I get an enormous sense of achievement when I clear my fridge without throwing anything away. This not only includes using up food, but also packaging: to the great amusement of my less thrifty other half, I like to use wrappers to use in lieu of greased proof paper when baking cakes. All this has very little to do with environmentalism and more to do with my general love of thrift. I would have been brilliant during the War.
It’s the new Maxibon: toffee ice cream, surrounded by different toffee ice cream, coated in toffee and studded with toffee crumbly bits.
The word toffee no longer makes sense. I’ve written it too many times.
I wonder if I am an ice cream snob. You know, like when people stop liking a band the minute their records are available in HMV? Well, now you can get Maxibon in every corner shop in London, I’m suddenly not all that bothered.
Grovesnor
You know sometimes you’re out dancing and maybe drinking quite a bit and everything’s a bit of a blur, but then the DJ plays a song that blows your mind and then the next morning even though most of the night is a bit muddy you can’t stop thinking about that song and before you even try to get some water into your body you go on google and try to find that song? Well: me and Birgit, Berlin, the Lido, a few weeks ago, Grovesnor and Drive Your Car.
Grovesnor used to be in Hot Chip and everything he does is AMAZING. My current favourite is Only 4 1 Nite 2007. “One drink turns into two and you know, two drinks can turn to a few and I’m ashamed to say I forgot about you, I even started doing the electric boogaloo. Cutting loose, drinking juice, watching her shake her papoose…”
I’m not quite sure he really is using papoose as euphemism for bum/breasts, but I love it anyway.
This ought to be the stupidest programme ever, and yet, and yet. One comedian (spindly Sue Perkins) and one journalist (Giles Coren, restaurant critic of the Times and one-time winner of the Bad Sex In Fiction award for a line in his 2005 novel about a penis which leapt around “like a shower dropped in an empty bath”) dress up in silly clothes and, for a week at a time, eat their way through a historical epoch. My favourite was the Supersizers Go… Regency. It featured bonnets, jugged hare and for Coren, eating the diet of the history’s greediest bastard, Prince Regent, later George IV, a breakfast of champagne and pigeon pie. Afterwards, he said he felt “like a python who has swallowed a shopping trolley.”
Sometimes known as a Turkish pizza, this flatbread-topped-with-tomato-and-minced-lamb is my favourite on-the-way-home treat. So cheap! So tasty! Almost healthy! Last night it was my friend Bex’s birthday, and after jumping around on a sofa in the Jazz Bar then wondering what all the fuss was really about at the too-cool-for-us-really Disco Bloodbath, we needed feeding. Thank goodness for the eternally open Turkish place just up Stoke Newington Road (it’s on the left, opposite Mangal 2). Two Lahmacun stuffed with salad, one can of Perrier, total bill: £3.10. I just realised that I never paid for mine. Er, thanks, Bex.
A cocktail containing clam broth and accessorised with a stick of celery ought to be gross, but I do love a Bloody Caesar. It’s a Canadian thing: vodka, clamato juice (a blend of tomato juice and the aforementioned clam juice), Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, served on the rocks in a glass rimmed with celery salt. Today we sat drinking them on a roof in Montreal, looking over the port, and it was very good indeed. Meant we didn’t need a starter when we went for our lunch too. Other memorable clamato moment: trying to drive from Montreal to Toronto in the century’s wildest snowstorm, getting marooned in Morrisburg, in the Macintosh Inn, a hotel with a luke warm tub and a waitress who declared everything “beautiful”. Bloody Caesars got us through the night.
Normally I am too impatient to bother drying my hands using a machine, preferring either the back of my jeans or, if available, a wad of paper towels. Then I went to Gatwick airport and discovered the Dyson Airblade. Finally, a hand dryer that works properly! You put your hands in the slot and BOOM! From wet-to-dry in under 12 seconds.
If you would like to know what is more ethical, using a paper towel or a dryer, Leo Hickman debates the answer here.
News just in! (4/7/08): They have an Airblade in the toilets of the Social on Little Portland Street! Another reason to love that venue.
So much more fun than a boring old bowl full. My favourite place to get a pint of prawns used to be the Holly Bush in Hampstead, but when I went there last we were served our prawns on a platter. A blatant breach of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 I think you’ll agree – we complained to the barstaff, who blamed “health and safety”. Apparently they’re not allowed glass in the kitchen anymore. BOO!
Today I had a lovely afternoon with my friend by the seaside, at Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. We had a dozen oysters, a pint of guinness (him), a pint of ale (me) and a pint of prawns (shared). The prawns were measured out in a pint pot, then shoved in a plastic bag. It would have been disappointing, but they were well tasty and the sun was shining so I let it pass.
The other day, I found myself, for entirely innocent reasons, having a shower in a colleague’s flat. While doing so, I saw that he kept his toothbrush and toothpaste in the shower, alongside his shampoo and soap, rather than by the sink. When I had got dressed, I asked him whether he cleaned his teeth in the shower. “Doesn’t everybody?” he said. Er. No.
I once heard a radio show phone-in on this very topic, and people called in with some corkers. I particularly remember the man who thought it was normal to strip naked when he had a poo.
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