This morning, we have been moved around the office into new locations. This was my old view:
Not stunning, admittedly, but it has sky and trees, and enough human interest to keep me occupied when I’m gazing out of the window thinking about the answer to a problem.
This is my new view:
Can’t you almost feel the life being sucked out of you as you look at it?
I took this picture in the south-west corner of Brockwell Park yesterday. I love the city views, but I really like this one too, because you can pretend you’re in the countryside:
Talking of nature, we spent a couple of hours last Sunday afternoon in the back garden of the Crown and Greyhound in Dulwich Village, where we were protected from a brief bout of rain by this monster, whose branches extend so far across the garden that nobody got wet at all:
I think it’s a horse chestnut, but I would be happy to be corrected.
I don’t write about restaurants very often, because most of the places I go out to eat are perfectly nice without being amazing, and thus not really worth mentioning, since I am not a food blogger. But I am making an exception for The Rosendale, because if I can save one person from enduring a Sunday lunch like the one I had yesterday, it will have been worthwhile.
Years ago, The Rosendale was a pub which did pizza. Good pizza – the type you’d travel for, although I only lived around the corner then, so I didn’t have to. Then I moved away, and by the time I came back it was a gastropub and getting good reviews all over the place. So we ate there, once, and it was good. But somehow it took us two years to go back, even though it’s a fifteen-minute walk from home, and this time, it was bad.
The service, to be fair, was only mediocre. After a long period during which nobody came to take our order (even though there were only two or three other groups there), we were presented with a basket of stale bread. Well, maybe it wasn’t all stale, but the piece I got was definitely past its best. As I spread it with butter so soft and tasteless it might have been margarine, I thought “they wouldn’t serve stale bread; this must be the texture it’s supposed to have”. But then I ate it, and no, it was just stale.
Next came beef carpaccio sliced so thickly as to look more like a couple of steaks, and a gazpacho soup so tart it set my teeth on edge, and such a disconcerting shade of ketchup-red that I could only assume it had come out of a tin. It was accompanied by greasy garlic croutons, which, in a charming touch of consistency, were also stale. What it didn’t come with was a spoon: I had to grab a waitress and ask for one.
The beloved’s main course of rabbit was, to give it its due, very good. My roast beef with all the trimmings, in contrast, was possibly the most inedible plate of food I have ever been presented with, not including the time a Spanish woman cooked me a pig’s trotter to welcome me to her home. The beef was tough and tasteless, the roast potatoes (which were the reason I’d ordered it) were dry and almost certainly reheated (or if not, then just very badly cooked) and, inexplicably, the Yorkshire pudding had the actual consistency of a mushroom. I’d noticed a plate going back into the kitchen with a barely-touched Yorkshire pud languishing on it, and at the time I’d thought “what kind of a maniac would leave a Yorkshire pudding uneaten?”, but in the end I had to do the same. The mixed veg had all been steamed together, which meant that the carrots were underdone but the broccoli and beans were fine, which was fortunate because they were the only part of it I enjoyed.
The puddings looked good, but we were too disspirited by the whole experience to stay and find out. At £40 a head for two courses with wine, they need to get better at cooking quite quickly. As for our Sunday lunch, the next time I want to leave the washing up to someone else I think I’ll head into Herne Hill for a perfectly adequate roast for half the price at The Commercial, or even a proper old-fashioned pub pizza at The Half Moon.
I usually wring every last available drop of fun out of the Country Show, but this year, for a variety of reasons, I only spent a couple of hours there each day and as a result I felt I missed quite a lot of it. I went to bed last night feeling faintly sad and anxious at not having spent more time there, like a child who suddenly realises that when she wakes up it won’t be Christmas any more.
But when I awoke this morning I remembered that it’s quality, not quantity, that counts; and this year’s show was one of the best I can remember. The weather was perfect – sunny and warm but not hot – and the music was super (Alabama 3 in particular were brilliant, as they always are); the atmosphere was better than ever and despite record attendance it felt completely relaxed and friendly everywhere I went. It was nothing at all like that year that we had to dive out of the way of a bunch of teenagers trying to stab another bunch of teenagers. (But then, I was child-free this year, so I didn’t have to go to the funfair.)
Here’s a girl dancing in front of a parade that popped up out of nowhere while we were buying books for 20p each from the library van:
And here’s another shot of the same parade:
According to the South London Press, 180,000 people attended the show over the two days. So it was doubly odd to find myself back there this morning, one of perhaps half a dozen people whose daily business takes them into Brockwell Park at 7am. It looked empty and silent, but also kind of beautiful:
Forget Cyprus, I never want to live away from here.
Dang. I was so close to being right about Holland winning the World Cup! But I’m glad Spain won it, because they deserved to, and because I have more Spanish than Dutch friends. Although I have just inspected my bank balance and it turns out the cash I would have won had Holland beaten Spain would have been very useful (payday is Thursday). Oh well.
Anyway, I’m going to move on and pretend none of it ever happened, and I’m going to start looking forward to the event of the year, the Lambeth Country Show at Brockwell Park this weekend. The Lambeth Country Show is worth our council tax on its own. There’s live music, actual animals, jousting, fruit and vegetable shows, craft stalls, cake, cider, a funfair and sheep-shearing demonstrations. It is the most fun in the world, and it’s all free and on my doorstep. Who needs holidays?
Last Sunday was the hottest of a run of hot days in London. It was also the day the England football team lost to Germany in a 4-1 thriller in the second round of the World Cup, Kevin Pietersen’s 30th birthday, and the third and final day of Hard Rock Calling, the misleadingly-named music festival which this year featured, among other hard rockers, Stevie Wonder, James Morrison, Crowded House, Elvis Costello and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
But it was the promise of Paul McCartney which had me eagerly pressing the “refresh” button on my browser the morning tickets went on sale. I tried to get tickets to see him at the Dome back in December, but the good seats were insanely expensive and anyway, it sold out before I could buy any. Day tickets to Hard Rock Calling are £60 and you get to sit anywhere you like and see lots of other acts, so this was a much better choice.
Well, it was great and the photos are here, but in the long minutes between acts I found myself fascinated by what people choose to wear when it’s hot and they’re going to be outside all day, because if you live in or near London (or any British city), neither of those things is very often true. It’s hot today, but I am spending eight hours of it inside an air-conditioned office, so I am wearing a dress with sleeves. On Sunday, we were all exposed to bright sun and 30C temperatures for about the same amount of time. In those circumstances, deciding what to wear can be quite tricky. So I inspected the choices of some of my fellow revellers, and have come up with some guidelines, which I now present to you for free, with nothing in mind but your welfare and happiness:
1. As in so many areas of life, I agree with Baz Luhrmann. Rule number one is wear sunscreen.
2. With no shade and barely a cloud in the sky, hats are the order of the day:
3. Be careful with straps. Straps are good, but ill-fitting or competing straps are bad. However, if you have no choice but to show off your bra straps, do it with chutzpah, so it looks like you meant it:
4. It’s better to wear too many clothes than too few. You recover faster from being hot than you do from being burnt (I have tried both, so I can say this with certainty). And if you wear light, loose clothes you probably won’t be much hotter than you would have been in a bikini. I liked this outfit very much:
5. Do not, under any circumstances, wear a bikini. Bikinis are strictly for the beach.
I should come clean at this point and tell you that I was wearing a jumpsuit.
In many ways they are ideal hot-weather outdoor wear: they are durable, you can sit cross-legged without risking your modesty, and they keep all the ungainly bits covered while allowing arms and legs unfettered access to the air. However, they can be tricky to go to the toilet in. I think the answer to this is to wear a baggy-ish one with no complicated fastenings, and to stay on the fuzzy side of sober. You’ll be pleased to know that I more or less managed both.
However, based on extensive research I have decided that the IDEAL festival-going hot-weather outfit is a strapless top, elasticated shorts, a hat, sunglasses, sunscreen and a wrap which you can sit on when your legs get tired and put around your shoulders after the sun goes down.
Shoes are more problematic: you need something sturdy and comfortable which you won’t get sweaty in. I wore Crocs, but I am the only person I know who looks good in Crocs, and the only reason I think I look good in them is that I never on any account look at them once they’re on. I just revel in the squish of the tread and the swish of the air as it cools my toes. The real answer is probably flip-flops on soft grass and light plimsolls on rough grass. But I will leave that to your discretion.
Sorry for only talking about girls’ clothes. I have no advice for boys, although the hat and sunscreen rules are unisex. If you are a boy, I suggest you dress like this:
I have left the most important rule, not including the sunscreen one, until last. The most important rule, not including the sunscreen one, is:
6. Wear whatever you like. It’s a festival! Go wild.
A few days after I got back from Cyprus, an acquaintance of mine – who was, to be fair, quite drunk at the time – commented on my tan and then said “You look completely different. Usually you look – and I mean this in a good way – like a pasty Jew.”
It’s taken me a while to process this and reach the conclusion that there is no “good way” to look like a pasty Jew. It simply isn’t, whichever way you parse it, a compliment.
It’s also factually incorrect: I may be Jewish (well, sort of, and only partly) but I am not and have never been “pasty”. Pasty means pale, and I am not pale. I know this because I have spent my life being asked “Where are you from? No, but where are you really from? No, but where are your parents from?”. Aged about eighteen I got bored with trying to convince people of the actual answers to those questions (London, London and London) and started making up alternatives. “Iran”, I used to say, or “New Zealand”. People seemed happier to accept that.
You can get stuck in a way of thinking, though. University was the first place I went which was full of people who looked like me, because at Essex the student population in the mid-mineties was about 10% Greek. Having never looked like I belonged even to my own (green-eyed, freckled) family, I suddenly looked like everybody else. It was great, and for the first time I felt pleased to look the way I did. Do.
At around that time I briefly went out with a man who was newly separated from his South American wife. Before he introduced me to his mother, who had Alzheimers, he warned me: “If she says anything strange, don’t worry about it; she doesn’t always know what she’s saying.”
“Strange how?”, I asked him.
“Well”, he said, “she might say something like you’re not as exotic-looking as Paola“.
Not as exotic-looking? Exotic-looking was all I had. It was my USP. If I couldn’t compete on that level, I had nothing left.
Of course, the mother was perfectly charming and I gradually came to realise that the problem in that relationship lay with the boyfriend and not his dementing parent. But it left its mark, because I’d just started to come to terms with the fact that I would never be a blonde-haired, blue-eyed princess, and suddenly I wasn’t foreign-looking enough either. It took a while to get over that one.
These days, I avoid answering at all. “I’m just dark”, I say. “Just dark. Nothing else.”
Because the troubling aspect of this question, and the regularity with which it is asked, is that I don’t understand why it matters. What is it about me, about you, about my relationship with you, that means you need that particular piece of information? What difference does the answer make? It wouldn’t be so surprising if I lived in a country with a less diverse population, but in Britain, and especially in London, everybody is from everywhere. So since I am obviously English, what is it, really, that you want to know when you ask me that?
But part of the reason I think I like visiting Cyprus and Spain and Italy so much is that I look more like a local than I do at home – sunburn, poor command of the language and enormous straw hat aside.
I like watching international football in pubs in other countries. I think it’s because I can’t understand most of the commentary or the reactions of the people around me, so I just get to watch the game and avoid the dimwits and the thugs who beset most attempts to watch an England game in an English pub.
The last time I watched a major football tournament whilst abroad was in 2004, when I was in Alicante. Euro 2004 took place in Portugal, and on the news one evening a reporter interviewed people living near some of the stadiums to ask whether their lives were being disrupted by the football. “We’ve heard reports that there are English people rioting in the Algarve”, said the reporter. “Is that true?”. The local shrugged. “There are always English people rioting in the Algarve”, he said. “I don’t think it’s anything to do with the football.”
I was also in Spain for the 1994 World Cup, on a post-A-levels holiday with three friends. We caught a coach at Bromley South and travelled for a day and a night to get there, and a day and a night to get back. In between we spent a fortnight sleeping in a caravan on a rickety campsite somewhere on the Costa Brava; eating chips and salad and drinking sangria, making friends and getting into fights with the locals in the nearby strip of bars and restaurants that was the closest thing the area had to a town, swimming in the campsite pool and watching the football. I don’t remember anything about the football, except that I enjoyed it, and that it marked the point at which I got back into football after renouncing it forever following the debacle of Palace’s defeat by Manchester United in the 1990 cup final.
(That holiday was also the source of one of those weak jokes that I make instinctively and against my better judgement every time I hear the feeder line. As we boarded the coach the driver made an announcement giving us useful information such as where to find the toilet and how soon we would be making a cigarette stop. “There are rubbish bags at the end of each seat”, he concluded. “Oh I don’t know”, said a teenage boy behind me. “”They look quite nice to me.”)
This time, we were in Cyprus for the beginning of the World Cup. It occurs to me that another reason to watch football abroad is that lager tastes better in hot countries, and lager is the natural accompaniment to a game of football. Here’s the first lager of this year’s World Cup – a small Keo, in the Blazing Saddles Tavern in Coral Bay:
We watched England’s first game, against the USA, in a bar just around the corner from our apartment, on Tombs Of The Kings Road (did I mention that I love Cyprus?). Most of the crowd was English, though there were pockets of locals who had just come to eat and were largely bemused by the hooting and wailing of the white-shirted masses. With half an hour until kick-off, the barmaid distributed vuvuzelas and everyone gave them an experimental blow. They all sounded the same – just like the ones on TV – except for ours, which was the Barry White of vuvuzelas and emitted a deeply sonorous and surprisingly loud BLART which made everybody look at us momentarily, until we put it away.
A few minutes before the match was due to start, the manager decided to see whether he could get an English commentary version of the game. There were six or seven large screens around the outdoor area, where we were all sitting, but the controls were indoors, so he had to shout instructions to someone in the kitchen in order to navigate the channel browser. My Greek consists of about eleven words so I couldn’t make out the precise nature of what occured next, but somehow the TV ended up on a channel broadcasting what I think I would describe as hardcore porn (I am using a definition provided many years ago by my friend A, who told me it’s hardcore if “you can actually see it going in”). The manager sprang into action and switched off the TV, but this didn’t stop the scenes from being projected on to the remaining six-foot screens around the bar. Fortunately, since it was 9.30pm, there were no children in the bar, so it didn’t really matter that it somehow took them a good three minutes to switch over to another channel. By the time we got back to the Greek-language channel we’d started with, we’d missed the national anthems, but it was worth it for the spectacle of the four middle-aged woman sitting opposite us, who I think enjoyed their three minutes of free porn more than I’ve ever seen anyone enjoy anything.
I don’t much care whether England win or lose on Wednesday: my heart belongs to club football and Crystal Palace, and I am as happy watching Spain or Nigeria or Mexico, and as invested in the outcome, as when I watch England. But so far this World Cup seems to have been lacklustre, with a disappointingly poor show from African sides and some teams barely bothering to turn up at all (I’m looking at you, France). But there’s another week or so left of group games and then the knock-out stages to go, so there’s hope yet. For the record, my prediction is Holland, but I should warn you that I have never once got it right.
Here is my real-life version of the photo I posted last week:
I think I spent about half the holiday on this terrace. There is something beautiful about waking up and immediately wandering outdoors in a t-shirt and pants to have a sniff at the weather. I think I need to go and live in a hot country where I can do that every morning. I had a balcony at my flat in Bromley, which I loved and spent a lot of time sitting on, even though it was never very warm, because it was open to the elements in winter and shaded by trees in summer:
Now, living in a second-floor flat with no outdoor space, the only significant time I spend outside on a daily basis is during the walk to the tube across Brockwell Park. It’s nice, but it’s not the same thing at all. I need to go and live in a hot country for at least three months of the year.
Soon, I will blog about Cypriot architecture (briefly, I approve) and the Rough Guide To Cyprus (briefly, I do not approve). In the meantime, the rest of the photos are here.
I am going on holiday tomorrow. To here:
Last night, I dreamed that it was tomorrow morning, and I’d forgotten to print the boarding passes before leaving work. Then I realised, in my dream, that we were flying from King’s Cross, which meant we could print everything at the beloved’s nearby workplace, so it was all alright. Then the alarm went, and I realised we’re not flying from King’s Cross (I think you have to have special permission to fly anything out of N1) but from Gatwick. Shit, I thought: we won’t be able to print the tickets and now we can’t go on holiday. It took a couple of minutes’ early morning panicking before I realised it was still Monday, so I hadn’t missed my chance after all.
I think I really, really need this holiday.
That aside, this Monday morning was better than most, partly because today is my last day at work for a bit and partly because I had accidentally left the radio on Magic FM, which I’d turned over to on Saturday when I was feeling exuberant and in need of something to sing along to. Being woken up by Islands In The Stream is one hundred times less stressful than having to listen to John Humphrys being unnecessarily aggressive at half past seven in the morning. But if I don’t listen to Today, what will I blog about? One to ponder from that terrace over the next few days.
Glad All Over 