Blending in

HOW good is this? I've been meaning to mention it for a while, only just got round to it. A friend of mine makes wine in Marlborough under his label Fiasco, and we've become friends, like many people he and I know, mainly through Twitter. He and his wife blog fairly enthusiastically too, and they both have a fair amount of highly intelligent stuff to say, not only on the subject of winemaking, which they live and breathe, but on the marketing and distribution of wine too.

Now, Aaron (for that is his name) is full of excellent ideas. They spend precisely $0.00 on marketing, and yet he's properly out there, and it seems to be working for him. The man has an innate understanding of social interaction online, and whilst his work in this space is defiantly non-commercial in content, what he's managed to do is something most marketers can only dream of - he's built a genuine dialogue with his customer based on a mutual understanding, and based on a very good product indeed.

Anyway, Fiasco's most recent ruse involved the blending of their 09 Sauvignon Blanc. Only being a small vineyard, Fiasco don't have the latitude of some larger concerns of being able to blend from multiple vineyard sites. In order to get a bit of complexity into the wine, Aaron's used three different yeast strains to deliver three distinct wines from the same grapes from the same vineyard, a not uncommon practice.

We've been following the fermentation for some time, as the wines develop their own characteristics and Aaron's been video blogging like a crazy person. Literally.

So the plan he came up with a while back involved getting his online acquaintances to sign up for a blending experiment. Some time after signing up, three bottles arrived in the post, labelled A, B and C. The instructions were simple: try a couple of different percentage blends, note down your favourite, and email the results back to Fiasco. The average across all the results they get back will be the final blend. A genuinely user-generated thing - brilliant.

So not only did we get the chance to experience the blending process first-hand (it was amazing to see how three wines mixed together produced something so much better than any of them individually), we had a hand in creating a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that will be on the shelves of our nearby wine merchants in a few months' time.

What a brilliant thing to do.

Real world vs Twitter

Tonight, the Kiwi and I took part in a wine tasting on Twitter. Interesting concept, one that was dreamt up by three guys, the owner of a wine store in Auckland, a wine writer in Oamaru and a winemaker in Marlborough about two months ago. The deal is simple; you buy a bottle of Fiasco's 'Black Pearl' Pinot Noir, have your first taste at 2000 on April 19th, and post your tasting notes on Twitter.

Here's the feed: http://bit.ly/9UGeH

On the whole, a bit of a success. The wine itself is excellent, not only superbly priced at $20 (special Tweetbunch price, apparently), but it's Aaron's first Pinot of his own, I think, which is a fair achievement in itself. It's actually quite European in style, with a bit more juicy acidity and slightly more forward fruit, but with a great earthiness that NZ Pinots often don't have, certainly not this young (2008).

You lot in the UK probably won't see hide nor hair of it though, as I don't think he makes all that much. Such is life.

And of the event? A great idea, I think, and it went really well. True, there's the lack of face-to-face interaction that's the hallmark of online social interaction, but realistically that takes nothing away from it. You're still chatting away to a group of similarly-minded people, still tasting wine, still enjoying the experience, but with the added bonus of not only being able to talk directly to the winemaker, but not having to leave the house. I know there'll be a few 'social networking stunts our emotional growth' comments bandied about, as there always are, but the long and short of it is that this was a really innovative use of Twitter which worked tremendously well.

I think there may be more in future. Also, we made it onto Twitscoop, but that might be as much to do with the rest of the world being asleep / just waking up as because a few dozen of us were tasting wine at the time :)

Last Supper (sort of)

I'm a simple chap at heart, and in general it doesn't take a lot to keep me happy. This sort of explains why, at 0630 on Saturday morning I was wide awake and heading for the kitchen, all wide-eyed and excited by the prospect of chopping, roasting, reducing and boiling stuff for the rest of the day. Which is exactly what I did.

The event was the last dinner party I'll cook in my own kitchen, and E&T, who I know from Oddbins days, were coming up all the way from darkest Surrey, so I thought I should do it properly: haricot bean and tiger prawn soup followed by venison with chocolate sauce, followed by the Kiwi's amazing lime mousse, and some carefully chosen cheeses from various Borough Market stalls.

Wines were Ruinart NV to start, then a superb new white Burgundy with the soup, and d'Arenberg's 'Dead Arm' Shiraz from 1998 and 2003 with the venison. We moved on to a tremendous Southern French beast with the cheese, and then, possibly ill-advisedly, continued on with Port Ellen and Ardbeg for a bit too long.

Sunday was a bit of a write-off. But it was SO worth it.

This weekend we'll be packing up all that kitchen stuff (and some other bits and pieces), because some men are coming round on Monday morning to take it all away. Ten weeks later, customs and quarantine and bureaucracy notwithstanding, it'll arrive on our (or to be more precise, some kind friends') doorstep. The interim weeks, involving London winter, Canadian snow, Australian summer, New Zealand summer, interviews and so on, we'll be living out of suitcases, which poses an interesting wardrobe conundrum.

It'll be fine. I'm sure it will.

Curry, wine: Edinburgh

WHAT a weekend. After a fairly legendary lunch with my boss on Friday afternoon (finalising the deliverables for the coming four weeks or so...), I kicked off the weekend by watching the brilliant Spaceballs with the Kiwi. I'd forgotten how shamelessly puerile that film is, possibly one of the last spoof films whose tone is 'gently mocking', rather than simply vicious or way over the top.

Saturday morning involved a train to Edinburgh, all six hours of it, and that evening we caught up for a curry with my brother and his wife. Both were on sterling form and blessed with a superb local Bangladeshi restaurant. One of the things that's been bothering me 'n' the Kiwi lately is that it seems to be impossible to get a decent Indian or Chinese meal in London unless you're in the market for a £60+ a head dinner. It's a real treat to be able to get back to good, local food again.

Excellent to see them both too - it's been years since I saw either of them, and it's the first time they've met the Kiwi. Good to knock back a few whiskies with my brother too, for the first time in waaaay too long.

The Oddbins wine fair on the Sunday was a whole lot of fun as always, smaller than in previous years (or perhaps I've just got bigger), but the old crew were still there as always. The range is looking a fair bit better than it did in April (at the London version), with some astounding French wines on the way for once, and the German range finally worth a look. It's fair to say though, that these last two are more indicative of trends within the countries in question, but Oddbins has been notably light in these areas for the past few years, so it's refreshing to see something interesting there.

We ended up buying a mixed case. Quite what's in it I've very little idea.

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...

Not so bad after all...

It's occurred to me lately that this blog's turned into less of a worrying insight into the byzantine workings of my 7-year-old mind, more a sort of 'this is what we did on the weekend isn't it nice' thing, which isn't what I'd planned at all. I'll do better in future I promise.

Despite that, this weekend has been fairly pleasant; tapas and cocktails on Friday night and a bit of a drinkathon with Keef on Saturday, strangely woke up feeling bright as a button this morning which sort of made up for Friday morning, when I woke up feeling disastrously hungover having (purposefully) not drunk a drop the previous night.

So we made use of the day, wandering out around Kensington in the sun, downing a massive, largely fried brunch at Café Continenté after which I'm fairly sure I went into shock for 30 minutes or so, heading to Oddbins for some of their amazing own-label rosé, and slowly winding back home via Tesco for lots of exciting spicy things to cook over the coming week.

So just before I wrote this, I was in the kitchen watching the Kiwi bake some banana oat muffins. She's wearing a gorgeous royal blue maxi-dress with a halter neck, the afternoon light's coming softly through into the kitchen and she's a perfectly beautiful image of femininity to me, and just at that moment, I hear the living room stereo, with Adele singing 'all the wonders of my world...', and it occurs to me, not for the first time today, that stuff can get pretty good really, can't it?

I am a fool

How did that happen? Where did that bank holiday come from? Seriously, I've always been bad at working out when they were, but this really takes the cake - it was 1600 on Friday (FRIDAY!!) before a colleague mentioned it to me and this was quite literally the first I knew about it. How does one find out?

Anyway, twas a nice surprise and a much-needed break in the eternal scramble that my professional life has become. Friday night I took the Hatter out for dinner cos he's getting married this weekend and I'm sort of his best man. We went to the French House, which although they always overcook the steaks I really do like, and we drank rather too much.

Saturday I took my hangover round to a friendly American's house and killed it with red wine, the Kiwi having gone to the Nuremberg Horse Trials or some such. Sunday I cooked a semi-disastrous set of creme caramels to take round to dinner with some recently-married Kiwis nearby (it literally did take all day, in between Wii bouts and screwing up the caramel-making bit. The kitchen was covered in strands and blobs of caramel in various states by the end of the day, which the Kiwi and I left to dry and then went round cracking bits off and munching on them like Hansel and Gretel).

Monday (MONDAY!!) I finally got around to getting my bike out of the wardrobe, putting it together and cleaning it.  The resultant pic of the Black Panther I posted on Facebook provoked a fair bit of response, which presumably means the respondents thought I'd actually ridden it, when in fact having cleaned it I celebrated the act by doing nothing for the rest of the day.

One step at a time, sweet Jesus...

How good does this feel

It's been five long years, but this one's finally finished. There's still something of a mountain to climb, but this is a bit of a milestone for me nonetheless.

We are having a glass of (relatively inexpensive) wine to mark the occasion. I have my annual review tomorrow too, which could be interesting. More on that later...

Christmas, NYE, back to work

And we're back. Following a week and a half's mental haring around Manchester I'm back in the office to relative normality. It's a bit of a slow day here today as you can imagine - the alarums and hysterics I'm used to on the first day back are apparently unique to retail. It seems this doesn't filter down to (or percolate up to?) agency level for a couple of days yet.

Christmas was lovely. Following a cautiously enjoyable Christmas party with work on the Friday (taking it very easy on the beer, leaving in time for the last tube, don't think I offended anyone) we drove up to Manchester, taking a full 5 and a half hours to do so. We stayed in a reasonably smart apartment in Ancoats, just behind Piccadilly station, sort of, which is real inner-city Manchester, in the first throes of redevelopment and feeling a bit like Shoreditch did a few years back. It's still distinctly edgy, with some of the old rag trade offices still open for business and some of the old alleyways still ripe for lurking in, but the tell-tale bars and cafes are starting to creep in, along with the posh apartments and new businesses with shiny nameplates proudly displayed outside.

Bouncing between our apartment and friends and family all week was great, so good to see everyone again and spend time with them over the week - just as nice to be able to retreat to our own space when we needed to. The Thursday in particular was one of these times; the Kiwi went shopping whilst I settled into a pub with a bit of Orwell and some decent northern bitter. Brilliant. My wonderful Kiwi had managed to find me a Wii for Christmas too, which has shamelessly made me fall in love with her even more, whilst at the same time ensuring that I'll pay her marginally less attention in future. Funny paradox, that.

And so back to London on the Saturday, leaving at 0700 and taking about 2 hours 40 to make it back, in stark contrast to the outward journey. We spent the afternoon with the Hatter and his family out in darkest Hampshire; he's getting married in 08 and as I'm to be his best man (hooray!) we thought it about time we met the rest of the brood, and a very happy man he must be, with three ridiculously cute and (apparently) well-behaved kiddies and a rather idyllic part of the country to call home.

New Year followed, with a small group of mainly Kiwis round at ours, me drinking unusually heavily mainly in order to numb the pain of a minor mutilation which occurred whilst preparing bruschetta (middle-class credentials firmly intact there). New Year's Day was spent almost entirely on the sofa with both of us alternately freaking out about returning to work and (mostly me) worrying about January's finances which, in the context of 2008's plans, are some way off course.

There we are then. New Year's resolutions? I don't normally, but here we go: more exercise, more reading of books, more saving of money, more earning of money, more ruthless career progression (hahaha), more wearing of good shirts. Less drinking (not sure about that one), less eating of the bad food, less procrastination, less chopping of fingers. Oh, and possibly the purchase of something shiny before too long. And that's all I have to say about 'that'.

Cooking, Christmas Pounces

Blimey hasn't it been a while since my last post - although nothing much has changed in that time so nothing to report, folks. What has happened is that I've devised a plan to get what I want from this job and have submitted it to the relevant people, so we'll see what we'll see, I guess.

The current phase of this project is due to end this week, and we've actually been reasonably productive despite it having been a rather painful process. I suppose it'd have helped to know more about what we were building before starting to build it but unfortunately that's sort of the nature of this project; it's defining itself as it goes.

On a more positive note, a brilliant weekend just passed, beginning with the Kaiser Chiefs supported by We Are Scientists at Earl's Court on Friday night, followed by an early trip to Borough Market (introduced the Kiwi to Monmouth Coffee) for breakfast at Maria's followed by unrestrained and enthusiastic food shopping. Once we'd ensured we were well and truly skint, we headed back, laden with pork, scallops, preserved lemons, cheeses, truffle oil etc and (once I'd installed BT Vision, which is ace) promptly fell asleep.

We cooked a jalfrezi on the Saturday night, which was brilliant, all vibrant, fresh flavours and a decent belt of chilli too. Sunday involved cooking what we'd bought the previous day, scallops with sweetcorn puree and truffle cream followed by roast belly pork with sage and lemon potatoes, followed by white chocolate torte with dark chocolate sauce. Two other Kiwis came over for lunch - a sort of pre-Christmas thingy. Scallops sounded odd, but worked really well, despite a minor crisis involving quails eggs.

Later that afternoon we headed up to the Green Man near Great Portland St tube to meet the Kiwi's cousin and new husband (although they've been together for ages) which was ace - they moved out to Australia about two years ago and we've not seen them since so was great to catch up.

This morning, back to work. I felt like someone had squeezed an extra week into the year without me noticing, and then I realised that we're headed up north this weekend to see the family and that sort of made it alright.

Grumpy, stress, but some good news

Ooooh something of a day of contradictions today. On one hand, the Irish project I'm on is becoming somewhat tiresome, with fiddly bits of detail bothering me slightly and those who know me will know that I'm so not in the detail. So this is bothering me. I'm also seeing things going on in the business that I'm sure could benefit from my input but instead I'm here counting servers and adding up license costs.

Bah.

Anyway, if I'm seeming a little bit ungrateful and unwilling to do the necessary grunt work to get ahead career-wise, that's because I am. I reckon I just need to get my head down and plough on through it for a month or so before pulling the 'been there, done that, now show me something interesting' card and we'll see what happens.

That said, I am learning a ton of stuff at the moment, not only in terms of the techie stuff I'm being forced to read up on (who knew how useful an MVC Model could be?), but also in the whole project management, business analyst sense. Much though it galls me to say. It's a bit like muesli - you know what I mean, good for you but no fun.

On the other hand then, I've passed my six month probation period, which means I'm now officially an employee with rights and everything. The feedback I've had has been really quite good too, and constructive, so I'm feeling an odd mixture of massive smugness and huge inadequacy as I make my shoddy attempts to write technical specifications.

So woo for that. And for my Kiwi, who despite her monthly headache, presented me with a pretty good-looking bottle of wine as a well done present. No drinking in the week right now mind... GOD I'm so dull right now. I'm going to have to have a moment of irresponsibility soon, I can feel it coming on...

the holiday post

And we're back. Or am I? Tell you the truth, the line between holiday and not-holiday has been a bit blurred this time, which is all a bit weird and unexpected. Anyway, I'm sure you all want to hear about my holiday, don't you? If not, I recommend you skip this entry and buy a Pond Vac or something instead.

Following on from the last post then, we arrived in Nice in the early evening with the Kiwi's cold getting worse by the minute. She rallied after we'd checked in at the hotel and we went for a wander and got a quick pizza in a manically busy place in the town, complete with our first beer in over a month - so, so good. Back to the room, knackered, sleep.

Come the morning she was in a terrible state, awful sore throat and much distress, game attempts to go down to the beach thwarted by huge coughing fits and so on. On the second attempt I managed to convince a pharmacist that we really needed something full-strength, which took the pain away enough for her to get some sleep whilst I went for a wander and some lunch. That afternoon we did get to the beach briefly (you can only lie on big pebbles for so long), cooling off in the amazingly opaque blue water, sort of milky blue like a glacial stream.

We spent a few hours in the afternoon in a bar in the old flower market too, a gorgeous part of town, all fading pastel buildings and languid sleepiness, before deciding to come back in a few hours for dinner, which we did. Oysters, steak, mussels, tremendous. Early night and an early start to get the 0730 ferry to Corsica. Now, arriving in Calvi was a bit of an odd experience, as firstly we hadn't been given the actual address of the apartment we were staying in, so I had to translate the directions we'd been given to the taxi driver, despite the fact that the directions were from the airport, not the port, hence no use at all. Secondly, the route we took to the apartment somehow took us through the least picturesque bit of Calvi (which really is quite lovely on the whole) before dumping us outside a block on what seemed to be a main road.

Still, we got there, and by the time we'd got into the flat, we could see from the balcony that the beach was literally just across the road and the town a few minutes walk to the left, and although the road probably was a main road of sorts, in Corsica that just tends to mean
it's tarmac'ed.

We got into the swing of things pretty quickly, the rhythm of 'breakfast/beach/lunch/beach/dinner' forming the backbone of the coming week. Food-wise, Corsica's reasonably well-served, with decent cured meats (although they do like a light cure and very thick slices, so their charcuterie tends to be a bit more... challenging than the Italians') and some pretty awesome cheese. I'd heard of the infamous Corsican 'A Filetta' before, and was keen to get involved so we picked up a jar (a jar!) at the supermarket on the first day. It's a sort of cheese paste, god only knows how it's made but it's mental: an intensely rich ammonia smell which burns the eyes, and on the palate it seems to fizz and writhe before drying the mouth out completely and filling your head with an acrid ammonia sensation. The finish is marked by a few minutes of dizziness and choking.

It stayed in the fridge for the rest of the holiday. I have brought it home with me to try out on unsuspecting house guests and to ward off evil spirits. I have never in my life been beaten by a cheese, but this one has me hands down, I'm afraid.

On the wine front, Corsica does produce a fair amount of its own wine and beer, but doesn't tend to export, and we were pleasantly surprised. There's a ton of rose produced there, all of which is of the crisply aromatic variety (all indigenous unpronounceable grapes); the whites are similarly floral and the reds that sort of good, gutsy style you'd expect in that sort of place. The only not-lovely bottle we had was one we got from the local domaine, but it was only slightly sub-standard and cost about €4, so I'm not complaining. Their local beer was a full-flavoured lager with a healthy 6% ABV which, two bottles in after a day in the sun was not unlike being hit around the head with a cricket bat.

One more thing which really astounded us both about Corsica was the landscape - lying on a beach of the softest white sand I think I've felt, you would look up across the bay and see incredibly rugged mountains stretching up into the sky, apparently up to 2700m in places. There's something about that that gives you a whole lot more perspective than you're used to, somehow. In fact, I refused to believe they were more than 750m at most, and unfortunately the Kiwi found out what the truth was and I had to deal with being wrong, which as you'll all know I'm not very good at (doesn't happen that often, you see).

And so, bar a train trip to the nearby beach town of Ile Rousse and watching the start of the rugby world cup in some of the bars in the town, that was Calvi.

On the following Sunday morning we got the 0800 ferry back to Nice, negotiated our way through Nice to get the train to Cannes, just down the coast, and had a long lunch in a restaurant on the beach followed by wonderfully aimless wandering round town. That evening we sat chatting in a painfully cool bar just off the Croisette for so long we'd drunk too much and were too tired to go out, so we got a pizza on the way back to the hotel and gently wound down to the end of the holiday.

Back to Nice in the morning with my version of the Kiwi's cold (which she'd more or less got over with the help of super-strength French throat spray) developing nicely. On the way back, we stopped in the pub at the end of our road for a proper-sized beer and a bag of properly flavoured crisps before finally going home.

All in all, it was precisely what we needed. I'd definitely go back, too, although the jury's still out on whether it beat Sardinia or not. Photographic evidence will be linked to as soon as the Kiwi uploads the photos from her camera. Reasons why I'm typing this at work will be in my next post...

Holidays

... and so we're off. In 10 minutes that is, but I thought I'd take the final few minutes of the Kiwi's 'getting ready' to knock out a quick blog entry.

Last night's wine tasting went down a storm, by all accounts - they always start the same, fairly subdued and everyone acting a bit nervous, and by the third wine everyone loosens up a bit and starts to interact. Job well done. The success of the tasting somewhat made up for the inevitable depression which followed a meeting with a financial advisor who assessed my position as 'in a bit of a state' and then smugly told me the saving plan he'd followed all his life etc etc etc before returning to the fact that I'm going to die penniless.

Pah.

Anyway, I'm hungover and the Kiwi's got some sort of 'flu going on which has decimated her entire office and is forcing her to speak in a whisper, which makes everything she says sound like a really big secret and I'm so trying to be supportive and caring but I think it's coming off more like I'm just laughing at her, which is sort of true. Bad boyfriend, again.

Aha - she's clothed, made up and hairdone, looking lovely as usual, so I'm guessing this is my cue to shut down the PC... see you in a week!

Are we there yet?

For those of you not in the UK, today is a bank holiday, and what I'm doing instead of feeding my beer baby in the pub is sortofworking. I've had to invent a new word for it, because it's not really working, but I am actually doing constructive professional things in between doing this damn thing that Kathryn posted on her blog and has been intermittently occupying my time all morning. I've also been listening to more Pet Shop Boys than is probably healthy, but I'm in a sunny sort of disco mood and have had Se A Vida E going through my head since I woke up, so there you go.

However, apart from doing my expenses form (yay!) and fiddling around on Facebook (damn you facebook), I have actually been working this morning, and the main reason for this is that the Dublin project appears to have slipped another week, sort of. I have found this in the past though - instead of everything being delivered with a triumphant flourish on the due date, it all sort of trickles in over a period of several weeks. This is feeling like the last week of it all though - we've got a fair idea what we're building and how long it'll take, so work could conceivably begin next week.

I'll be involved then, although the build is taking place in the UK, so the visits to Dublin and their accompanying 0430 wake up calls will be less frequent, fortunately. I'm also going to miss the first week of the project because I'll be in Corsica working on my ability to do nothing for hours at a time (which I got quite good at in Sardinia last year). That's ok, as as far as I can see, week one will be all about working out who's sitting where and all the techies making sure their development environment is all working and so on. Nothing I really need to be involved in, I don't think.

One thing I will have to do before hols is give a wine tasting to my colleagues. 30 of them have responded to an invite to one on Thursday evening - normally 10 is a challenge to keep under control, so this could be something of a challenge, but I'm looking forwards to it. Will be a nice way to end the week - although it could make packing on Friday morning something of a challenge.

So, holiday then! Off on Friday, two nights in Nice (must... make... joke...), a week in Corsica and then one night in Cannes on the way back. Well, it's not really on the way back, but it's in the area and the Kiwi's never been. Personally I thought it was pretty dull, but it's a bit iconic I suppose and the train ride down the coast past Antibes is really lovely. Good cocktails at the hotel bars on the Croisette, too...

I can't bloody wait, to be honest. Apart from anything else, I've forsaken beer for the past month or so in an effort to be able to see my toes again, and I'm so looking forwards to that first cold one by the sea. That said, I've noticed a real improvement - I've cut out beer and almost entirely cut out bread lately. I've not really been exercising all that much more, but I'm visibly trimmer, so that's my top dieting tip - drink less beer.

I'm sure there'll be photos and all when we get back, but for now you'll have to make do with one of a pile of unnaturally shiny apples on reception at last week's hotel. They were definitely real: I think they'd been polished.