Category: Reasons to be cheerful

Ramsay

On By Laura MorganIn Food, Reasons to be cheerful

I decided yesterday that a meal in a properly swanky restaurant is worth at least a weekend away, for the amount of pleasure it brings. This was on the back of lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Claridges restaurant, which might have been the best meal I’ve ever had. We had the set lunch, but it was so good I’m tempted to go back and try everything else, and if I could afford it that’s exactly what I’d do. As it is, I’ll just share the menu with you so you can enjoy it vicariously.

Since it was a special occasion our waiter gave us a whistlestop tour of the kitchen, which was much calmer and quieter than you’d expect. I thought kitchens of posh restaurants were supposed to be a louder and hotter version of actual hell, but this was more like a very orderly production line. Which, I suppose, is what it is.

(Do you like my new design, by the way? It’s not my own; it’s one of WordPress’s standard designs, but I like the layout and the header image, which makes me think of Ireland, where I will be next week. A fantastic meal may be a good substitute for a holiday, but there’s no harm in having one of each.)

Gay Paree

On By Laura MorganIn Other cities, Reasons to be cheerful

paris

I’m off for three days of eating, drinking, eating, walking and eating. I fall in love with Paris all over again every time I go, including the time when I went with both my siblings, and my brother had to come a day late because his passport had expired, and my sister got food poisoning and puked all the way home.

Have a lovely bank holiday weekend, unless you’re outside the UK, in which case just have a lovely weekend. Or is May 1 a holiday everywhere?

The funk of forty thousand years

On By Laura MorganIn Music, Reasons to be cheerful1 Comment

thriller2

I went to see Thriller Live last week. I wouldn’t have sought it out of my own accord and I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was prepared for something quite weird. And it was quite weird, but in a cheerier and more innocent way than I was expecting. There’s no story; it’s just two and a bit hours of some singers, dancers and musicians performing the biggest hits of Michael Jackson’s career, in chronological order (which, incidentally, makes it fairly easy to work out which ones they’re saving for the encore).

The early songs, performed by a Jackson Five with the worst afro wigs I have ever seen, feature a very sweet little boy with the voice of an angel playing the youthful Michael, but from Off The Wall onwards the lead vocal role is shared between four singers: a guy who sounds exactly like Michael Jackson, a guy who looks exactly like he’s from the 1980s, a woman who is obviously the one they go to when a song is too hard for any of the others, and a guy who sounds more like Michael Jackson than the last two, but makes up for it by being skinny and white. They are backed up by a troupe of dancers, who are kind of amazing, and by a live band who are for the most part hidden, except when one of them is allowed on to the stage to perform a particularly tricky solo, like the guitar line in Dirty Diana.

Everyone is really, really good, and there are some nice costumes, especially in the songs from Bad where everybody gets to pretend it really is the 1980s. But the main thing I took away from it was an overwhelming sense of uncomplicated Eurovisionesque joy. Everybody in it is so happy, all the time! Sensibly, the narrative voiceover which introduces the show and describes the Jacksons’ rise to fame is ditched early on, so that we don’t have to hear any of the less wholesome details of Michael’s life as a solo artist. And even more sensibly, the post-Bad hits are limited to Earth Song and Heal the World. The rendition of the former almost tips over into being unbearably twee, with the performers dressed all in white under a giant projected globe, but they rescue it just in time by bringing back the small boy from the beginning of the show to sing Heal the World.  And it’s just lovely.

Michael Jackson is undeniably a strange and disturbing person, but the songs are as good as they ever were. If you liked them then, I think you should go along. If you tell me when you’re going I might even come with you, but don’t tell anyone I said so.

(Edit: it belatedly occurs to me that describing someone as “skinny and white” is no guarantee that he doesn’t look like Michael Jackson. But he doesn’t – see?)

Fun in the sun

On By Laura MorganIn Reasons to be cheerful

One of the many benefits of good weather is that there’s lots of free entertainment to be had simply by going outside and observing people. Watching a group of six-year-olds playing with a ball is lots of fun; add a two-year-old who’s unsteady on his feet and it becomes something I could enjoy all afternoon. There is something utterly charming about children who have only just learned to walk running around in the sunshine. Coming back from the shops just now I almost tripped over a child whose head accounted for a third of his overall height. Presumably being built along those lines, however temporarily, gives you a very high centre of gravity, which would explain why his unfocused charging around the park seemed to be largely governed by the direction his head fell in with each unguided lurch. It was almost as much fun as watching children dancing at a wedding, which is one of the straightforwardly funniest things there is.

Reasons to be cheerful

On By Laura MorganIn Reasons to be cheerful
  1. I didn’t switch on the electric blanket all weekend, and this morning it’s almost…warm outside.
  2. I didn’t even have to wear a scarf on the way to work!
  3. I came off call this morning, which means that as of 8am today anything that goes wrong with the website I work for (whose identity, if you don’t know it, can probably be dimly discerned from this post here and this post here) is Not My Problem.
  4. And best of all, in exactly a week’s time I’ll be on my way here:

holkham1
(Image from BBC Norfolk)

It’s only for a few days, but I’m ridiculously excited about it.

(Oh, and I bought the Chagall.)

Advent song for December 17

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music, Reasons to be cheerful

I had no plans to include this song, but it popped into my head this morning and hasn’t left, so here it is.  I don’t think I’d ever seen the video, but I like it very much because everybody in it seems so happy.  Whatever you think about Paul and Linda, I think they were very much in love, and you can see it here.  Also, I like that the “choir of children” is actually them.  It reminds me of the story Paul told about auditioning children to voice the part of Rupert in the full-length video for We All Stand Together, and all of them were so rubbish that he ended up doing it himself.