Sick Degrees

So. I was having ‘post work drinks’ with a friend (a minefield in itself and certainly essay worthy) and that horrible thing happened again. We met so and so’s work colleague who, oh yes, is best friend’s with your ex! What a coincidence! And this guy, sunglasses Mcgee, knows your mate from Uni!!! And Anne over there, pashmina Anne, went to the same school as you but you don’t remember but your mum does and by the way, how is she?

 Is it just me, or is the world getting smaller? And I know that may sound base, but recently I feel like the ghosts of the past or indeed the ghosts of the unknown but closely linked, are chasing at my heels. And quite frankly, it’s just annoying. These connections, as much as they can be fun and surprising, often put a dampener on things. It’s unsettling. In some situations, a new job for instance, you’re in a totally separate world from all the school and Uni connections that were so prevalent in our day-to-day lives before and now you’re testing new water. Putting your best shiny self forward. So when you realise that you’re having a pint with someone that you made out with in an Indie club in Birmingham when you were 15, all glassy eyed and hepped up on poppers, it can become a bit tainted.

 I’d love to make a flow chart of all the connections we have between one another. Because aside from growing up in the same city, going to the same school or the same University, these tenuous links between people geographically miles apart and often several friendship groups apart, all come down to personal choice.

 Myself for example. I grew up in Birmingham and was sent to a private all girls school. I then spent the rest of my years in Birmingham (and at University. And now to be honest) feeling a bit uneasy about that and very much aware of the person I wanted to be. Luckily I had a cool older brother whose records, books and friends I could steal to help me. And at school I connected with people who also only cared about The Strokes and wanted more than anything to get into Res and smoke fags and kiss boys but were also out spoken and smart and although somewhat detached from the ethos of our school, did well there. And we met other people who felt right and that was that.  Circulating between the clubs and bars we could get into until we got old enough to get into them and we didn’t want to go any more.

 And then we all went to Uni in different places and made friends who liked the same music, believed the same things, danced the same way, got as drunk, got as serious, laughed at the same things, dressed similarly etc. The kind of person you’d say “We have the rest of our lives to pay each other back!” to, whilst dropping a cool twenty on the SU bar. Or just sit in silence next to on the sofa.

And that was that for three glorious years.

 And now, as people start to climb onto a career ladder and more start to trickle down to London from various places in the UK, it seems that everyone spent those three years doing similar things: making friends with your friend.

 I suppose it can be seen as life affirming: there’s a reason we make connections with people. And it’s not necessarily because of basic shared interest or changeable superficiality. It’s because we see a part of ourselves in them, a part that makes sense. Or in the best-case scenarios, a part that makes more sense of ourselves.

 So if that means that the six degrees of separation gets a bit tighter, so be it.

 I’m just grateful that the chance of us being biologically related is a lot slimmer.

 

 

Wafer thin wishing

Diets are boring. They are boring to do, they are boring to talk about, you are boring if you are on a diet. But they are essentially all about food and so warrant an inclusion in this blog which, much like my poor starved appetite, has been much neglected.

DUKAN

I previously embarked upon the Dukan diet about a year ago in a vague post Christmas attempt to shed the evidence of a thousand pigs wrapped in blankets. But it fell by the way side pretty sharpish because I am someone who enjoys delicious delicious beer and a packet of cheese and onion crisps to go with. And it’s pretty hard to stick to a regime when you spend your overdraft on eating out because it’s nice and fun but actually its Tuesday and you are fairly unsatisfied with your life so FUCK IT I’m having the steak.

But with a renewed sense of courage, some kind of point to prove and a pocket full of dreams, I am back on the Dukan. And in the same way that damp spreads and turns into a rancid smelling mould, I cannot ignore the Dukan’s large presence in my life any more. So let’s talk about it!

Dukan is all about protein and non-fat and yes, no carbohydrate.

Things that I have been eating a lot:

• Onken non-fat yoghurt (strawberry or vanilla)

• Sainsbury’s non-fat cottage cheese, usually plain but if I’m lucky/have planned ahead so as to get to a big Sainsbury’s, the one with pineapple in. Which I know sounds disgusting and that’s because it is.

• Pre-Sliced chicken flavoured either sweet chilli or tikka.

• Crab sticks.

• HAM

HAM is now a really important part of my life. To complete the Dukan diet successfully, you have to have a slightly relaxed moral compass. By this I mean, one has to feel fairly nonchalant about how many animals, particularly pigs, are being slaughtered in order to benefit your weight loss. And of course there are ways to make this more humane, for example making sure all your meat is organic or free range etc. But it’s pretty hard to find organic wafer thin ham in Tesco’s and I am on a budget. Cows take a pretty bad hit also, what with all the steak and jerky but even more so, yoghurt and skinny lattes. Good bye soya, I am back on the good stuff and have blocked out all my previous anti milk farming arguments. Animal rights issues certainly enter my mind each day as I peruse the cold meats aisle but I figure on this diet it’s either them or me, AND I CHOOSE LIFE.

Speaking of living, the beginning stages of Dukan can often make you feel like you are actually already dead and someone has hijacked your still warm corpse. Carbohydrates obviously provide energy needed to complete the day’s activities, without which you could be found staring slack jawed at a coat hanger for twenty minutes or brushing your hair with the cat. Working in a bar was particularly difficult for this as I was constantly on my feet, walking or cleaning with only half an hour to sit down and silently devour a pack of Bernard Matthews Turkey breast in a dark port-a-loo esc staff room that smelt like feet. Grim.

 Such lack of energy can seriously mess with your emotions. One moment you may be crying on the bus listening to Bob Dylan’s Girl From The North Country on repeat and the next, silently burning with rage in the checkout cue because if that bitch doesn’t slide down the shopping divider thing NOW you will cave her head in with her own butternut squash and walk away smiling.

One of the greatest lows is realising that actually it’s pretty disgusting to carry around half opened packets of ham and even worse, crab sticks. You definitely do not want to be that girl who smells of crab sticks.

So why do it? It is an effective diet, not that I have seen the merits massively, but a couple of people have commented that my face looks ‘healthy’. Which is nice. But more than this, I am hoping that the discipline involved will filter into other aspects of my life.

I once spent a week in a shack with a mud floor in the middle of rural Wales with no phone signal and no red wine, learning Kalaripayat (an ancient Indian martial art), in an attempt to internalise this physical excursion and use it to generate a true sense of meaning when pronouncing ‘Joe’, the first word of Samuel Beckett’s play, ‘Joe’. I never got it right.

But I am hoping to apply this psychophysical method to my personal life; the disciplined heavy protein eating being the physical act that concentrates my mind to choose a career path, excel within that field, meet my soul mate, live in a house with some tasteful Bauhaus elements, and raise some babies whilst all the while making shit loads of cash.

If my mother taught me anything it’s that FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BRAVE.

So crab sticks it is.

 

PARIS

The city of luurrrrrrrrrve. And wine. And FOOD.

So James and myself took a trip across the channel to Paris for the weekend to experience how to correctly live life and eat food as frequently and as disgustingly as we physically could. And, as I will elaborate upon later, the physical breaking point was certainly discovered…

Anyway! The first night. After grinning inanely at the presence of FREE peanuts that came with our tiny beers, we ate dried saucisson sec, cornichons, goose rillettes, confit of duck and mystery salted meat steak with wine from the Cote de Beaune on red and white checked table top. So basically it was SICKENLY perfect, on a par to the scene from The Lady and the Tramp where the dogs kiss over a string of spaghetti. However, I doubt those Disney dogs were as sozzled as we definitely were.  

The next day, after walking semi unconsciously through Notre dam, we had lunch at Derriere. Derriere is a restaurant set up as a kitch apartment, where you can have dinner in a bedroom, play Ping-Pong in the living room between starter and main course or walk through a wardrobe into a secret smoking room. And the food was amazing- I has salmon tartar with horseradish cream followed by pork leg with mixed forest mushrooms and new potatoes. AND we had an ice-cold bottle of 1998 Sancerre to top it all off. HAHAHAHAH YES we were CERTAINLY beating Paris down into the ground.

But then, well, Derriere suddenly lived up to its name. The salmon tartar that was so glorious gave me the most savage food poisoning that wrote off the third and final day. There is something almost spiritual about revisiting ALL of the food you had eaten in the past two days, perhaps it is the ultimate in food criticism; you REALLY get to think about it again and again and again in a different light. I was crying out “Kill me”, I had visions of a baseball bat swimming through the air toward my temple, ending it all. But James was reluctant to kill me. And I guess that is the sign of a good relationship.

So, no galleries were visited or landmarks seen but I could describe to you in detail the turn of a typical Parisian toilet cistern. It was a purely gastronomic experience with an unfortunate end. But hey ho, Paris is only two hours away! However, it will be a lot longer until I can revisit any uncooked fish.

some words on cheeeeeeeeeese...

Right. If you don’t like cheese, I would stop reading now. About 70% of my waking life involves the handling, slicing, tasting, smelling, wrapping, displaying and selling of cheese. It’s not what I ever thought I would be doing but here we are. So if you don’t like cheese, it sort of undermines my existence in a round about way. And I can do without that kind of negativity. In addition, if you are allergic to cheese (and many people are, the world is a sick place) I wouldn’t bother either as it’ll probably just be boring.

SO cheese. I work in a deli in Broadway Market, Hackney. I am currently in the process of learning about 50+ different cheeses from around Europe. Now it may sound completely inane but I really underestimated cheese as a ‘thing’ before I started selling it. It is a defining factor in a certain way of life. Before I go off on one, I should state that I think cheese is really good and incredibly interesting and we should all eat lots of it. BUT what is even more interesting about working with cheese is ‘Cheese People’. These are the kind of people that come in on a Saturday morning and spend seventy pounds on cheese. SEVENTY pounds. It’s a lot. Buttttttt I suppose if you have the money and cheese means something to you, then that’s fine, its enjoyable, its been a long week, treat yourself! Who I am I to judge? But I do. I do judge.

When I work behind the market stall on a Saturday said ‘Cheese People’ come over and instantly think that I am one of them. I can give them a sample of any random cheese and they take it, looking directly into my eyes, boring into my retinas like in no other social situation. They smile and nod with an amused yet shocked expression: “Well THAT is just amazing, isn’t it?” Of course I agree. I have to. They are about to spend a lot of money and this in turn may reflect well on me. Many people know exactly what they are talking about. They have a modest body of knowledge that you cannot mess with. On the other hand, there are an equal number of people who are simply caught in the rush of market time and would react in the same way to a piece of proffered tarmac. I have the knife and therefore I have the power. Its probably too far to make some sort of cheese stall related world community analogy here, but you may if you wish.

So with cheese being treated like gold in the microcosm within which I spend a lot of my time, the realisation of just how ridiculous people can be comes at the end of the day when I am at home and cheese is a long way out of sight. As I think I have harped on about before, high end products such as cheese and wine generate the commonly termed ‘massive dickhead contingent’. They get off on knowing a little bit of specialised knowledge and practising their sex face whilst eating slithers of Brie. And I suppose people like me lull them into a false sense of security. I confirm the correctness of their facts or big up their musings on the certain taste of a cheese. I play along with the laughter, ooooooo that IS sharp, WOAH that really packs a punch. But the truth is, I AM LYING. I probably don’t know any more than they do about cheese, I am learning and interested but in reality the whole transaction is a farce. People trust the one behind the counter. I am essentially getting paid to pump up someone’s ego. And it comes in at seven pounds an hour.

What do you do when someone farts in wine class?

Well, nothing. I was deadpan. I think it is possibly the most compassionate moment of my life. Cathy, opposite me, was begging me to cave. She was internally DYING with laughter and saw right into me; she knew I was weak, that I would give in and together we would laugh “hahaha YOU FARTED?????? That is UNCOMMON IN PUBLIC@!” But I kept it together. And thank god, as karma is a bitch and I do not want to cross the fart gods in this uncertain time of professional development.

So this eve was Beaujolais; a wine I love but one that has recently dropped in sales and is now deemed ‘unfashionable’. I find this terribly hard to take. Beaujolais Villages, and particularly Georges Dubeauf, is a wine that reminds me of Sunday and my Dad and the first time I realized what wine was AND that I liked it. So there were many people at wine class giving it a hard time and I had to hold my tongue as ACTUALLY thousands of people drink Rose, a substance in my eyes that should be used as floor cleaner and yet here we are, slagging off an 18 pound bottle of hand harvested French wine, simply because the label is too colourful. BITCH PLEASE. And it got worse when we tried a Jacobs Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, nicknamed ‘the alcoholic Ribeena’. Now, I love a good wine and quality is both important and noticeable. But it is a luxury to be able to afford a bottle of wine above six pounds on a student budget. And I think Jacobs Creek do an excellent job of providing good wines that are drinkable with or without food. Perhaps my judgment is clouded somewhat by sentimental memories of buying three bottles of Jacobs Creek for ten pounds at the bottom of Jerningham road in New Cross to accompany a vat of bolognaise that fed the five thousand. (Or just me, Becca and Harriet…) Either way, its easy to judge when you are used to drinking expensive vintages or you naturally put price above substance. This is how the wine industry and wine enthusiasts are tarred with the ‘posh twat’ brush, a brush I am pretty familiar with. So, I am prepared to drink as many bottles of wine as I have to and shout incoherently at as many strangers as I can UNTIL people truly start to believe that the world of wine is changing hands. 

A note on wine...

So I have started a Sommelier course in London Bridge, it lasts roughly 12 weeks and at the end I will take an exam and hopefully have a certified Level Two Sommelier qualification. My first session last week proved to be a pretty eye opening experience. Not only was I completely incorrect in thinking I knew ANYTHING about wine, but I also learnt that men who like to drink wine and talk extensively about it are actually as ignorant as the rest of us, they’re just pissed and loud and have the utter arrogance to say anything enough times that you cave into their opinion. A case in point of this was the weird old wino at the back of classroom who shouted “I taste blueberries!!” at our tutor so many times that she had to pry the tasting glass from his dead lock clamp of a hand and inform him that “no, there are no blueberry traces AT ALL in this wine, perhaps you had a blueberry muffin before class?”. Honest to God, I am not making it up. Aside from that, it was actually really interesting. We tried six different wines, three white, two red and a desert wine, all varying in price and region. We then tasted them with salt, sugar, apple, cheese etc to check for balancing acidities and how to match wine to food. So top insiders tip for you; you can actually have any wine with any kind of food as long as you salt or put lemon juice on your meal. It is not wine that makes food better but actually food that brings out the varying qualities of wine. For instance, red wine is commonly paired with steak because of a presumed affinity in the richness of texture and flavor. However, it is actually the salt on top on your steak that deepens the umami aspect of the meat and that in turn brings out the ‘tannins’ (resonating flavors) of your glass of red wine! Also, Cote De Rhone can be drunk with any meal, its balances with salt, acidity and sweetness and is relatively inexpensive. I also learnt that women are normally better Sommeliers, or more selective tasters than men, as we have more complex taste buds. So LADIES, don’t buy into the masculine dominance surrounding the wine list at restaurants, you have more capacity to choose a nice wine than you know.

So to conclude, the nicest wine I tried at the session was a 2006 Pio Cesare Barolo from Italy, acclaimed to be one of the world’s greatest wines. So if you have £34.99 knocking about, go and pick up a bottle! If not, the Wine and Spirit Education Trust cellar is situated on Bermondsey Street, London Bridge.