages, nothing particularly special about them, it was the venue that counted.

The Chinese contingent

We ate our sausage rolls sitting on the steps leading down to the quays, along with hordes of others, and watched the people at tables in their somewhat more crowded conditions. A group of Chinese men turned up, dressed alike in a kind of blue collarless jacket and matching trousers. They were very cheery and looked like they might be academics possibly and they tried to find themselves a spot at the tables. They must have done this before because they persevered quite assertively, and did find rather a cramped space eventually. The Chinese men obviously liked the sausages and sauerkraut, and maybe potato, since at the tables you could get your sausages with bratkartoffeln.

Time to go when the smokers arrive

On the steps we were careful not to sit near anyone who was likely to light a cigarette, but then someone nearby us moved away and some rough-looking smokers took their place so we thought we’d make our way to the boat, though there was still nearly half an hour before it was due to leave.

The story continues with Valhalla.

Two Nights in Regensburg

August 2007

Regensburg sounds nice

We decided to spend a couple of nights in Regensburg. We’d heard that Regensburg was one of the German cities least damaged by WW2 and it’s also the birthplace of the Pope, not that we’re great fans of the Pope but one needs to know where he’s coming from. We’ve passed nearby to Regensburg a couple of times but never stopped.

First impressions

Entering Regensburg past the university, which is obviously a major element in the town, along leafy avenues with young people riding bicycles, we find our hotel. First a walk to the old town to get a general impression of the place, over the wide many-tracked railway with few trains in sight and past an old peoples’ centre – looks like a block of flats where old folks live and have a pharmacy and health centre and shops on site – and then through an arch and into the historic centre. Our plan is to get a drink in a bar and suss out somewhere to have dinner.

Too much pizza and pasta

Seems a young people’s town, no doubt because of the university. Downside of this is that the only thing you seem to be able to get in restaurants is pasta and pizza. You’d hardly come all the way to Regensburg for pasta and pizza. Pasta and pizza, they’ve been exported from Italy to everywhere and have become the universal staple fare in cafés and restaurants, and supermarkets for take-home quick cook meals. Part of the reason in restaurants is that they are quick to cook. And they can be light and appeal to the healthy-conscious. But at some point they’ll be superseded, they’ll come to be seen as outdated. Wonder when and what they’ll be superseded by. No clues on this as yet.

Two beers and free theatre

We find a bar that looks like it won’t be hoping to sell us some pizza and order two beers. And we watch the world go by in the square. Tourists, students, people going home from work, children, eccentrics on bicycles, eccentrics not on bicycles. Civilised. Not quite mainstream Germany. Haven’t got to grips with it yet.

The river

Next a stroll by the Danube. We see the museum ships, closed now as it’s evening, one a paddle steamer that once did the 100km trip to Passau. We think that tomorrow we’ll take a boat trip on the Danube, but there’s no indication this evening of how you do that, or even whether you can. Tomorrow we’ll find out. Let’s look for somewhere for dinner.

A restaurant

We find somewhere for dinner that isn’t pizza and pasta, though this took a bit of strolling the streets. We did pass one bierstube that looked a possibility, though not immediately appealing – we’ll come back to this though if all else fails. But all else didn’t fail as we came upon a triangle on one of the main streets, on the edge of the pedestrianised zone, by some bus stops, where there was a restaurant with tables outside, and it looked like the food might be Bavarian. We checked the menu, which was hand-written and hard to read, but a newspaper-cutting on the display board said that this was a newly-reopened restaurant focusing on local Bavarian specialities, so we decided to risk it and sat down at one of the outside tables. (Photo at www.europeanbeerguide.net/regepubs.htm#muenz)

As can sometimes happen, this turned out to be the perfect choice, notwithstanding there being just we two, plus another couple who’d just arrived, and a table of three drunks (see my page on Drunks in Restaurants. But the restaurant was obviously trying hard, with the waiter in his brown suede waistcoat and clogs and the menu in a kind of locked wooden frame, with hand-written pages that were hard to read.

We saw on the menu, kimmelbrat, and we asked the waiter what kimmel was. His Bavarian accent was so strong that neither of us understood barely a word that he said, so I ordered it anyway. When it came I immediately saw what it was, for it was a meat stew with caraway seeds, kümmel in the German we know, obviously kimmel in these parts.

Kimmel

For starter I had a wurstsalat, which I’ve eaten before in southern Germany, strips of pale pink sausage, cold, in oil and mild clear vinegar, and Hilary had a beer soup, which was a meat broth with beer in, with lumps of bread floating in it. Both our main courses, my kimmel and Hilary’s pfifferlinge – yellow wild mushroom which were in season – came with bready dumplings, far too much breadiness for us to be able to eat. And to drink: local beer, though this is a wine-producing area, but beer seemed right.

As we were eating, some youths were drinking cheap wine by the bus-stop, see Under-Age Drinking, German Style.

Thanks for the Bavarian

Other diners arrived, and when we came to pay the bill Hilary thanked the waiter/owner for providing somewhere to eat that was different from pizza and pasta, which caused an elderly couple sitting nearby to join in loudly and say how much they agreed with her, and how this was just about the only restaurant in Regensburg now where they can get a meal of the type they appreciate – a Bavarian dinner.

Actually, the elderly couple weren’t being quite truthful, as we discovered on our walk back to our hotel, when we passed through the grounds of Regensburg’s four- or five-star central hotel, the Arch, which had a yard with many tables and people were arriving and asking for a table and the waitresses dressed in pink check Austrian-type dresses with full shirts and a bib and flounced-out sleeves on their white short-sleeved blouses, presumably Bavarian style as well as Austrian, were telling them there wasn’t a free one, the restaurant was busy and it was full. We looked at the menu and it seemed to be Bavarian but with a modern twist, and quite expensive, but we thought we might give it a try tomorrow.

Rich and poor alike

The people passing the restaurant where we had actually eaten – and in the Arch you wouldn’t have had such entertainment for your money – included not only alcohol-abusing youths; smartly-dressed theatre-goers got off the buses too, and at the other extreme a group of women with their children, some in pushchairs, passed by, and as they walked past the municipal rubbish bin one of the children instinctively opened the lid and had a look inside. Didn’t find anything though so just as quickly closed it again. Won’t waste time on empty crisp wrappers.

And that was the end of the first part-day in Regensburg. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

A Wedding in West Cumbria

July 2007

Lunch in the café

Today we went over to Ravenglass. One of my pleasures when we go to Ravenglass (west coast of Cumbria, see www.visitcumbria.com/wc/raveng.htm) is to have lunch in the café on the station of the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway. The food is not what you’d call classy, in fact I always have the same thing: meat lasagne, chips and salad, and with the salad there’s always a tinned-pineapple ring, which I never eat, though Sam and Zoe were with us today and they fought over it, to go with the baked potato with cheese and coleslaw chosen by Zoe, and the baked potato with tinned tuna in mayonnaise and baked beans for Sam. That’s the food you can get in the station café. It’s not everywhere you can buy such vomit-promising nosh, and long may it survive.

The wedding breakfast – two-handed style

While eating my orange-coloured lunch, I enjoy overlooking the station platform where all manner of pot-bellied and limping people, dressed in the depth of fashion, come and go from and to rides on the steam trains. Today, as we’ve witnessed before, there was a wedding that had a ride on the railway as part of its schedule. The previous wedding we’d watched from our vantage point was notable mainly for the photographer who was dressed in a bright green tie and bright green shoes, which together with his lack of a chin made him look like a frog.

But today’s wedding was perhaps even more extraordinary. Two antique red buses brought the wedding guests, looking uncomfortable in their unfamiliar strapless dresses and sparkling high-heeled shoes, down from Muncaster Castle, where the wedding ceremony had evidently been held (I talk about the Muncaster Estate elsewhere; owned by the Gordon-Duff-Penningtons, yes indeed, triple-barrelled surname, for whom I feel rather sorry in many ways, but more of that on another page), the guests then boarded the carriages of the little train for a ride up the line. Nothing unusual in that. What was most unusual, however, was that each of the guests was handed a brown paper carrier bag containing a packed lunch, which consisted – for the bride and groom were sitting together in an open carriage right in front of us so we could see this – of two white baps with a filling that we couldn’t determine but seemed to be rather buttery. Both bride and groom ate and enjoyed their baps two-handed, that is, they each took a bap in both hands and chomped, massively. And then when they’d finished, and without wiping their mouths, they gave each other a kiss. Bleah!

The Farmgate Café, Cork

Lunch and Japanese Tourists – May 2007

Japanese tourists try some boiled potatoes

Lunch at the market café, called the Farmgate Café, which, we guess this from the number of Japanese tourists who turned up, some obviously not speaking a word of English, appears to have got itself a name in the guidebooks. One couple, with their regulation upturned flowerpot cloth hats that identify a Japanese tourist anywhere in the world, obviously had no idea what the menu said, but perhaps had been advised by the guidebook to ask for fish chowder, followed by the fish of the day. The woman of the party skipped main course, possibly she thought that struggling with one unidentified foreign dish would be enough, but the man manfully got his roast cod and dutifully ploughed his way through it to fulfil the itinerary. We both had fish chowder for starters, which was indeed very good, and I had Irish stew for mains, accompanied, as was the Japanese man’s cod, by potatoes done the old-fashioned Irish way, boiled in their skins. This works very well with something like Irish stew, as the potato soaks up the gravy. Quite what the Japanese man made of it we couldn’t tell for he remained impassive and intent upon doing the itinerary. But not much by the look of it. Hilary had a salad with smoked salmon, also very good. No wine for us, as it was lunchtime, but we noticed a couple of Marche wines on the menu, ah, that’s nice.

Irish Dutch cheese and conger eel

Although we had lunch in the market we’d really gone there to buy some Irish cheeses to take home, there being a good range of Irish cheeses now, for example we bought some Irish mature Gouda that, though I’m not a Dutch cheese expert, seemed very good to us. We were told that it was made by a Dutch woman who’d emigrated to Ireland, and on our walk in the hills the previous day we’d met a local man and his current girlfriend, possibly his only ever girlfriend we didn’t ask, who was Dutch, and you kind of think, how does someone find their way from Holland to the far west of Ireland? But obviously they do somehow, we didn’t ask how, because that would have seemed, to us anyway, too forward.

The thing I really wanted to buy in Cork market as soon as I saw it was some conger eel. You don’t see conger eel in the north of England and possibly no longer do you in the south, which if true is a shame. In Cork market were two fine, ugly, conger eels. But I didn’t buy any as we were travelling back on Ryanair, and if they confiscate a tube of lipstick because you could attack the pilot with it I dared not imagine how they might react to a kilo of conger eel.

Kenmare Stag Party

Dinners and Drinks in Kenmare – April 2007

And so to County Kerry

We’d planned to travel from Cork to Kerry by bus, preferring the bus whenever possible, so we asked in the bus station whether there was a bus from Cork to Kenmare. “Ah, well now”, said the man at the information desk, “No, there isn’t”. What he meant was, as he subsequently explained, you have to change at Killarney. This seemed a bit complex especially for the way back so I got onto the Bus Eireann website, www.buseireann.ie. Very good site and it turned out that the timings of the bus weren’t quite right for us, so for the following morning we booked a hire car from Cork airport as there was no hire shop in town. At the airport we picked up a red Renault Clio for £44 for two days, very reasonable, though the additional insurance an additional €38 – as ever, all the money goes to those poor, lamentable, insurance companies.

Out west to Kenmare, which our friends had suggested would be a good place to stay and where we’d thus booked a hotel. Weird hotel, enormous dining room kind of Soviet-grandeur style, with white tablecloths and gold-backed chairs and all laid for dinner, but with no menu displayed. So we had a little stroll round Kenmare, which proved to be geared to tourism, with restaurants and pubs and gift shops in a triangle of Victorian streets, the buildings all fresh-painted in bright colours, with wrought iron balconies.

Kenmare and its cranes and breezeblocks

All around Kenmare are building works. Field upon field having houses built on them for the perfect let or second home. Is there going to be the market for all this property? We rather doubted it. Ireland’s a bit like Spain, it has had a housing boom as its population has got richer and foreigners have come flocking for holidays and to buy a holiday home in a pretty location, fuelled partly by relatively cheap borrowings. Now that interest rates in the euro zone are rising, and there must be considerable overcapacity, a lot of these new builds are destined to remain unfinished or unoccupied. That’s how it seems to us anyway. Kenmare has loads and loads of it going on.

A coffee and scone overlooking the estuary

Our friends had suggested a café by the estuary some five miles out of Kenmare so having looked at what the town had to offer we decided that might be the best bet for some tea and cake, and took a drive out to it. All very Irish, somehow, it was part of a sailing and water sports centre and was really a bar. We walked in expecting a display of appetising homemade flapjacks and cream buns and the man at the bar said rather uncertainly that he could do us a scone or we could have something from the dinner dessert menu if we wanted. So we ordered a scone with jam and an apple pie with cream, and they were very good, and since there was a sign outside saying they did fresh fish in their restaurant and part of the place seemed to be a fish wholesalers, we asked if we could see the dinner menu. And it looked like the food might be quite good. It was Saturday and we asked if we’d need to book and the man said no, we should be OK if we just turned up later.

The stag party

We took a drive to the end of the peninsula and watched for seals but didn’t see any, though we did see an avocet, and you don’ see one of them every day; then we took a leisurely drive back, stopping to look at gardens full of palm trees, arriving at the sailing centre again at about 7.30. We walked in to the most enormous noise, made by a group of men sitting at tables at the back of the restaurant. They weren’t being especially raucous, but the restaurant was like a barn and the sound of their voices was echoing round the ceilings where it was amplified and making an immense din. Should we stay? Ah, come on, it might be fun, we can survive it, but the man at the bar was rather embarrassed and suggested that perhaps we’d be more comfortable sitting at one of the tables in the porch. Since it was a fine evening and the porch overlooked the estuary we thought this sounded a good idea and agreed. The barman, who was a Brummie, came and had a chat with us. He was an experienced publican who’d run pubs in the Midlands had decided to retire to the west of Ireland and was just helping out in the bar and restaurant as much for something to do as anything else. The group of noisy men were a stag party from Killarney, who had arrived at the restaurant as a coachload, unannounced, and most of them wanted steaks, and it was causing the kitchen great consternation; there were a number of tables booked for the evening – we’d noticed the reserved signs – and Brummie was hoping the stag party would be through and out before too many of the people who’d booked arrived. But he’d see that we weren’t forgotten, and please forgive him if the service wasn’t as quick as it might have been.

Kenmare Bay mussels and fish and chips

We’’d eaten an elaborate meal the evening before and had had a good lunch consisting of fresh rolls and a pate of Irish salmon with seaweed that our friends had bought us from the market before accompanying us to the airport, to ensure we wouldn’t be hungry on our way, and so we weren’t in the mood for anything elaborate. We ordered Kenmare Bay mussels (lots of mussel beds in Kenmare Bay) followed by cod and chips, which turned out as we’d guessed, very fresh fish in a delicate batter and hand-cut chips cooked in fresh oil – probably oil rather than fat – and with nothing to criticise at all. The mussels were interesting because they tasted very Irish, somehow, more fishy and salt-watery than the mussels we have in Italy, which taste fleshier and are greasy on account of having been cooked partly in oil.

How you doin’ there?

Our meal was interrupted – or rather we had a constant floorshow – with members of the stag party going out to the balcony for a smoke, and being Irish they all said hello and nearly every one of them stopped, on both outward and inward pass, for a chat, some of them continuing the repartee while outside puffing away, until the waitress came out and closed the door on them. But it was all very good-natured and all immensely friendly.

Brummie managed to get them all through and get the money for all the dinners and drinks they’d had by a method of firm cajoling, he was obviously very experienced at his job, and they staggered off to their coach at about the same time as we were leaving, somewhat after the first reserved guests had taken their seats, looking a little bit aghast. We gave the lads in the coach a wave as it pulled away, they already having told us that next stop was a bar in Kenmare, though they’d no idea which one.

We’re taken to a bar

We pulled up in Kenmare centre on the way back to the hotel, partly for a stroll and partly to see what might be a possibility for tomorrow night’s dinner. The best restaurant in Kenmare seemed to be Mulcahy’s, not cheap, and a bit over-elaborate for our liking, but ah, come on, let’s see if they’re open tomorrow night and have a table. Yes they are, and they do, so we booked it. That’s done, then, problem over for tomorrow, we’ll worry about how we pay the credit card bill later. Now we’ll have a little stroll round town to see how the other restaurants are doing. Oh, look, there’s our lads from the stag party. You following us around? At which point, come on now, we’re taken by the arms and dragged into the nearest bar for a drink.

I thought it best to take the car back to the hotel at this point as otherwise we’d have had too much alcohol and be obliged to leave it in town all night, so I did, and the hotel car park was full and it took a bit of driving round to find somewhere, and so this took a bit longer than expected, and during this time the lads were immensely kind to Hilary in the bar, making sure she was not left alone for a minute and that conversation never faltered.

Smirting

The bar, Crowley’s Bar, was packed, mainly with stag and hen parties, you could barely move, but it had a constant flow of people, not the kind of hostile groups you used to see in a London pub with a circle of impenetrable backs, and one reason for this is that there’s a permanent coming and going of people out to the street for a smoke. Has the smoking ban led to greater sociability among pub-goers? Possibly in Ireland the people were sociable enough in the first place, though we did hear that there’s a new verb entered the language in Ireland, to smirt. This is where you go outside for a smoke and flirt with the other people of the opposite sex doing the same (in gay bars, it’ll be the same sex one assumes). This is called smirting and is quite an occupation.

Yet another hen party squeezes its way in

Yet another hen party squeezed its way into the bar and one or two of our lads were obviously a bit taken with its members. Classy girls, said one of them to me, aren’t they? So I thought I’d help him out by engaging them in conversation, which proved very easy to do, simply by asking them which one was getting married and then comparing notes with our prospective bridegroom, who by this time was out of sight, in a side room joining in a session with guitar, accordion and drum, he was the guitarist and possibly a non-drinker. The girls were a bit short on conversation among themselves and seemed delighted to be helped out a bit, but our lad who was especially smitten was embarrassed and so convinced of their classiness that he asked, weren’t they the announcers or disc jockeys or something that he’d been hearing that morning on Radio Cork? This just made them giggle, it was a conversation-killer, and he fidgeted about on his heels wondering what to do next and blushed and fiddled with his wedding ring.

Maybe these girls seemed classy because, though they were wearing the regulatory hen-party horns and sashes, the horns weren’t reindeer horns and the sashes not obscene or excessively sparkling.

A naive assumption

I’d naively assumed that the weddings, to which the stag and hen parties related, would be taking place on the following day, but no, of course not, silly, tomorrow’s a Sunday, you don’t get married on a Sunday. No, the forthcoming Big Days were a week, or in our chap’s case two or three weeks, away yet. I now wish I’d asked the girls what sort of work they did, it’s just that after the gaffe of our lad I didn’t feel this was appropriate.

A cigarette destroyed

We decided after a bit that we could go now, that it wouldn’t seem rude, and sure enough that seemed to be fine. Shouting above the din to be heard was getting a little wearing for us oldies. Outside we met one of the party whom I’d been talking to about drugs in general and drugs in Killarney in particular and I’d mentioned that the biggest killer statistically is not an illegal drug, it’s cigarettes, and when I went to shake his hand I accidentally knocked his cigarette to the ground. “You’re certainly practising what you’re preaching, aren’t you?”, he said to me, but in a warm way.

Back past the empty hotel dining room

We wandered back to the hotel past the streams of be-horned and be-glittered hen-party groups passing from one bar to the next, bent-kneed in their high-heeled shoes, and up the hill to the hotel entrance, passing the now empty Soviet hotel dining room; previously, when I’d come to park the car, a few hunched-shouldered elderly couples were eating their dinner in silence, and the menu was now on display: soup of the day, roast of the day, and we decided that booking into Mulcahy’s for tomorrow was probably a very wise move.

The dining room fills up for breakfast

The following morning at breakfast the dining room filled-up shortly after we got in, so obviously the hotel was pretty full, and who were all these people? Mostly Irish, and so far as we could tell, all manner of people away for the weekend. Some may have been to a wedding, we thought, and possibly some to hen parties. The breakfast was shambolically organised, and the food quality mediocre at best, so even more we were glad we’d booked into Mulcahy’s.

We go for dinner to Mulcahy’s

We go for dinner to Mulcahy’s. Busy restaurant, and we seem to have got the last table, tucked away behind the wine racks, which was no bad thing because it meant that we could see most of the other people in the restaurant without having too much to listen to them, a fair number being Americans. Quite a number of Americans, we found, around Kenmare, universally rather loud and irritating. Mulcahy’s must be the place to go according to the guidebooks.

Quite stylish, bare-wood tables, and I had for starter another try at Kenmare Bay mussels; possibly a bit more tasty than yesterday’s but still with that very Irish taste about them. None too bad. Hilary had the day’s special, which consisted of crab claws, a crabmeat mixture, and a crab pate, and in the centre of the stylish rectangular plate a cup of gazpacho, which it was clear one was expected to drink from the cup. Actually, very delicate and, like the girls from Cork at a hen party, classy.

A delicate dinner in Mulcahy’s

Our main courses consisted of monkfish for me and scallops for Hilary, both perfectly cooked and accompanied by carefully-chosen delicate other things that we can’t remember what they were – should have written it down. Whatever they were, we remember thinking that the tastes worked very well together and we’d have to remember them – how old are we? That we think we’d remember anything without writing it down?. Also very classy. What was less classy, were the quarter-moon dishes of mixed vegetables, which were unquestionably well-cooked, but rather guest-house and unnecessary, possibly they’re still expected in that part of Ireland.

And a bottle of Alsace Gewürztraminer, which was so nice that we’re now into Gewürztraminer and have started buying it from the local supermarket.

A dessert of homemade ice creams laid out on the dish like a Japanese garden with a delicate thin stick of wafer biscuit posed across the top. €140 the bill, a lot of money, but probably for what we had, quite reasonably-priced. Just two waitresses managing the waiting-on, running around like mad things, they were both very professional, very polished, very attentive, very impressive.

The French coach party gets an early start

The following morning we had to get up early so as to get the car back to Cork airport in good time so we didn’t have to pay for another day’s hire. The Soviet-style dining room already had a group of people in it to our surprise, since we’d arrived bang-on opening time. These proved to be a group of elderly French tourists on what appeared to be a do-Ireland coach trip, for their bus was waiting for the final stragglers to do a wee-wee before setting off, as we were leaving. A French-speaking Irish guide with them, we felt rather sorry for her.

We give the hunger museum a miss

In Skibereen in County Kerry there’s a multimedia experience museum of the Hunger of the 1840s, which sounds a rather gruesome spectacle to want to visit, so on the grounds of squeamishness we gave that one a miss, even though we stayed not far from Skibereen.

A Visit to Cork

Dinner in Cork – April 2007

We’re invited out to dinner

We were invited out to dinner with friends. They called for us at the hotel and first, there’s a bit of time, let’s go to a bar. So we walk to one of their favourites and I have a pint of Beamish stout as that’s the local brew, but no one else seems to drinking Beamish – disgraceful. Busy bar with people of all ages, we join a table of youngish people speaking Spanish.

Then to the restaurant which was very good quality, French-style, I had a timbale of salt cod Irish-style and then three of us had breast of guinea fowl for mains, Michael opting for a lamb steak with a kind of puff-pastry crust which he said had been flavoured with mint, possibly his choice was the classier one, though ours was very good, and anyway, the French don’t eat mint with lamb – possibly they do more so now, but Asterix the Gaul says they don’t. Service, French style, was quite slow and along the way we got through two bottles of Lebanese red wine. Then it came to dessert and Michael said to the waitress, do you have a dessert wine at all? And so it was glasses of sweet dessert wine. And then when we eventually left at about 11.30 the female half of our hosts suggested that we’d need a nightcap and she thought the bar next door was still serving, so she went in and checked and sure it was, and so along came another bottle of red wine and four glasses, not cheap, €27, and after a walk by the River Lee, watching a heron fishing in the darkness, and bumping into some friends of our friends and a chat at about 1am, we eventually got to bed at about 1.30.

In Ireland, go with the orange white and green

In Ireland, it’s like Italy, you just have to go with the flow. The main difference is that in Ireland this flow seems inevitably to be accompanied by a vast amount of booze. The other difference is that whereas Ireland’s flag is orange, white and green, Italy’s is red, white and green. The main similarity is that the place operates in a state of surprisingly efficient chaos. And they both begin with I. As does India, whose flag is also orange, white and green and where also there’s no avoiding the chaos. So now we know, it’s the flag and the initial letter what does it.

English Country Restaurant

May 2006

We went out to dinner last weekend, to a pub with a good reputation for its food, in a village called Great Salkeld. All very peculiar and old-fashioned. We declined to sit in the deerskin-backed armchairs with a drink while perusing the menu – how passé that would have been had we done that! This was in contrast to the folks who arrived in their fresh-washed rugby shirts, their womenfolk in high-heeled shoes with straps up the ankles, who apparently treated this procedure as the norm. No!, we went straight to the table like urbane familiars, and sat under the disapproving eye of the stuffed head of a large Aberdeen Angus bull, and ate a rather old-fashioned meal of slices of duck with onion ice-cream. Now I know that onion ice-cream doesn’t sound old-fashioned but it really is archetypically that, it sounds like it’s supposed to be up-market but didn’t go with the duck at all, or at least none of our group thought it did. And the boss of the place who came to take our order said he could recommend the fish, which comes from Lake Victoria and is a river fish so is quite mild-flavoured and so large in size that we could be absolutely sure that the fillet we would receive was completely free of bones, this causing Hilary to exclaim with a laugh something to the effect that, Oh, we’re Cumbrians, we are!, we can’t be doing with bloody bones!; an observation on society that was apt, if potentially ill-judged. Quite why the fish has to be imported from Africa – ah well, we know the reason why. So I don’t think we’ll rush to go back there again. If only someone would open a decent restaurant round these parts.

P&O Ferry Rotterdam–Hull

January 2006

Social Research Before It’s Too Late

Travelling back from Holland on the overnight ferry we went to the cafeteria as usual and watched what everyone was choosing to eat as we always do – for the P&O North Sea Ferries are a source of social research that is possibly going to fade soon and then where will we be? The cafés on these ferries have a help-yourself buffet that you pay a fixed amount for, and you can then choose any amount from an immensely wide range of options, including roasts on a carvery, Indian or Chinese, salads etc etc.

A Pink Snowperson

On this particular trip I happened to decide on roast beef I think, or it may have been pork, anyway, I was at the vegetable counter and helping myself to some mixed mange-tout and red pepper, and I was carefully picking out the red pepper in excess of the mange tout, because I thought it looked to have been cooked less energetically, and I spotted a woman out of the corner of my eye who was regarding me with some disapproval, though this wasn’t, I think, because I was picking out the red bits but because I was choosing to eat any of this unspeakable red and green mixture at all; I could tell from the look which was a definite I-know-what-I-like one, so I kept an eye on what she was eating, which turned out to be two chunks of roast beef, roast potatoes, and chips. She then followed up with some cheese and biscuits, then a creamy sponge dessert, then ice cream. She was the shape of a globe, with another, much smaller, globe stuck on top, which was her head. She looked rather like a snowman, except not white, more a kind of blotchy pink. Her friend who was with her was not quite so large, though still immense by most people’s standards, and I noticed that she couldn’t finish her chips and declined the final ice cream. There’s a study to be done on the P&O ferries, before they turn into a pumpkin.

Or Not a Pumpkin

Or before they stop doing low-cost day-trips, or before they cease providing an all-you-can-eat-for-a-fixed-price buffet.

A Cenone for New Year’s Eve

December 2005

Male Appetito

It was New Year’s Eve and on NYE in Italy you eat a cenone. A cenone is a big cena, which is the Italian word for dinner, rather like a calzone is a big sock, you thought it was an Italian pastie what you get in pizza restaurants didn’t you? Well it is, but it means a big sock, which is a pretty good description if you think about it. Anyway, a cenone is a very big dinner and on NYE it commences about 9pm.

Facing a Cenone

Facing a cenone in one of the region’s best-thought-of restaurants, when your appetite has gone missing, as mine had done for a couple of days since, is rather like the man with no arms or legs who enters a swimming competition, jumps into the water and sinks straight to the bottom. When they fish him out he splutters, “What a time to go and get cramp in the ears!’. Whereas I had to face the following tweleve-course meal:

12 Courses

1. a plate of cold stripey-grilled vegetables; courgettes, aubergine, mushroom, onion and olives, preserved in oil or vinegar or both.

2. some olive ascolani and cremini, olive ascolani are large green olives special to the region of Ascoli Piceno, which have been de-stoned and the resulting hole filled with a mix of chopped beef, veal, turkey and pork, the olives are then coated with flour and deep-fried. Cremini are little cubes made from a mix of flour, egg and sugar which are then coated in flour and deep-fried, so the result tastes rather like deep-fried custard, if you can imagine such a thing.

3. something resembling a slice of mushroom quiche.

4. a mushroom omelette

You may have detected at this point that someone who doesn’t like eggs or mushrooms could be disadvantaged – yes indeed, the menu planning could be improved, notwithstanding the restaurant’s reputation. I like both eggs and mushrooms but unfortunately not that evening.

5. pig's trotters and lentils as a kind of thick soup.

I was looking forward to trying this and it was quite palatable, even for someone with no appetite.

6. mushroom ravioli in a creamy sauce

yes, yet more mushroom.

7. a slice of vegetable lasagne, vegetables including mushrooms.

8. a plate of sliced duck meat with an Italian pickled onion

(less harsh than the British form as done in red wine vinegar, not malt vinegar, so not too awful to eat).

9. a pork chop from a young pig, with potato cubes done in the oven in the pig fat.

10. a plate of salad.

11. a dessert of a kind of jam- and cream-filled sponge.

12. coffee and chocs.

With this came four bottles of wine, a fizzy white one to go with the starters, a light red one for the pasta, a darker red one for the meat, and a sweet fizzy one for the dessert.

Going Out For Air

Fortunately, now that smoking is banned in Italian restaurants, the Italians are forever getting up and going outside for a smoke during their dinner, so I was able to wander out for some air now and again, without seeming to be rude or out of place.<

A Jolly Do

But it was quite a jolly evening nonetheless, with much wandering around and shaking of hands at midnight.

Going Out For Air

And I’m pleased to report that by the time we came to drive back to the UK on 3rd January, my appetite had been found again.