Best lunch ever at Gidleigh Park

One of my hobbies is eating my way around Britain and I have been to quite a few notable nosheries including Le Gavroche, Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's, Maze and The Fat Duck.

But these all paled into insignificance against Michael Caines' two Michelin starred Gidleigh Park restaurant  near Chagford in Devon.

Giz and I went there for Sunday lunch and it was just exquisite!

The hotel is in beautiful grounds in a very peaceful location. It is relaxed and elegant, with the superb, unotrusive service that you expect in a place like this.

After canapes in the lounge as we chose from the menu, we were shown to our table and first to arrive was a complimentary artichoke soup in a tiny glass accompanied by superb artisan bread, crusty on the outside and soft and melting inside as so many bread rolls aren't.

My first course was salmon confit and my main was Devonshire sirloin which came with a cep shaped ravioli filled with delicious braised shin. I would like to tell you all the different components but unfortunately the particular menu we had isn't shown on the website.

We both had an apple plate to finish, which had three apple desserts lined up: tarte tatin, lemon mousse and a lemon biscuit with ice cream, plus a tiny jug with warm apple jus. To die for!

I've added photos of what I ate. Not great quality but I had to take them with my BlackBerry. The camera was with J, who at this time was running the Amsterdam Marathon and finishing at 3 hour 43, which is very good.

We opted for coffee and petit fours in the lounge. I was expecting a couple of hand-made chocolates but it was like another course: three tiny perfectly made desserts on a wooden tray. An apple doughnut, a blackcurrant posset and a chocolate, hand tempered. We couldn't have eaten another thing, so just as well we didn't go for the tasting menu.

The only drawback to this wonderful place was the very windy and narrow country lane leading to the hotel. Unsuitable for heavy vehicles, it had hardly any passing places and for a townie driving a new car was a bit of a white knuckle ride. But well worth it for the experience that followed.

TODAY'S GOOD NEWS

Three decades ago, the otter population was at risk of extinction because of chemicals and poor quality waterways. Now the riverbanks are filled to bursting with otters. Good news indeed!

Plymouth gets Christmas makeover

As you read this, dear reader, I will be gallivanting in my ancestral home - Devon - and reclaiming my Four Square mayorship of the power station next door to my mum's house.

So it is apt that today's good news story features my former home city of Plymouth.

Plymouth is to get its Winter Festival complete with ice rink.

The Winter Festival will start with the Christmas lights switch-on on Thursday, November 18. It will feature the Christmas Ice Rink on the Piazza, festive shows at the Pavilions, Christmas markets, Sleeping Beauty at the Theatre Royal, the Christmas Carnival, late-night shopping, festive street entertainment and a special 'Santa fun run'.

I will hopefully get to see some of this when I go down to Plymouth later this year to deliver the presents.

And if my mum wasn't excited enough about enjoying the delights of Gidleigh Park, our lunch destination today, she will be beside herself next Thursday when she and one of her widows' associations go to see John Barrowman at the Plymouth Pavilions. A full report to follow. Gird your loins.

Heifer rescue went well

Continuing the theme of good news stories, I am indebted to Fran of South Cerney for this heart warmer about a heifer rescue that went well.

The Wilts & Gloucs Standard reports how the heifer was hauled to safety by firefighters after falling down a well at Crudwell. The 12-month-old animal plunged through the cover of a 10ft deep well at Hayleaze Farm, but landed upright in the water and mud.

A crew from Malmesbury was on the scene first and made it safe before a specialist animal rescue team from Stratton arrived. Rural safety officer Adam Martin explained: "The cow was in an extremely confined space and would have been very frightened by what had happened, so the challenge was to get her sedated and then lifted free.

"The water was drained from the well, which allowed the vet access to carry out sedation. It was then safe for us to get down to her and put strops around her."

All's well that ends well.

Today's good news

I can tell you that I have bitten off more than I can chew with my pledge to find some good news every day.
A trawl of BBC news and local paper websites revealed a litany of bad, bad news.  Eventually I found a heart warming titbit at the Croydon Advertiser.

For 70 years, the South Norwood and Woodside branch of the Women's Section of the Royal British Legion have been meeting up once a month to socialise and organise fundraisers.

The ladies are celebrating their 70th anniversary and preparing for Poppy Day. But they desperately need new members. "We've not had any young people join us for a good 20 years," said Secretary Ann Sparshott. "We need some young people in to help us with the fundraising and the lifting and carrying which comes with putting on our events.


"The support the Legion provides is going to go through the generations. It's rewarding to hear when people get the help they need. It brings tears to your eyes. I think it's a brilliant cause."

And now the good news

The triumphant rescue of the Chilean miners yesterday was a wonderfully uplifting story that had people all around the world sobbing as we shared in their joy.

It got me thinking about how rare it is that we rejoice in a good news story.

The media happily feeds us stories of hoodies with knives, drunken promiscuous teenagers, men killing their own children and so on without putting them into perspective. The impression is that society is out of control and nothing good ever happens.

Any good news stories are buried away or become "fillers" if they're used at all.

So I'm going to try to find a good news story every day. It won't be good news as in Tom Daley wins two gold medals, or interest rates come down. That's the sort of good news that is shared by the media. I'm talking about stories of human interest and kindness. Here's hoping I can find some! And please share any of your own stories.

One story that has stayed with me over the years was an item about an Albanian refugee ship. No countries would accept the refugees, who were on an unseaworthy vessel out in the ocean. They had been turned away by an Italian port. But when they landed at a Greek island, instead of turning them away, the locals rushed down to greet them with blankets and sandwiches.

In a similar vein, last winter's heavy snow brought out the goodness in people who offered rooms to strangers who were trapped in their cars.

That's the sort of stories we need folks!

Today's award for being out-of-touch and slightly preposterous: Andrew Marr

BBC political correspondent Andrew Marr is in the news himself today for describing bloggers as 'socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy young men' who give journalism a bad name.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Marr said: "A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people.".

Er, hello?

I'm not sure what sites Marr has been visiting, but Mashable, noted authority on social media, tells us the majority of bloggers are women.

There are a few "angry" sites: for example, http://ihateryanair.co.uk/ is also in the news today, which is a good example, but sites like these are usually doing a good job. Power to the people! Companies, utilities and politicians can't get away with anything lilke they used to, because of the vigilance of pesky spotty people on the web.

Of course Marr is approaching this from a defensive stand point. Does blogging present a challenge to newspapers and TV news over the next few years?

Undoubtedly yes, in terms of speed of breaking news. No TV station or news agency can respond as fast as Twitter, as we have seen with recent major stories. Nearly everyone has a camera phone, therefore we can all make and share news as it happens.

But blogs and online media present news in small chunks, and I believe that paper copies of newspapers will still thrive because people want their analysis and comment.

In the meantime, I suggest Mr Marr visits some of the blogs in my blog roll to see that some of the content is written by entirely sane people with perfectly good complexions, and none of us living with our mothers.

We go to Buckingham Palace

J's picture of the Queen Victoria memorial, Pall Mall

That's stretching the truth slightly, but we did go to the Queen's Gallery which is within the palace. We had a day off for J's birthday and I booked the visit to the  Victoria & Albert Love & Art exhibition a few months ago, after we saw the film Young Victoria.

I don't know about you but I've always thought of   Queen Victoria as a dumpy, sour faced woman in black. But it turns out, that was in the second part of her reign after her husband Albert died, aged just 42. In the years they were married they were very happy and the exhibition shows the works of art, sculpture and jewellery that they commissioned for each other.

Was the Queen at home?

 Victoria more or less lost interest in art after Albert's death. She commissioned some wonderful works to commemorate his life, including the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, but the rest of her life was spent in mourning, with the room in which Albert died lovingly kept as it was.

I loved the picture of Victoria that was given to Albert as a birthday presen (left). Her shoulders are bare, her hair cascades over her shoulder and she looks sensuous and wanton.

Very few examples of her costumes survive but the exhibition had a sumptuous dress which showed Victoria had a tiny waist when she was slim.

I loved seeing the watercolours and drawings that she did. She was a talented artist but being Queen it was difficult for her to paint so she mainly indulged in her hobby when she was with her family.

The exhibition has been extended until early December. Check it out here

Who talks about sad men?

Reading a few biographies lately, I was struck by a recurrent theme. Fathers are nearly always described as remote, cold, unhappy, shouty.

In Lynn Barber's much trumpeted read, her father gets little compassion but is berated for drinking, shouting and rudeness. Barber doesn't attempt to analyse why this was the case and is equally scatching about her "sour, bitter" mother.

TV presenter Fiona Phillips talks of a happy childhood but her relationship with her father was also challenging. He was detached and remote.

Then recently, Liz Hodginson asked why are men over 60 so boring, with nothing to talk about?

I wonder what would have happened if a man had dared write that about women over 60. There is a lot of reverse discrimination nowadays which seems perfectly acceptable. TV ads can happily poke fun at men for being inept round the house. Feminists write endlessly about the lot of women, and it's a "lot" which has changed beyond recognition in the last 100 years.

Looking back, I wonder if the unhappy fathers of biographies were tired of being the breadwinner; of having to perform routinely dull 9 to 5 jobs to ensure their families were fed? There was little opportunity in the 60s for breaking out of the mould. Generally only the priveleged were well educated.

Did the grind of a dull job and the retirement with little to offer except a nagging wife and a shed lead to the "boring men" that Hodginson talks about?

My own father fizzed and enthralled as a younger man, a Royal Marine with the charisma to host events and chair local community meetings. But after leaving the services at 37, he gradually lost his joie de vivre as he took on a succession of jobs he didn't enjoy. His health began to deteriorate and he became a classically grumpy old man.  We knew so little about him. He rarely talked about himself or his past.

Younger men today, we read, don't have it any easier. Their role has been changed, probably against their will, as women were liberated from being housewives or typists. They have to compete for the best jobs against women as well as men, and some companies impose numbers on how many men can be hired in order to hire more women, regardless of who's best for the job.

From a young age boys constantly hear how inferior they are to girls. It was apparent in the TV programme "Gareth Malone's extraordinary school for boys" where the boys could scarcely concentrate and were largely incapable of reading, let alone debating with girls of the same age.

Allowing boys to hide behind Wiis and other gadgets clearly doesn't help their interpersonal skills. The nanny state of compensation culture doesn't allow them to burn off energy and parents get castigated for letting their children walk or cycle to school on their own, even if it's only a short distance.

If all this was happening to women, and women were so unhappy, there would be a huge inquest. But who feels sad about the men?

Give Ed a break

My personal preference was David, but what's really getting my goat is the vitriole aimed at Ed Milliband because he thwarted his brother's ambitions by standing for the Labour leadership in the first place.

What?

Now with certain things - inheritances and the monarchy - the eldest son always gets priority. Some weird old feudal thing.

But I don't see why, if Ed made his career politics exactly as his brother did, he can't go for the top prize too.

Leaderships don't come round very often and particularly not when there are meglomaniacs like Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair.

I'm sure the psychologists are going to have a field day. There was excited gossip on the Andrew Marr show today about how Ed always copied David. But here's the thing. (An expression I hate). David had his chance a couple of years ago when he made an attack on Gordon Brown, without naming his prey, but then backed off. He could have made his move then and maybe Labour wouldn't have lost the election. But we'll never know.

My only advice to Ed, following his appearance on the Marr show today, is that he doesn't want to sound like he supports the Coalition government. I know it's hard to find differences between the three leaders, all young, highly educated middle and upper class men as they are, but unless Ed finds a differentiator, we'll be stuck with Cameron and the gang for years.

Thank goodness for Harriet Harman is all I can say: the only senior woman politician and a good #2 to Ed. She is the only minister to have effected any real change for women in over 30 years, with the last being David Steel and his abortion act.

A great performance from Joaquin Phoenix

I find Joaquin Phoenix far more interesting and appealing than cute boys like Brad Pitt. He's edgy and enigmatic.

I just love the way he and Casey Affleck successfully pulled off a massive hoax, lasting for two years.

It started when Joaquin appeared on the David Letterman show and was virtually monosyllabic with wild hair (left). He was retiring from films and promoting his new career as a rapper. Letterman, in frustration, ended the interview "Joaquin Phoenix could not be with us today".

Now Phoenix has apologised to Letterman. http://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities-news-in-pics/23-09-2010/54750/

It was all part of him creating a character.

A "documentary" directed by Affleck shows the breakdown  of the star and his descent into drug taking. When "I'm Still Here" first came out, it seems a lot of people were fooled.

Even the Sunday Times was unsure if it was a spoof, but the writer, a couple of weeks ago, revealed that Phoenix had slipped into the cinema where a preview was being shown and was laughing at all the amusing bits and looking pleased with the reception the film got.

I'm relieved that it was all a stunt, and that Phoenix has been having a bit of fun. It was very brave of him and it's probably been one of his greatest roles.

Getting to know Raquel



Glam at 70



That's Raquel Welch, not Raquel Wolstenhulme.

I've just been reading her book "Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage". It's not exactly an autobiography: there's quite a lot of biography, but then it suddenly becomes a treatise for women with Raquel's views on all manner of things, plus a few chapters where Raquel gives her beauty and fashion tips.
I've always been a bit fascinated by Raquel Welch. As she says in her book, she's been fairly enigmatic without giving many interviews throughout her career. She's able to give a list of men including Richard Burton, Burt Bacharach, Burt Reynolds, Warren Beatty (it goes on) and teasingly asks us which one she had a relationship with. And we probably don't have a clue.
I find that she's even more of an enigma after reading the book.


The other Raquel (Wolstenhulme)



Made famous by that shot of her in a fur bikini, Welch apparently became very stroppy whenever directors expected her to take her clothes off. Maybe that's how she got the reputation she has for being difficult. Anyway, you have to admire her principles. It seems that she wanted to be a serious actress, and indeed, has always thought herself to be a serious actress, but because of that wretched photo, everyone treated her as a sex symbol. Very irritating.

In her beauty and fashion tips, she talks at length about plastic surgery and injectibles, but doesn't say whether or not she's had any of it. She does own up to using "Frownies," tiny bits of cardboard you stick on wrinkles at night. I think she's trying to kid us all that she's had nothing done. But you don't look like she does at 70 without a bit of help.

I did warm to her after she admitted to putting on 15 extra pounds during the writing of the book, because an injury meant she wasn't able to exercise. Phew, the woman is human! I was beginning to doubt it after she gave a example of her daily diet. You know the sort of thing: breakfast, egg white omelette. Lunch: salad. Dinner: steamed fish.

I don't care if Cheryl Cole endorses it, it's nonsense

Like most of us, I've fallen prey to the odd diet book in my time. Yes, always hoping that the latest book is going to give me all the foods I like combined with a sure fire way of losing weight. Without too much deprivation.

Over the years I have feasted (perhaps that's a little too strong a word in this context) on diet books including:
- The F Plan: remember that dreadful fibre filler you had to make every day? It was like eating sawdust. And pease pottage (not the service station) and Granny Ann biscuits, which probably made pemmican look tempting;
- Dr Perricone's Facelift in the Fridge (or something similar) which revolves around eating vast quantities of salmon, porridge, blueberries and turkey. I liked this diet for a while but now I can never face salmon;
- Atkins: oh yuk, the idea of all that meat and no vegetables or fruit! It's a sure fire recipe for standstill of the intestine.

The latest one that befell me is "Eat right for your blood type," which has the cover endorsement "I believe in it 100%", Cheryl Cole.

I was hoping that as a blood group O, there would be plenty of meat and seafood for me to hunt down.  The book is big on cave man metaphors. But the bad news is that I am not supposed to eat any wheat, ever; hardly any dairy (including eggs), no blackberries and no lentils, soya beans or anything remotely pickled. That's just for starters. Now if I really fancy a slice of bread, I am told to go for "essene bread."

Having never heard of it I googled it and found it's some strange raw bread made from sprouting wheat, which you leave out in the sun all day to "cook."  Here's a  a recipe: http://debbietookrawforlife.blogspot.com/2008/04/wheat-part-ii-how-to-make-essene-bread.html

A day's menu for weight loss looks like this: breakfast - slice of essene bread (toasted: is that possible? Does it ever achieve the form needed to go into a toaster?) with low sugar fruit spread (but not jam); lunch - organic roast beef, 2- 4 oz, with nothing else; dinner - steamed artichoke with lemon juice. Plus a couple of snacks of sliced carrots, celery sticks and two rice cakes with a dribble of maple syrup.

I can see how Cheryl stays so slim on a diet like this! It even manages to make the F Plan look tasty. I didn't read all the pseudo science that goes with it because for starters, an O like me is supposed to be a martyr to my stomach and victim of food intolerances. Nonsense: I am not intolerant of anything, food-wise, and have no allergies or inflammation. Nor have I ever suffered from eczema, diabetes, heart burn, indigestion, trench foot, etc etc.

This is one diet book that is now going back on Amazon. Anyone want to make an offer?

Twittering Inanities

One of the attractions of Twitter was its sprinkling of celebrities, many with thousands of followers. Thrill to the antics of Demi Moore and Ashton Kuchter! Hear the inner thoughts of Russell Brand, Stephen Fry and Lily Allen! Enjoy nuggets of business intelligence from Duncan Bannatyne, Peter Jones and Lord Sugar!

But what Twitter teaches us is the utter banality of the written word. Very few have mastered the succinct soundbite demanded by the word restrictions.

Last night four harpies of the medium, Times' writers India Knight and Caitlin Moran, Channel 4 presenter and posh bird Kirstie Allsopp and Grazia's editor Jane Bruton, were all watching the Labour leadership candidates on Question Time and furiously tweeting to each other.

Were we supposed to kill ourselves laughing at their wit and rapartee, and thank our lucky stars that these doyennes of writing and broadcasting were sprinkling their gems among we plebs?

I merely thought that the four of them should retire to private instant messaging, but I doubt if their egos would allow that.

Duncan Bannatyne, meanwhile, gives us blow-by-blow accounts of the Amazon book charts, to remind us that he has a book out; occasionally tells us what the weather is like where his holiday home is and sometimes has a go at fellow Dragon James Caan.

Lord Sugar only started a month ago but is already lost in the celebrity egotism of Twitter, exhorting ever more people to follow him so he can reach thirty thousand.

Here are his most recent tweets:

I will be doing a live Q & A on Twitter for the Mirror serialisation on Monday at 6 pm


And:

From Monday, it all kicks off with my book. Buy the Mirror next week for exclusive serialisation (book out on 30th)
 
I think that says it all.
 
Many tweets are from people promoting something. Websites, blogs, books, links, forthcoming appearances. Most of it is drivel about what people are doing. And then a tiny, tiny percentage are witty and make you laugh out loud. Precious few of those are from celebrities, it has to be said.  The only celebs I'm following who can truly use the medium properly are Richard Madeley (@richardm56) and Graham Linehan (Father Ted writer), @glinner. They're there frequently, unlike some celebs who only post occasionally to remind us they're alive, and they give us provoking thoughts, trivia, amusement.

Let down by The Stig

The recent unmasking of Top Gear's The Stig, by none other than The Stig himself, has made me quite irritable.

Why couldn't an investigative journalist have revealed the identity of the hit TV show's mysterious racing driver?

But instead, as if the hefty £££s involved in being a driver to the BBC weren't enough, The Stig - former Formula 3 driver Ben Collins - has to write a book about his Top Gear years, to ruthlessly fleece his employer.

Former employer, probably, as the BBC doesn't like its Stigs to be known  (there have been two so far.) The BBC even tried to tried Collins to court, but as the Sunday Times' 10 page Stig Special today shows, they were unsuccessful.

I'm not falling over myself to read the revelations. I daresay The Stig was the most talented driver of his generation but somehow thwarted from making the step to Formula 1. There's probably some sob story about injury or not being in the right place at the right time, but ending up having the last laugh by competing against celebs like Cameron Diaz and former racing drivers like Damon Hill (whom we all hoped was The Stig.)

I hope Collins enjoys his cash.

Extreme Car Cleaning

If, like me, you thought that car washing involves a bucket of water, some turtle wax and maybe a chamois, think again.

It seems there is a whole "car detailing", or extreme car cleaning, movement on the web, where, for example, the cleansing properties of detergent are discussed in minute detail.

J was mysterious about the big box that arrived for him this week. "It's my stash" he muttered. "Stash" is usually used in reference to my crafting supplies.

Anyway, here are the contents of the box: everything he needs to clean a car.

Assorted mitts and soft towels (one with pockets: who knows why); sprays; unguents and suds. A hose pipe and a power cleaner are essential. Buckets are not de rigeur.  

My car was then put through its paces with J administering something called "snow foam" which is left for a few minutes and is then rinsed off, leaving the vehicle pristine.

My car under the snow foam

It seems a harmless enough hobby, albeit expensive: his box of stash cost £160. I will never have to face the bare knuckle ride that is the car wash ever again (will the heater thing lift up in time or will it crash through the windscreen?).

Epping Forest Festival

Itr's Groundhog Day again: the annual Epping Forest Festival. We strolled over after lunch and it seemed even busier than usual, even though the sky was cloudy. It's a fair that showcases the forest at work and at leisure, and all the groups who are attached to the forest: conservationists, woodland burial grounds (!), J's running club The Orion Harriers, horse riding schools and so on. One omission this year was the jousting. I wonder why?

There was falconry

Plenty of woodland crafts

Tractor rides

J visits the Orion Harriers

Horse rides

Our favourite cookery books

I love looking at cookery books although I don't often cook from them. I tend to follow recipes only from magazines or cookery cards. Funny that. Anyway, a newspaper columnist recounted yesterday how she has been having a clear out and a lot of cookery books were binned or given away. She found herself keeping the Nigella books but getting rid of Gordon Ramsay and Antonio Carlucci.

My "keepers" would also include some of Nigella's books: I love Feast and Christmas with her gorgeous Ebay collected reindeer crockery. I'd also keep two really old, and food spattered (always a good sign) books that I used a lot years ago. One is "The Dairy Cookery Collection," which was a book sold by the milkman (!) and the other is Marguerite Patten's Everyday Cookbook. Marguerite is still seen on TV occasionally. I think she's marvellous. She was a home economist during the war and advised how to make recipes from food rations. Gary Rhodes has developed recipes with her help.

I have a couple of Delia Smith's and I would keep those. If in doubt, look it up in Delia.

I would get rid of my Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls, my one Gordon Ramsay amd my Claudia Roden. The latter looks beautiful but I'm never going to try the recipes.  I don't have any books by Julia Child or Elizabeth David, which a lot of chefs use as benchmarks.

It's ironic perhaps that the cookery books most of us love are by cooks, not chefs, who give us unpretentious recipes that deliver good results. Which books would you keep and which would you get rid of?

Opera on The Green

You could have knocked me down with a feather when I found a whole page in the Sunday Times Culture magazine about opera singer William Shimell.

When I was at BBC Radio Devon, I had to interview him. I got him to sing for me and his voice was so powerful I had to stand outside the room to stop the needle on my Uher going into the red.

He was very good looking and charming, and lived fairly locally in Kingsand. Kingsand is just "across the water" from Plymouth in Cornwall and to my mind, one of the last undiscovered gems. A lot of the houses in the windy streets are second homes, which is sad but inevitable, but it's a pretty little place and untarnished with the usual "emmet" spoils of Cornish tourism.

My mum Giz and I usually go to Kingsand and its sister village Cawsand once a year. We always wander up to The Green, where passers-by can occasionally thrill to Bill giving an impromptu recital. We're not opera buffs by any means. We went to see Carmen in the Theatre Royal and Giz fell asleep and had her programme snatched from her lap. Never again!

After my interview, I looked out for mentions of Bill in every opera review, but never found any. The Sunday Times article explains why. He is very famous internationally and has been one of the defining dons of his age, performing Don Giovanni and Don Alfonso many times. But for some reason he was not asked to do the roles in his home country.

Now he is appearing in a film, aged 57, for the first time ever. "Certified Copy" with Oscar winner Juliette Binoche and William Shimell is out on Friday. It sounds intriguing, and nothing to do with opera. Shimell doesn't get to sing one note.  Here's a review from the Cannes film festival from The Guardian. I will look out for this with interest.

Ghost Cars

We happened to be in one of the car dealers at the weekend (a new car is firmly back in J's "circle" - see http://chat1960vintage.blogspot.com/2010/08/circle.html) and I was intrigued to see the cars shrouded with sheets (right). New cars: we could see the "60" on their numberplates. Someone's pride and joy, waiting to be driven proudly out of the showroom today.

I will be driving home my own new pride and joy today. I only get a new car once every four years so it's an exciting day, twinged with sadness. I never name my cars or personalise them, but I do get quite attached to them in that we drive many miles in four years and spend many hours twiddling our respective thumbs and gear stick on the M25. As Gary Numan rightly said, "here in my car I feel safest of all".

Delia's Thai chicken with lime and coconut

Judging by the interested shoppers gathered around the end cap in Waitrose where all the ingredients could handily be found, a good number of households sampled Delia Smith's Thai Chicken over the weekend.

Heavily promoted on TV, the ingredients were well discounted so the recipe  costs just £2.30 per serving.

Thai cooking is regarded with great suspicion by J who is a traditional meat and two veg man. So I didn't tell him what I was preparing and served it up as a fait accompli. He actually liked it! Although he is heavily prejudiced by the words "Delia Smith" and "Waitrose". I have found that Nigella simply doesn't have the same effect.

My observations from cooking the recipe are:

• The juice of two limes is quite plentiful, and if anything the recipe was a little "wet," so I would only use the juice of one next time
• The coconut flavour was more elusive than the lime flavour. J said he couldn't taste coconut at all. I was expecting the sauce to be a bit thicker.
• Delia's method for cooking rice was flawless and worked perfectly. Measure out 150ml rice in a measuring jug (for two), pour into a small frying pan with a lid and add 300ml boiling water and a pinch of salt. Stir once, then put the lid on and barely simmer for 10 minutes. The liquid had been absorbed by then and so I placed a teatowel over the top (having taken it off the heat!) to keep the rice warm. If the liquid hasn't disappeared, Delia advises increasing the heat for a minute.

This campaign is great marketing from Waitrose. The recipe is pretty fool proof but looks impressive, and the average Waitrose shopper likes to cook from scratch when he / she has enough time. The fact that the chicken is reduced in price to £2.89 from £4.33 is a pleasant surprise because Waitrose has only recently started competing in price against the other supermarkets. Its profits were buoyant last year and put down to the successful Essentials range.

Dear John and It's A Wonderful Afterlife

Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried

You can tell from the sappy DVD cover box the sort of film Dear John is. The design screams "The Notebook!", another story written by Nicholas Sparks, and indeed the story is very similar: two people who come from different walks of life fall in live and are tragically parted.

Special Forces Army Sergeant John Tyree (Channing Tatum) meets Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) when he is on two weeks' leave from Germany. After a whirlwind two week romance, they pledge to write to each other every day until they are reunited in a year's time.

When the year is up, Tyree feels he has to stay with his unit because of 9/11. He and Savanah continue to write but then it peters out and she writes to say she is with another man. He later finds out it is someone he knew, a neighbour of Savannah's, who has terminal cancer.

It ebbs and flows quite nicely as a film but to me the most moving part of the story was a reconciliation between Tyree and his dad, whom Savannah believed has Asperger's syndrome. But it was one of those films I find frustrating because people don't say what they really think or believe, and suffer agonies for years because of what was unsaid.

Meanwhile I should have feared the worst with It's a Wonderful Afterlife, a comedy by Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) because it isn't available in Blu Ray and I don't recall it being released to the cinemas.

It is shockingly bad.

Sendhil Ramamurthy from It's a Wonderful Afterlife

In a nutshell, a mother obsessed with finding a husband for her overweight daughter (Shabana Azmi, who apparently gained 35 kilos for the part) runs into trouble with some departed spirits who can't pass over to the other side.

It's the sort of film that needed to be lightning fast to pass as an acceptable horror pastiche. It has an amusing spoof on Carrie,  for example. But it's directed in a very slow and painstaking way and you're just groaning inwardly and feeling sorry for some of the good actors caught up in it (Zoe Wanamaker, Sanjeev Baskar, Sally Hawkins from Happy Go Lucky). It's also disappointing for a female director to give the message that no matter how kind and loving you are, you have to lose weight if you're to have any claim on the handsome man (Sendhil Ramumurthy).

One to avoid folks!

Micro blogging: destroying our legacy for the future?

Paul Carr at TechCrunch wonders if micro blogging via Twitter and Facebook are leading to such a distillation of our lives that future generations will have no legacy. And more prosaically, we will have no memories to draw on for our autobiographies. "By constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing," he writes.

I don't think you can blame micro blogging for this state of affairs. It all started when Outlook came along and we stopped using diaries to log our appointments. I had long stopped keeping a diary as a journal, but I still have all my office diaries from the 90's and I get instant recall just by seeing the entries of what where and when.

I'm not going to be able to do that with Outlook but fortunately I have this blog. If you only use Twitter or Facebook then yes you are asking for trouble if you want an archive for the future. Facebook has launched a foray into blogging and now has networked blogs but the painstaking nature of writing a blog, the upkeep and promotion, mean that a lot of people will never bother.

My worry is that we are breeding a generation of cyborgs. People with no original or creative thought. Students routinely plagiarise the web when writing their coursework and taking their exams. The controls against this are minimal. Add to this the destruction of the English language, spelling and punctuation, perpetuated by constant texting and tweeting, and it doesn't speak to me of a heritage of literature for the future in the way that we had Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and so on.

But everything goes round in circles and eventually becomes trendy again. I firmly believe we'll see a return to paper and pen, letters and journals. I am sure that the pleasure of writing with a fine fountain pen on pristine paper will eventually be rediscovered by all those who have never done it. 

Reasons to be cheerful for the end of summer

The unrelentingly bad weather over the last few days would suggest summer has left the building. It's true that there are things that once again didn't happen this summer, which are to be regretted (the new tealights for the garden didn't get out of their box; there was no al fresco barbecue with Pimms and we didn't go to a picnic concert, etc) but I am actually looking ahead to autumn, and even winter, with a degree of cheer.

Reasons to be cheerful:
1) A decent night's sleep beneath the weighty togs of a comfortable duvet;
2) Not having to close all the windows just to nip to the shops;
3) Not having to deal with kamikaze wasps in the garden;
4) Not having to do any gardening (except pick up all the sodden leaves and plant spring bulbs);
5) Magazines stop writing articles about "5 days to a bikini body";
6) Able to wear tights again and ditch the spray tan;
7) Snuggling into woollies and coats;
8) The occasional delight of a blue sky and sunshine combined with cold air;
9) Christmas. Yes we all pretend to hate it but I love getting the decorations out, buying presents and planning food menus;
10) Staying indoors in the warm while it pours outside, and not feeling guilty

What are your reasons to be cheerful this autumn?

Angelina Jolie expose is damp squib

There was a lot of hype about Andrew Morton's unauthorised biography "Angelina." Initially it wasn't  published in the UK for fear of legal action. I bought it from our friends over the pond, Amazon.com. I wish I hadn't bothered.

The much leaked Big Story was Morton's assertion that Jolie's mother Marcheline locked the child upstairs for two years and barely saw her, leaving her in the care of a succession of babysitters. The baby apparently reminded her too much of Jon Voight, Marcheline's husband, who had gone off with another woman.

We only have one source to thank for this titbit, one of the alleged babysitters.

And according to Morton and a few quacks he lines up, this led to all of Angelina's problems: cutting, anorexia, promiscuity, vials of blood, etc etc.

Zzzzz.

The problem for me is the word "uauthorised." In the case of powerful living icons like Jolie, it means nobody very significant in her life is going to talk. So Morton has to skulk around in the undergrowth and find some people who vaguely knew her or her mother or her mother's cleaner.

And then I'm bothered by all the psycho babble too. It's too easy to blame parents for what happens to people. I don't hold with it. I firmly believe that most of Angelina Jolie's "cries for help" are just attention seeking. I'm  sure she just goes for maximim impact when she kisses her brother on the lips, for example, or makes claims about open marriages. I reckon she's fairly conservative and even prissy, in real life.

Morton  wants to claim that she isn't a good mother but he bottles out, and instead we get a lame statement that Angelina has a lot of babysitters and it's history repeating itself. Morton is very hard on Marcheline and almost deifies Jon Voight.

The book is sloppily written too. Getting her "acting chops" is referred to twice, whatever that is. And somehow, at the end of the book, I don't feel I know Angelina any better. She is an enigma, and remains thus. Morton even manages to make her a bit boring, which I'm sure wasn't his intention.  

X Factor: Victorian bear baiting at its worst

I shudder at the hype surrounding the return of the X Factor.

In Victorian times, crowds gathered for freak shows, to marvel at "special people". The X Factor doesn't bother to sanitise it thus. Its researchers tirely comb the mile long queues of hopefuls to find The Stories: young man trying to send Grandma to Lourdes; white daughter of black parents sobbing about wanting to make them proud; very large girl wanting to become Barbra Streisand.

And then the deluded who don't realise they can't sing, but will now have their flat, brave voices subjected to ridicule.

As for the talent, well, a handful of average youngsters are pushed through for the public's delectation, brutally groomed, styled and made to sing old standards. Simon Cowell reckons he can probably turn anyone into a star, Dustin the turkey or Paul the octopus. But he can't. Remember Steve Brookstein?

Meanwhile the two vacuous, averagely talented clothes horses sitting beside Cowell weep on cue and compete to see who can wear the most attention grabbing outfits. Quite what their credentials are for judging a talent competition it's hard to say, but then this is not a talent show.

The winners are ruthlessly milked, paraded with new albums every time a new series airs (Alexandrea Burke, currently appearing everywhere) and equally ruthlessly dropped when the public tires of them, unless, like one or two rare exceptions, they tire of Cowell and make it on their own.

I stopped watching it in 2007 when Emma Chawner (very large girl wanting to be Barbara Streisand) appeared. Camera panned slowly to her family, all very large, glaring at Cowell in the wings. His expression, disgust, superiority, you name it - but no pity - said it all.

The Circle

J was crestfallen. Two key items had fallen off his "circle," as I call it: a Saturn-style ring around his head that at any one time could contain the following items: new car; new TV; new heart rate monitor; latest marathon; better broadband.

And in one week alone he had lost three items!!

1) New car, after grudgingly agreeing we should become a one car family; 2) new TV, after we finally bought one (although we have yet to put the glasses on....), and (3), better broadband after BT Infinity got installed.

So I was worried on J's behalf. A man without projects is not a man worth knowing.

Fortunately, a change of heart about the car meant I came home to find J with his nose in an Audi brochure. We haven't even become a one car family yet but the thought of sharing my "ute" (utility) is filling him with dread. So his weekends will revert to test drives and visits to dealers.

I'm expecting  "new heart rate monitor" to join the circle as he's been grumbling about his strap.

As for me, my circle currently includes bulbs - I am about to order the spring selection; autumn fashions - I have decided to heed the advice of Grazia and buy a few key pieces including an aviator jacket and a camel coat and wild swimming, after I saw a TV programme about it and then bought the book by Roger Deakin.

Molly's circle never changes. It's two things: blue tits and Felix As Good As It Looks.

BT impress

Criticising big well-known companies is a popular pastime in the UK. British Airways, British Gas, BT, BP, all come under attack and I have been known to indulge in it myself.

But I have to give credit where credit is due, and BT have been very impressive lately.

I've always been a BT customer and my brand loyalty occasionally riles J when he decides we're paying too much for broadband and wants to go for one of the fly-by-night operators (Sky? Heavens no.)

To me, good broadband is very important because I work from home a lot of the time, download a lot of big files and don't want restrictions placed on usage.

Anyway, back to BT. I recently had a mailshot from them about their new service Infinity. 40mb broadband! I should have binned it without showing it to J but he saw it and was immediately on the blower to BT. He has this knack of bartering with them so we always end up getting a reduced price.

I tweeted about how I shouldn't have shown J the flyer and I was impressed to get a direct reply on Twitter from BT saying they were here to help if I needed them. Twitter is a great tool for companies to engage direct with consumers, provided it's not done in an irritating way.

Meanwhile the router turned up on the day promised, followed by an SMS confirmation that the engineer would call on a particular date.

And finally I was called by a very friendly BT call centre employee confirming he had changed my name, which was a separate request.

You might think this is all just good customer service, but to me it is exemplary and what all companies should be aspiring to.

Perhaps I should have waited until the installation happens and we test the speed of the broadband, but I'm fully optimistic it will all go to plan. Stay tuned!

Nostalgic return to Dawlish

Seagull at Dawlish

When I was a kid we quite often went out for a drive on Sundays. In the winter we would wear our car coats, brought back from Singapore by Stamps (my dad.) Strange concept - did anyone else have a car coat?!

Stamps was nicknamed because of his temper so quite often when we arrived at our destination, we came straight home, either because he couldn't park (he would never pay to park) or we had had an argument en route.

For some reason Newquay was a particular hotspot. We went there at least twice without getting out of the car.

Dawlish, however, has happier memories. We used to go there, wander along the canal looking at the famous ducks and put money into the Sooty & Sweep machine.

This weekend I was down in Devon to see my mum and we planned to go to Ashburton for the first time, having read that it's a foodies' paradise. Even AA Gill has been there! But alas, there was a summer show on and we couldn't park anywhere - and I always seek out pay and display, unlike Stamps - so we drove on and went to Dawlish instead.

The place hasn't really changed. There was a funfair  (Anderton's, minus Rowland) and the Sooty & Sweep machine has gone. We found a nice tea room and had a savoury team - cheese scones with tea.

And I took some pictures of the famous livestock. One thing we were surprised about was the state of the canal. Very dirty.

Loose cannons in Edinburgh

Imagine being kept awake at night by cannons (tethered one hopes, and not loose.)

This is the fate that has befallen J, my long-suffering spouse. For the last few months he has been doggedly commuting to Edinburgh first thing on Monday, returning on Thursday.

He is well known at his hotel of choice and they know his little preferences: extra bread, a beer voucher instead of a free bottle of wine in the room, etc.

Unfortunately, the Edinburgh Festival means that J has no chance of getting a room at his favourite hotel. The rates have shot up, and, every night for a month, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo gets going with those cannons.

Picture shows view from J's hotel room this week.

A 1930 wedding

I often think fondly about Kathleen Lovis, my grandma who died in 1991 aged 84. She was an indomitable character, larger than life. They never owned their house or had a car, and were never well off. But Grandma was a marvellous cook, made lovely clothes and highly prized birthdays and Christmas. My mum and her brother had a happy childhood. 

She was 81 and a widow when she finally went abroad for the first time, to Canada where we have relatives. Unfortunately the pace of sight seeing and catching up with relatives resulted in a stroke and she was kept in a Canadian hospital for two weeks. When she got home, doctors could find very little wrong with her.

I am very lucky that she wrote her life story and gave it to me in a red folder. I love her account of her wedding.

She married Jack Lovis in Plymouth, their home town, on December 29 1930. In her account, Kathleen wrote:

"Mother made my wedding dress, long in white satin. She also made the three bridesmaids' dresses, yellow with lavender accessories. We had a small page boy who wore a yellow satin blouse and purple velvet trousers. I borrowed a headdress and veil from a more prosperous friend. It was a lovely long one made of real lace.

"I was lucky that I was able to buy my 3 tiered wedding cake at a reduced price from Cummings, a lovely confectionary shop near us. It was a cancelled order and should have been £2, and I think I got it for £1.

Cut Price Engagement Ring

Kathleen recalled: "Jack had bought a nice 22ct wedding ring. I didn't have much of an engagement ring. We'd been told there was a shop selling off its jewellery in Union Street and we'd gone and bought one. It was supposed to have been £7 and we got it at half price. I often wished though it had been a better ring."

My Gran told her friends and boss in Woolworth's, where she was working behind the tea bar, that she was getting married. Her two friends cried and her boss asked if she was ready for marriage. After courting for six years, and 24 years of age, my Gran replied she was more than ready. But of course in those days firms usually chose not to employ married women.

On the morning of her wedding, Kathleen cleaned the brass step as usual. She washed and curled her  hair  and applied her face powder, kept in an orange and blue bowl.

Reception Buffet 

For the reception, Kathleen had bought long unsliced loaves of white bread. "My mother had boiled a large ham to perfection. There was a large genoa cake full of fruit and cherries, and a lot of really delicious fancies. "Needless to say it was a spread fit for a king and queen.

"We only had port or sherry for the toast. Other than that it was soft drinks or gallons of tea. We played games and it really was very congenial."

Grandma changed into her going away outfit, and she and Jack set off the very short distance from Embankment Road to Oakfield Terrace, where they were going to set up home in a top floor flat. It was to be their first ever night together. And Grandma's two sisters had both bought her a nightie for the occasion.

Food Glorious Food?

Is it too much to ask that our food is pure and unadulterated?
I ask the question in the week that cloned beef found its way into the foodchain, but that was really the tip of the iceberg. I read recently that bread is nowhere near as blameless as it looks. Those "baked on the premises" claims are often very wide of the mark because dough is made up, frozen and then shipped all over the UK.
But, an even more sinister development is that bakers routinely add cocktails of enzymes to bread, which gets them around the laws on using preservatives. These enzymes are just as bad, but they don't have to be declared on the packaging. This explains why the sliced loaf you buy on a Saturday is still soft and spongy a week later. And have you ever noticed how fat is added to bread? I can understand now why artisan bread is so expensive.
Bakers and farmers want to make profits of course. But I resent them doing it by stealth and subjecting us to unnatural chemicals, hormones and goodness knows what. I don't want to eat GM modified foods, and I'd like to think that when I study the labels I'm being told the truth.

Further reading:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/the-shocking-truth-about-bread-413156.html

Things that bother me

Trending well on Twitter UK today was the theme "things that bother me".
Contributions included: printers running out of black ink first, bad grammar, people not showering and people who drive Range Rovers. All good fodder.
Off the top of my head, my list - not in any order:
1) People who, joining the motorway, try to overtake you on the inside lane when you actually moved out to let them get on;
2) When the tines of a fork get stuck in the cutlery tray of the dishwasher when you're trying to unload it;
3) Misplaced apostrophes;
4) People walking right behind you;
5)Websites which, after entering your order and credit card info, suddenly throw up error messages. Has your order gone through? Nah. In that case, I won't bother.
6) Websites that allow you to order when they are out of stock.
7) The Daily Mail
8) Christmas in August
9) People who ask you for URLs the whole time without using Google;
10) Being ambushed by charity collectors. As a responsible citizen, I support 2 charities by direct debit,  the Big Issue seller outside Budgens and numerous sponsored walks/silences/marathons by friends and relatives. I am forever donating clothes and books to charity shops. Yet when I go to Sainsbury's, not only do the cubs expect money for packing my bags (which I don't want them to do, as they put potatoes on top of raspberries), but there are two different charities outside the entrance. Stop already! And then people come to the door and look affronted when you won't put money in their tin.
11) Training courses which inevitably have some ghastly acronym you're supposed to memorise, eg: "TACIT" - tact and coaching impact training  (I made that up). Plus any reference to people being "authentic".

As you can see, I have started to get into my stride with some of the big issues. What bothers you?

Grazia leaves the building

Those of you who have read my ramblings since 2006 will know that I love magazines.  The current roster consists of three subscriptions plus a weekly and a minimum of five monthlies bought in the shop.

One subscription that is ending right now is Grazia.

When I first started reading it, I was impressed with how it managed to cross the age divide. It seemed fresh and different.

But the constant emphasis on Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston and Cheryl Cole, is getting me down. Every story about Angelina is either "fresh signs the marriage is breaking up" or "friends' alarm at how thin she is getting". I do wonder about the sources they use. I'm sure sometimes it's just the guy who cleans the pool.

For Jennifer they go along with her PR charades and subject us to "New love for Jennifer!" followed a week later by "Heartbreak for Jen." In fact Jennifer is simply promoting her new films by appearing loved-up with her co-star, and maybe going on holiday with him, and then it's all over after the flash guns have popped. Both stars pocket some cash and the film gets a boost. Get it Grazia?

Then there's the fashion. Now this isn't Grazia's fault, but the Groundhog Day nature of fashion is also depressing. This week Grazia showed us the autumn styles, and guess what? In a nutshell, Star Trek trousers, hiking boots, lace dresses, kilts and the midi. I hoped the midi had died a death never to return. It flatters hardly anyone and if you're older than 30, looks matronly and middle-aged.

As fashion is never new it's a shame we never go further back in time and have a fully blown 40's, 20's or even 18th century revival. If that happens, then I may start buying Grazia again. But at the moment, I'm all Jolied out and I won't be beating a path to Top Shop to look like Mr Sulu.