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.

Continental Markets

Kendal, Cumbria – November 19th 2009

Continental markets are a bit strange at the best of times, but in the year’s worst downpour, they’re sad as well as strange.

Kendal had put on a ‘Continental Market’ during the time that Cumbria suffered its highest rainfall ever recorded – what a shame! We went there on November 19th, the day that there was severe flooding over many parts of the Lake District.

The continental market was rather sad to see, for not only was in bucketing down with rain, it was windy and the only people who might have qualified as potential customers all had their heads down and collars pulled up. I attach a few pics, not very clear as it was not only wet, it was also quite dark.

Continental markets are a nice idea in principle, but I find them rather samey: French sausage, French cheese, German sausage, the people doing the selling are clearly from France or Germany or wherever is appropriate to their product, so I suppose they travel from place to place, staying in hotels, and trying to clear a few vanloads of produce. Whether this is economically sensible for them, I don’t know. I guess it’s touch and go.

One of the stalls selling French sausage had oddly-translated display tickets, and I wondered whether this was done on purpose so as to seem quaint and foreign. It had ‘Sausage Coated in Chile’ (I like that one, even if it is contrived), ‘Sausage in the Goat’s Cheese’, ‘Sausages of Duck’, ‘Sausage Has the Garlic’ and ‘Smoked Sausage Pork’s (pig)’. Possibly we’re getting a little picky as we grow older, but none of these looked to be especially good quality, so we didn’t buy anything.

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.

High Heels and No Knickers

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

Sunderland

November 2008

In Sunderland I first needed to make a mobile phone call – a business call – and I sat on a street bench to do that. Sunderland is a very poor town, and people who sat nearby me looked curiously at me, as if they’d never heard someone say things like, ‘I’ll be back in the office tomorrow morning and will email you from there’.

I went into the Winter Garden, which is a kind of circular glass building containing tropical plants – not very large; and a party of primary-age schoolchildren in blue blazers had just completed their visit and were being ushered in and out of the toilets in small groups. I had a look in the adjoining museum and art gallery but was not greatly gripped by anything (I much prefer the museum and art gallery in Kirkcaldy). I then thought I’d try their café and bistro, as they called it, for lunch, but on looking at the menu of meat stew and mashed potatoes and the display of rather tired-looking cakes decided against it. Usually museum cafes are quite good, but the Sunderland one certainly didn't appeal, or not to my urbane middle-class tastes at any rate.

I also thought I’d take a look inside the public library, partly because it was there signposted on the ornamental street signs, and partly because it was nearby. I wondered who would be in there browsing the books, for Sunderland has a poor look about it. The answer turned out to be hardly anyone. The ‘Study Area’ had a few old blokes looking at a newspaper, I could have stayed and studied something, had there been enough time, for there were plenty of free tables. But what was busy, with a queue of people waiting, were the computer terminals, of which there must have been 20-30. I don’t know whether you have to pay anything to use them, I omitted to ask. The people using the terminals and waiting for a vacant one were mostly young – in the 20s and 30s or maybe late teens – and with a large proportion of ethnic faces, that is to say, of an ethnology not generally thought traditional to Sunderland. And that was slightly surprising, as in the streets the population are almost all white. The foreign-looking people are studying, while the indigenous population shuffle the streets (as I have to confess, I was that day).

I had been wondering, strolling the streets of Sunderland, what is it that makes someone look poor? I think it must be a mixture of clothes, complexion and countenance that does it, but I couldn’t precisely pinpoint it. Also if you try looking this up on Google, it is one of those topics of information, that among all the mass of available information, is not there. I have resolved to study this some more, since no one else appears to be doing so.

I think that better-off people tend generally to hold themselves more erect, and I think they wear more-revealing clothes. I was watching the students of Durham University and many of the girls were wearing little pumps on their feet, that are like small boats that cover their toes and heels, but sweep down at the gunwales to reveal an amount of veiny foot. The financially-struggling women of Sunderland, in contrast, wear trainers or clompy male-like shoes. Also the privileged students of Durham University tend to body-hugging jeans, while the downtrodden women of Sunderland have loose-fitting jeans that sag about the bum. But that’s just the shoes and the jeans, there must be a lot more to it than that and I have put it on my list of Very Important Things to Research.

Hartlepool to Durham

November 2008

I waited for the bus to Durham, at the bus stop that was outside the Hartlepool Arriva Travel Centre. This meant that I could spend the time waiting for the bus, profitably reading the adverts for holidays that were stuck to the inside of the travel centre windows in great abundance. I learned that I could go on a five-day trip to the German Christmas markets, with afternoons to myself in Freiburg and Strasbourg, and a berth in a cabin on the overnight ferry from Hull to Rotterdam, for £259. That seemed extraordinarily good value. Or if I preferred, Skegness for £129 or Morecambe for a bargain £99. What value! Pregnant with possibilities!

Then it was time for my bus and I saw with some surprise and delight as it arrived that it was a double-decker. It was a rather ancient double-decker that rattled a lot. I rushed upstairs to the front seat, but needn’t have hurried, for of course all the old folks (ie all the other old folks) fill the seats nearest the door, so they have as short a distance as possible to walk. The only other person to come upstairs was a young man who looked like he probably had a mild learning disability, and he sat near the back. The bus was rather decrepit, and the backrest of the seat opposite where I was sitting came away from its housing when the driver braked, and slapped back with a resounding clonk as he accelerated.

The driver batted the bus along at quite a lick. Or maybe he didn’t especially, maybe it just seemed like it because it was an old rattly bus. Winding through depressed-looking towns, though this bus also negotiated some country lanes, past pheasants strutting in the ploughed-up fields. These buses do a number of detours around housing estates and it’s not always clear to a newcomer like me whether you’ve been down a road before, whether the bus is in fact just doing a loop. So I was not quite sure how many direction signs I saw to a SureStart centre, for it’s possible that some of them were seen more than once, but it did appear to me that every small town had at least one. SureStart is the government programme that helps parents with parenting skills, among other things to try and help make the poor less poor.

The other pleasing thing about this double-decker bus was that one of the unappealing towns it went through was Hutton Henry. When you drive north along the dual-carriageway A19 through County Durham, you see the signs to Hutton Henry, but of course never go there. To my delight, the bus did, not that there was much there when it came to it, but no longer will I have to wonder.

As the bus gets within sight of the cathedral at Durham it goes down a steep straight hill, quite fast, which in the front seat upstairs makes you feel like saying, wheee! (to yourself of course, even though there was no one else on board). A windy day too.

Sunderland to Hartlepool

November 2008

The bus from Sunderland to Hartlepool was a smaller one than I travelled on from Durham to Sunderland, and was cream and blue instead of bright purple. The passengers, as with the Durham to Sunderland bus , were almost entirely old folks travelling on their free passes (well, why not? that’s what I was doing). And they looked rather poor.

The bus goes through a string of poor-looking towns: Ryhope, the outskirts of Seaham, Easington, Horden, Peterlee. I have been through most of these places before, and they do look rather depressed. The people look poor, whatever that means (some comments on this on my page about Sunderland). And so do the buildings. Among the old folks joining and leaving the bus was a woman reading a book called Contract Law. Why would someone travel on a bus from Sunderland to Peterlee, reading a book about contract law? She may have been studying law – as a (very) mature student – or maybe she was in dispute over a loan or something. So much that one doesn’t know and is far too shy to ask. There was a story to be told there, there must have been.

The woman with her book was unusual. No one else I saw that day on the buses was reading a book.

A Visitor to Sheffield

Poor Catya. She didn’t want to feel reliant upon us, she wanted to be independent, so she looked on the Internet for a hotel in Sheffield, and found one that looked nice. Reasonably priced, and three-star accommodation.

We got to Sheffield around 6pm on Sunday, not knowing where Catya was, and not knowing whether or not her friend Pietro was with her. We phoned her on the mobile as soon as we were settled in our hotel, and suggested we have dinner together. Catya told us the address of her hotel, and it was within walking distance of ours so we said we’d meet her there.

We walked to the address she’d given us, and when we found her hotel we were horrified. It was a shabby-looking pub, with young men inside playing pool and a sign at the door that said, ‘The Art of Afternoon Drinking, Practised and Perfected in Sheffield’. We found Catya sitting on the benches outside, her shoulders hunched and her long jet-black hair wrapped around her chin. ‘Catya’, we said, ‘this is no fit place to stay’.

‘It’s horrible’, replied Catya, ‘It’s dirty, and there’s a disco that goes on until about four in the morning.’

‘We must do something for you.’

‘No, it’s OK, I will write feedback on the website when I get home’.

‘Well, let’s go and get something to eat and we can talk about it.’

Catya was clearly quite shaken. The man on reception, who was covered in tattoos, had insisted that she pay in cash for the full five nights that she had booked, and had given her no receipt for the money. She had asked to see the room, but he wouldn’t do that before receiving the money and then had simply given her the key and said which floor she’d find it on. There was no lift and she lugged her suitcase up the stairs. There was an en-suite bathroom but with no door on it.

Catya was somewhat frightened. She’d been down to breakfast that morning, but was concerned that the kitchen was as dirty as the rest of the place. The butter she described as having been melted and left to harden again, and she’d asked for toast but been told there was only bread.

Catya was insistent that she must stay there because she didn’t think she’d be able to get her money back if she didn’t, but we insisted that she must not stay there, and that somehow, we would ensure that she did get it back. We were aware, though, that we might be on weak ground, as she’d paid in cash and had no receipt.

First, Hilary phoned our hotel, to see whether they could do a deal that would nearly match in price what Catya had paid. This was successful, so next I said I’d come back to the pub with her tonight, and talk to them and see what might be possible. None of us were too hopeful about this, and strategies were buzzing in my head.

Fortunately, when we got back to the pub, there was someone just opening up the reception area – a yellowing and poky office just inside the entrance. I asked if I could have a word, and explained that circumstances for Catya had changed, and she would need to check out in the morning, and that since she’d paid for five nights, she would require a refund for the three she wouldn’t be using.

The young man was quite pleasant and helpful, notwithstanding his shirt hanging half-out from his jeans and a tear in these jeans across the knee. That would be fine, he said, but he could not refund the money right then, as he did not have the key to the safe, but he’d leave a note that we’d called, on the computer. Someone would be in around 8.30 in the morning, who he thought should have the key. I said to Catya that she must stay here again tonight, and that I would get it sorted out in the morning, she was to meet us, with her suitcase, outside the hotel at 8.45. There was a Tescos almost opposite, and she should go there and buy herself some breakfast.

At 8.45, we arrived, to find Catya sitting on the outside benches, as hunched and forlorn-looking as yesterday, and I went with her to the reception, where there was a rather severe-looking grey-haired woman, and I explained the story again. The grey-haired lady started off being somewhat suspicious and negative, but I sent Catya off to sit in the car, speaking to her in Italian so the lady would not know what I was saying to her, and then did a chat-up job on the lady, with smiles, and stories about Catya and her life and circumstances, only partly true, and nod’s-as-good-as-a-wink tales, and she sent for someone to go and get the money from the safe, who turned out to be a young teenage girl, who arrived and counted out the notes into my hand. The lady then even produced me an invoice.

When I left, with ‘oops, we’re on a double-yellow’ excuses to curtail our tete-a-tete, I accidentally left the invoice on the counter, and the lady came running after me, ‘You forgot your invoice’, she said, smiling, and I assured her that, oh dear, it’s usually my glasses that get left behind, and we parted with laughters all round.

>

Catya was waiting in the car with Hilary, and when I arrived and handed over an invoice and three nights accommodation in cash, she was disbelieving. I’m not sure she believed that I hadn’t been to the bank and got the money to pay her myself, but then again, there was the invoice – all clear and showing the refund. Catya had not expected to see the money again, and still couldn’t really believe she had. I had every confidence that I’d get it, though not so swiftly and smoothly.

My next job, after having installed Hilary and Catya at the training centre, was to go to the Vodafone shop to sort out a problem whereby our mobiles had decided to not allow us to call overseas numbers. I’d expected this might require a bit of persistence, but actually it all went smoothly, and again I somehow succeeded in getting a cheery smile and see-ya-later from an initially somewhat bored and surly-looking sales girl in a red blouse.

In walking to my celebratory cup of coffee in Caffe Nero (‘The best coffee this side of Milan’, it says on the staff’s t-shirts, and actually, to be fair, I think It probably is) I felt myself walking tall and upright – couldn’t help it – which in Sheffield, which has a lot of poverty and deprivation evident almost everywhere – seemed conceited, if no mean achievement.

Catya still feels peeved about the whole business and does not want to let it go, she cannot wait to express her feelings through the hotel’s website feedback forms.

And in case you are wondering, yes, the pub hotel is the Harley, ‘Your Harley. It’s full of music. And Gin.’ – dreadful reports from wherever you look it up.

A Railtour Comes Upon Us

Ravenglass, West Cumbria – June 2008

A Train Arrives

We were in Ravenglass for the 800th anniversary of the granting of a town charter, see Ravenglass Charter Fair.

We went and stood on the footbridge over the mainline railway, as a special railtour train was due. The train had left Cardiff at 6.10am in the morning and had stopped at Bristol, Cheltenham, and Birmingham, together possibly with some other intermediate places, to bring a trainload of people to Cumbria. Some of the passengers had got off at Grange-over-Sands and been taken by bus to Lake Windermere, and others had continued on the train to Ravenglass, where a special steam train on the narrow-gauge railway had been arranged to take them up the valley and back again, while the mainline train went and turned round at Sellafield, so it could collect its passengers for their return journey home facing the right way, some two hours later. We stood on the footbridge while the special railtour train arrived, and the people still remaining on it got off and filed past us on their way to the narrow gauge station.

Inelegant, is Probably the Word

Inelegant, is probably the word. Mostly men, mostly grey-haired. I kept thinking of that song, Ziggy is a bloke with a stubble on his chin, he looks like suvving the cat's brought in. Diamond-patterned pullovers and sagging stomachs, and a shuffling gait.

They filed past us.

On the railtour train you could travel first class or second. In first class there appeared to be an at-table dining service, whereas in second you brought your own sandwiches to keep you going from 6.10am until the train was due to arrive back in Cardiff, some time after midnight. All the carriages, first- and second-class, were rather old, in various shades of reddish-brown, blue and cream.

These railtour trains, I am fairly reliably informed, get fully-booked.

A highlight of this particular trip from Cardiff was to be the return leg, when the route would take the train on some lines around Manchester, usually reserved solely for freight trains.

A Delight of Hawking Sounds

The diesel engines, for there were two at the head of the train, were once used on the lines to Fort William and Mallaig. Class 37s. Upon leaving Ravenglass station they made a noise a bit like you can do by exhaling with your lips almost closed and relaxed, while hawking with your throat. This seemed to be a feature, as it was greeted with great satisfaction by those watching. Presumably the drivers knew how to generate this noise by pulling the relevant levers, and so delight their audience.

D More-I C

In my wanderings around the globe, I spend more time being amazed than I do understanding anything. Railtours such as we witnessed that weekend are immensely popular with a certain (rather inelegant) sector of the population, while some of us spend our time juggling the commitments of work and family. There are lots of people out there in the world who are different from me, which should be rather surprising as I’m a fairly run-of-the-mill character, but I think I’m past being surprised, I just gape in wonderment.

More about the happenings in Ravenglass at Ravenglass Charter Fair.

Ravenglass Charter Fair

June 2008

If your gob has a full set of false teeth, learn to smile with your mouth closed.

A Fair, an Audience

The 800th anniversary of the granting of a town charter to Ravenglass: marquees casting shadows over groups of people selling pots and jams and second-hand books. And in the main street, entertainment; Morris-dancers, step and clog dancers, a brass band and street entertainers.

The visitors with grey beards and their wives liked the street entertainers. They laughed, or more precisely they lowered the bottom half of their mouth and raised the top to reveal a fluorescing array of unlikely-looking dentures, all neat and white and with a stuck-on look.

Street Entertainers

The street entertainers were very proficient. Two men who did tricks, like juggling three knives while balancing on an eight-foot-high unicycle. That's very clever. And putting a household rubber glove over your head, down as far as beyond your nose, so you can blow out though your nose and the rubber glove inflates. It inflates and inflates and inflates until at some point when it looks like it might burst you quickly push it upwards with your hands and it flies way up into the air as the air inside it escapes. That's original. And an escapology trick, escaping from a linen sack after having had the hands padlocked together.

The teeth in the audience glowed in appreciation.

Fookin Whackem

But I was uncomfortable watching the Morris-dancers and step-dancers, I wanted to choreograph them, I wanted to say to them, throw yourself into it, good people, with all your being, and when you whack them sticks together, don't flinch and blink, fookin whackem. But I didn't say that as currently it's none of my business; one day, perhaps, when I’m retired and have time to take up Morris dancing.

If You’re Going to Wear a Hat

There was also a brass band, the Egremont town band. It's very good that Egremeont has a town band, it's good that any town has a brass band, not least Egremont, but I wanted to say to the conductor, yes, I know it's a sunny day, but if your band members are going to wear a hat, let it be a corporate hat – that motley collection of flat caps and upturned linen flowerpots of different shades of pale just looks sloppy, looks not a million miles divorced from the handkerchief on the head, knotted at the corners.

And what I’d like to know is: those street entertainers, who put so much time and emotional effort into their act and presentation, and probably get paid an hourly rate that’s barely worth contemplating, and possibly work as tax inspectors or bank clerks during the week; what do they do it for? Why? That’s the question on my partly-closed and suitably relaxed lips, as I watch the lips of the rest of the audience part to reveal a fluorescent and unlikely-looking grin.

Gloating Suits

Broadgate Ice Rink, London, November 2007

I wandered to where Broad Street Station used to be, now called Broadgate and containing offices of finance institutions surrounding an arena in the centre of which is an ice-skating rink, where at lunchtimes, certain of the office workers come to ice-skate.

This particular day was cold and windy and there were just three people on the rink. Had you put it on the telly, people would have said it was unrealistically absurd, and would have laughed, had the programme been labelled as comedy. For there was a young woman in sweatshirt and jeans, who skated round and round backwards, ie in reverse, like walking backwards, and every so often she crashed towards the side where she took a swig from a paper cup of coffee. Then there was a man in a red overcoat, who looked like he had his hands in his pockets, though in fact they were just by his side, and like the woman he was a proficient skater, but just glid around in his overcoat. And in the middle was a man in his blue office shirt and suit trousers, his sleeves rolled up and an inverted V of sweat-marks on his back, and he was trying to practise skating jumps. He held his arms out in a pose of balance, and when he felt himself suitably poised, he jumped and tried to turn in the air, landing uncertainly and with feet flailing and just about staying upright. Around the rink stood groups of gloating young office workers in their dark-grey suits, holding paper cups of coffee and some a flaking pie in a paper bag, and with their greasy hair and sneers were waiting for the jumping man to fall over, so they could all cheer and jeer and snigger. Lots of coffee and food stalls about too, but I didn’t buy anything despite it being lunchtime – felt a bit nauseous.

There are pics of Broadgate Ice Rink (though not this occasion unfortunately) on my Flickr photostream.

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!

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.

Cross Folk in Bishops Stortford

April 2006

A minor detour to Bishops Stortford, which we’ve never visited before except for passing though on the train, and which is not too bad-looking a town. We had a pleasant walk in a large leafy park, and looked around the streets near the church as the local people were going out to dinner in their cars. I don’t know why, but each couple we saw getting into their tinted-window Range Rover, we assume off somewhere for dinner, looked angry and miserable, and drove their regulation 4-wheel away with an evident jamming into the gears. I wonder where they were going, that caused them to look so displeased. We ate in Pizza Express.

I can recommend a visit to Bishops Stortford, and if it is early evening keep a lookout for the large-car-driving locals who never smile, to see if my observation can be substantiated. Pizza Express is a place where all sorts gather, smilers and non-smilers alike, so that was OK, though we watched excruciatingly as a family of dad, two teenage children, and what we guess was dad’s newish girlfriend, tried to keep up a relaxed conversation over their pizzas – a scenario that we witness in restaurants quite frequently. This lot did pretty well we thought, in the circumstances.

The March

September 2005

On Saturday a march assembled at Parliament Square and walked to Hyde Park where there was to be a concert with speeches. The theme of the march was to protest about the presence of British troops in Iraq. It included, as ever, a sprinkling of Workers of the World Unite proponents, which seemed a little irrelevant to the subject in hand, together with the Rama Krisha Temple lot jingling their bells, and quite a few bearded chaps in robes who periodically put their copy of the Daily Mirror on the ground facing east, bent over, and rested their head on it, with their bottom in the air.

An elderly couple came and sat by me on my park bench. ‘Nice to see so many young people on the march’, said the lady. ‘Yes’, I replied, out of politeness. I asked where she and her husband had marched from and they said Parliament Square, which was quite far enough and now it was time to sit down and eat a cheese sandwich from a plastic bag in their rucksack. I asked if they’d seen my friend Chris, who was playing the saxophone in a band and they said they thought they had, very good the band was too, in Whitehall. Older men wasn’t it? Yes. Oh yes, very good they were. I had to meet some friends in a café in Marylebone High Street at 3, so could not wait for Chris to march by tootling, or to watch any more unlikely-looking people pass by, so I wished the couple a happy concert, which they said they didn’t intend to go to, finding it much more pleasant to sit in the park instead, which indeed it was.

Python in St James Park

April 2004

23 April 2004 was a warm and sunny day in London. On emerging from a meeting into the sunshine at about 3pm I walked across St James Park which was, as you’d expect, jam-packed with people doing all sorts of things from feeding the ducks to practising their poi balls, though perhaps none more remarkable than the man who’d decided to take his python for a walk. In fact he’d been intercepted by the police and was being watched over by a silent policeman in a flak jacket while he, the man with the python, sat on a low fence looking sullen. The python wasn’t looking like it had any emotion as pythons don’t, except rather fat so whether it had just eaten one of the ducks I can only speculate. The policeman in the flak jacket, who had some support from two more of his profession standing back rather, looked a little worried while trying to stay in charge. I’d have liked to have hung around to see the outcome and possibly found out how the man had got the python there in the first place, whether he’d brought it on the bus or the tube for example, but as ever when I’m in London these days, I had another meeting to go to. It was quite a sizeable python.

Javoll sind wir noch ein und auch gedoppelt

June 2003

Our periodic trips to Westminster for meetings began last November when the leaves had long since left the trees and I was intrigued to find that in a public garden just off Horseferry Road there were some ginkgo biloba trees. These trees are associated with the name of Goethe, I think he had one or more in his garden in Weimar and he wrote a romantic poem associating his love for an 18th century muscular German matron with the double leaves of the ginkgo. As one we are doppelt, it ends, or words to that effect. Romantically-inclined Germans go all soppy over it, or did, I’m not sure they do still, though they might. You can also make an infusion from the leaves of the ginkgo that is said to ease muscular tension when consumed. Never tried it myself though will do when chance pertains.

Anyhow, during the winter, we were unable to identify which of the trees in this charming London public square was the ginkgo because they were all bare of leaves. But now, in the sunshine, we can see them shining out and so pay homage to the great man. There we were, Hilary and I, in our suits and carrying our laptop cases, saying: ‘ooo look, there it is, javoll sind wir noch ein und auch gedoppelt’, while the scantily-dressed office girls sat on the grass, wondering what the bloody hell these idiots were finding so interesting to point at. Then we got the number 88 bus to the next meeting.

Much as we were tempted, we did not have the courage to steal some leaves from said tree to make an experimental infusion, though might manage it one day, when fewer scantily-dressed girls are sitting on the grass pretending to eat their tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches, eyeing us so critically.

Have you noticed the change in office workers’ sandwiches over the years? Increasingly, they have become full of a whitish sloppy substance, to replace the smooth but not sloppy pink ham and fish paste of yore. We get these slop-filled sandwiches whenever a meeting we attend has sandwiches laid on. I find them not too bad but a bit overfull of ingredients that all taste pretty much as one. I’m not sure if I closed my eyes whether I could say if I was eating avocado, prawn and mayonnaise, or chicken tikka massala. Some of them have a bit of dried-up bacon in which acts as a variation on the texture, which can be a nice change. But every day? One must eventually turn into an homogenous white slop, based upon the theory that what you are is determined by what you eat. They’re popular though, so perhaps it’s me that’s out of line with what goes on in the world. White slop rules, OK. OK?

More on St. John’s Gardens in Westminster on my Ginkgo Biloba in London page.

More comments on the social history of office workers’ lunches on my Slop-Squelched Sandwiches page.

In the Footsteps of Tony and Cherie

August 2002

We’ve just returned from a few days in Ravenglass on the west coast of Cumbria in the company of Tony and Cherie. Well, not exactly company, they arrived in Whitehaven to see the tall ships one day later than we did, and we got there one day after the ships had, annoyingly, sailed away. I hope that Tony did what we did in the absence of ships, and looked in Estate agents’ windows to see that, in Frizington, you can buy a terraced house for £14,000. The only downer is that you have to live in Frizington which, whilst safe from muggings and with hills all around, is a bit short on things to do, like work for example.

Whitehaven, despite the money being spent on tarting up its harbour and museums, is a very poor and depressed place. I wonder if Tony detected this. I bet he didn’t. Then on the afternoon that he and Cherie chose to ride on the Ravenglass and Eskdale railway, we’d decided to do another stretch of the Cumbria coastal path, which we’re covering in sections. It’s an excellent long distance footpath, though you have to be a bit persistent to deal with all the places that the farmers have knocked down the waymarkers and put barbed wire over the stiles, but apart from that it’s ever such varied walking, and no one seems to know about it, so we saw nobody at all on our eight-mile afternoon stroll in the sunshine, while Tony sat in the little carriage with Leo and the nanny, and Cherie rode on the steam engine footplate with Peter the driver, and whether the excitement of it all contributed to her current misfortunes, I’m not unkind enough to speculate on. At the head of the line they were whisked away in cars with dark-tinted windows and taken to the Woolpack for lunch – not one of the better pubs up in those parts in our opinion, but chosen because it doesn’t involve too many single track roads and has exit by road from two directions – apparently this was crucial in deciding the lunch venue. All the minders had a glass of orange juice each, apparently. The regular people go to the Ratty Arms (yes, really) and drink lager, even though the man will serve an excellent pint of real English Jennings if you ask him.