Elbow, Roundhouse, 11.10.08

I'm obviously a bit preoccupied at the moment - with all the stuff that's going on at the moment I'd totally forgotten to tell you about the brilliant Elbow gig on Saturday night. What a perfect (almost) evening.

I'm fast becoming a fan of the Roundhouse, generally the sound's great and it rarely feels that full, either through great capacity management or tardis-like architecture, I'm not sure. Weirdly, their normally dull beer selection was complemented by the addition of Sagres, which we'd just been drinking in Nandos down the road. Little things like this help, I find.

They were supported on the night by Jesca Hoop, who I suspect is really quite good, and judging by some of the streaming tracks on Last.FM, I think she probably is. Unfortunately her delicate voice combined with the relative lack of interest from the crowd meant she was more or less inaudible, and as she only played a handful of tracks (including a duet with Guy Garvey) I'm not sure she didn't wander off out of sheer annoyance. Poor lass, I thought she could've been great in the right circumstances.

The main event then. The Kiwi made a great point at the beginning about how good the sloping floor in Brixton Academy is, in that you're more likely to be able to see (especially for her, she's ickle), and this was one of my two criticisms of the venue. The opening track was spoilt slightly by us shuffling around trying to get somewhere we could stand next to each other and still see, which depended largely on a very specific configuration of people of certain heights going all the way forwards to the stage, so it's safe to say it didn't really happen.

The band, without exception, were tremendous. Opening with 'Starlings', complete with a trumpet wielded by each band member (whether mimed or not, I don't care), they had the audience grabbed from the word go (or in this case 'How'). By the second track, the bloke next to me singing at the top of a voice so flat it had canals was getting to be too much, so we moved to the middle back, and better sound.

On that note, what amazed me throughout was the quality of the sound, and the preciseness that they got in playing almost note-for-note versions of the tracks we were all so familiar. There's a time and a place for innovation and so on, but a band at Elbow's stage in their career and with their sort of fanbase, should know that they're not going to get away with Jazz Odyssey: we want to hear what we've got on our stereos, just louder and in real life.

And that they delivered. Unusually, one of my favourite tracks of the night was one which didn't really grab me on the record; "The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver", which Guy really seemed to enjoy and absolutely took it by the scruff of its neck. It's great to hear a proper Manchester accent in song - a friend of mine once mentioned how much she loves hearing regional accents on singers, and I have to agree. Not only is it so... honest, but it gives the work a sense of place, and much like terroir in wine terms, embraces its origins. One other track stood out, but you'll have to come to our wedding to hear more about that one.

On a final note, whilst writing this, my iTouch has been in an unusually capricious mood. I've had it on a Genius playlist it's built around Elliott Smith's perkily scornful 'Somebody That I Used To Know', and it thought to include Ben Folds' slightly mawkish but still touching 'Late', his posthumous tribute to Smith. It's a bit like a Spielberg film, in that it's a bit cheesy and predictable, but in such a way that you can't fail to be moved by it. The 25th and last track is Fleet Foxes' gorgeous 'Ragged Wood', which reminds me that we're going to see them in November and it promises to be an amazing night.

It's Talk Like A Pirate Day

Yarrrrr.

Holiday good, gloomy home weather bad

What's happened to the weather? I go away for a week, ok - 9 days, and suddenly winter's crept in the back door whilst I wasn't looking. Not happy with this.

Anyway, we got back yesterday, so the memory of our stay in a brilliant villa in San Juan de los Terreros, which is here. The satellite photo was taken a little while back, so it doesn't look like the houses on our street are finished yet, which they all were.

It was a week of 30+ temperatures, lots of sleeping, both beside and in the pool, plenty of brilliant food, both in and out, and some truly excellent wines, the best from the Ribeira del Duero.

I have to say though, that Almeria, which we flew into, is a bit of a dump. We were lucky enough to chance upon a really good restaurant for dinner, but otherwise it's not all that. The one thing it has to recommend it is this hulking great contraption sticking out into the harbour.

It's some sort of industrial revolution-era device originally used to allow freight trains to drop stuff into waiting boats. Most cities built docks and the like, but the Almerians did this instead, and when it was decommissioned (assuming it actually was...) the mayor of the town decided that, given it was one of the only things the town had to differentiate itself, it should stay. Interesting, yes, but the appeal is somewhat limited as a tourist attraction.

The rest of the coast, up through Pulpi towards Alicante, alternates between beautiful desolation and near-desert conditions, and massive, semi-built urbanisations forming either second homes for wealthier Spanish families, or boxes for sunburnt cabbies from Romford to stash their horrible kids and sullen wives in for a week or two's drinking and complaining there's no chips on the menu.

Fortunately the Kiwi, in her infinite wisdom and skill, chose a predominantly Spanish town for us to stay in, so the only football shirts we saw were in Murcia airport on the way back. Seriously - whole families in them. I really feel for respectable football fans, like the Mighty Melvin - this lot really gives that garment, which I'm sure some people quite rightly wear with pride, a terrible name.

So anyway, the week's bookends aside, the holiday itself was one of the best to date. The villa we rented was pretty much perfect, with loads of space, air conditioning and a large enough pool to actually get a proper swim in of a morning. The perfect way to get us both to chill out a bit, before we begin the 11-week countdown to leaving London. The remaining diary pages are beginning to look very small indeed...

Tarts and other diversions

What a weekend. Scouting for engagement do venues on Friday night followed by dinner at home, once round Richmond park on the Black Panther on Saturday morning, drinks out on Saturday night, Gordon's with T&E on Sunday afternoon followed by dinner & movie at home (Cloverfield, don't believe the hype), long walk by the river this morning followed by a day in the kitchen at long last. This evening's dinner worked pretty well, though I say so myself, roast lamb rump with puy lentils, rosti potatoes, glazed shallots, tomato concasse and herbed gravy.

The bit I'm really pleased with is in the photo; bitter chocolate tart, served with a splodge of sour, cool, sharp crème fraîche. The crumbly bits on the top are a result of some last minute emergency pastry trimming needed to get it out of its case. I've had a bit of a challenge with tarts lately (ho ho), as they've all refused to set properly, but this one seems to be holding its shape reasonably well. The crisp vanilla-tinged pastry is a bit of a winner too. Both recipes from Gordon Ramsay's Passion for Flavour, one of his earlier books that's still a bit cheffy and not quite so 'posh Jamie Oliver'. Sometimes you do want to spend 6 hours on dinner, rather than trying to fit preparation of a memorable meal into 30 minutes.

Sitting alongside this little lot was a bottle we brought back from Australia last time we were there, a 2002 Vasse Felix Shiraz, which I reckon is just about peaking right now, at least this bottle was. Good luck finding any in the UK though, we tend to drink all our Aussie wines shockingly young, so there's never anything of this sort of age around.

And so ends the last bank holiday of the year (I think). Three and a half days of work and we'll be heading out to southern Spain for a week in a villa somewhere near Almeria, with nothing on the agenda but reading, drinking, eating and the occasional dip in the pool or, should the effort seem worth it, the sea. I can't wait.

On the reading front, I'm currently sailing through M F K Fisher's excellent 'The Art of Eating', which I'd recommend to anyone, whether they care about food or not. It's so brilliantly written, without a hint of pretence or self-consciousness, and provides a valuable missing link between the likes of Brillat-Savarin and today's food writers, not to mention a fascinating and well-researched insight into culinary culture over the past few thousand years.

I'd take it on holiday, but it's about five inches thick.

The ring thing

So if you're on my Facebook friend list, you'll already know this, but last night I asked the Kiwi to marry me, and cor blimey she only went and said YES, so we are now officially betrothed, I believe. Brilliant!

Very briefly, as I need to get in the shower and prepare for a fairly intense day in the pub, the whole night was excellent from start to finish. We started with Champagne (Pol Roger NV, if you're interested) at Vertigo, where I mumbled the question. At 600ft, it's the highest building in London, a real landmark, and the view from the bar's tremendous. Our table faced northwest, towards the Telecom tower - the weather was perfect too, watching the sun set over the most amazing city in the world.

Following that we got a cab over to Wild Honey in Mayfair, the sister restaurant to Arbutus, which we've also been to. Terrific food and superb wine was somewhat overshadowed by how excited and dizzy we both were, but it was superb nonetheless. Would definitely recommend it. It turned out that a friend of ours was having a birthday party over in Soho, so we dropped in on that on the way home.

I feel absolutely tremendous. And I can't believe the ring, whose size I guessed, fits perfectly and looks so completely natural on that wonderful girl's finger.

Perils of online translation

This is brilliant. Obviously the owner used an online translator to work out a name for the restaurant - unfortunately assumed the error message that was returned was not an error...

Terrific.

Minor changes, new blog toys

The eagle-eyed among you (you know who you are, I'm sure) will no doubt have already spotted some tiny changes I've made to this blog. Along with the brilliant SnapShots I've been using for a while, I've put Lingospot onto it too. This is quite a sexy piece of fun, which picks up words I've published and gives you a little run-down of what they're about. Check out some of them further down the page - you'll see a little arrow next to them which, when clicked, opens up a window where you can see the Wikipedia entry for that word, plus some Flickr photos and so on. Nice, no?

I've also shuffled some of the ads around, including this one at the top which I'm not sure about really. Don't forget that advertising on this blog does actually pay me money when clicked...

Oh, and the other thing is the little doo-hickey on the right hand side that cleverly dumps my blog into your feed reader, should you use such a thing.

That's about it, will write more shortly. This past weekend deserves a bit of bloggage, I'm sure.

Another bank holiday, toddler tantrum

Another bank holiday sort of crept up on me this weekend, although this time I can profess to having found out about it a little earlier than last time (Wednesday? something like that). Following a week that was a bit like wading through treacle work-wise, it was very welcome.

So, if you're interested... on Friday night I started to teach the Kiwi how to play chess, and from the looks of it she'll be beating me soundly in relatively little time. She has a naturally analytical, strategic mind that lends itself well to the game, whilst personally I struggle to have the patience. We'll see. We're both about as competitive as each other, so perhaps I'll develop a bit more aptitude for it out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

Saturday we both caught up with friends separately, and Sunday we went to the rugby sevens at Twickenham, at which England beat New Zealand in the first quarter-final round and thus were out for the rest of the day. With that and the tennis result I'm uncharacteristically smug for an English sports fan - we don't often get the chance so I'm rather milking it. That said, rugby was definitely a secondary attraction of the day, the first being smuggling as much alcohol into the ground as possible, along with the usual results. Streakers, pitch invasions, hailstorms of plastic pint glasses, cardboard beer trays, hats and at one point, the construction of a snake of empty pint glasses being constructed that stretched pretty much from the back of the stands to the front, and the length of one whole block.

We called it a day afterwards, and came out of it relatively unscathed. I did run to a cashpoint (run? why? I don't know) and back during the course of the day, out of the ground what I reckon was about 1.5k at a sprint in my non-running shoes, which I think is responsible for every muscle and joint in my body aching today and a suspected pulled calf muscle. Hopefully this will be a learning experience.

Yesterday was hilarious from start to finish, the highlight being the sight of my Kiwi, face down on the living room floor throwing a proper toddler tantrum about having to tidy her clothes off the floor of our bedroom. Fists banging on the floor and everything. Second to this, superb food all day, with a brilliant borlotti bean minestrone for lunch (her) and good ol' roast chicken & veg & pan gravy for dinner (moi). And a short week ahead of us! Brilliant.

Sniffle, Cough, Flight, PIE!

Looking back on recent holidays, this is happening to me with alarming frequency: I AM ILL. Again. This time it's a particularly evil little virus that's had me incapacitated all weekend and is still, STILL poking at my sinuses with spiky poking sticks and leaving horrid things in my lungs and banging on my head incessantly. All this despite first attempting the holistic healthy approach and then, faced with a deadline of Wednesday morning to get well again, attacking it with good ol'fashioned over the counter Drugs.

The deadline of Wednesday looms because Wednesday is the day upon which we embark on an aeroplane journey which will end on Friday morning. Leaving Heathrow at around 1400 on the 12th. Arriving in LA at 2000 on the 12th. Arriving in Auckland in the early morning of the 15th. Arriving in Brisbane some time later that day. What happened to the 14th? Lord only knows. I'm trying to get my head around this but frankly it's beyond me, so I've voted to just screw my eyes tight shut from the London tarmac until when someone says 'Welcome to Brizbin'.

The journey back is simpler. Leaving Auckland at midnight, we arrive in London at around lunchtime that day, the only problem is that 24 hours will have passed in the meantime.

In the meantime we'll have had a brilliant time I'm sure, and I'm really looking forwards to catching up with the Family Kiwi and the Auckland lot (not to mention those in Hamilton and Hawkes Bay), and everything in between. I'm sure photos will follow.

So tonight we're packing (and I'm secretly looking forwards to the flight out, so long as I'm virus free at the time), and having a couple of the best pies in the world (sorry NZ, I do mean literally the best). One more day of work... then we're off. Bloody brilliant.

Oh. One more thing. When I said 'we're packing', I actually meant 'the Kiwi's packing'. I'm on the sofa being poorly.

I will never grow up. Ever.

Saw this today round the back of the Tate Modern. Made me giggle all the way back to the office.

Terrific.