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Parma

Pausing in Parma

So I’m back in Parma, bracing myself for an earrrrrly train tomorrow. I’m going to Bra, which is not so very far but an absolute pig to get to by train. Four hours or so. Oh well. The destination will, I hope, be worth the pain of getting there: Cheese, glorious cheese.

I got here on Wednesday afternoon: left London where the generally fine weather I’d been grateful for for most of my stay so far had turned cold and grey with spitting rain. I sprinted down the street and got onto the airport bus with about three minutes to spare, made it to lovely Stansted in good time, and then killed it in various queues. The check-in queue was enlivened by a frequent occurrence at Stansted, namely the embarrassed departure of a pair of English holidaymakers who thought they were in the queue for Palma, Majorca. The endlessly unhelpful airport staff of course know all about the confusion – the word Palma is totally indistinguishable from Parma in the English accent over a loudspeaker – but make no concession to the weakness of travellers when making flight announcements. What fun!

My heart sank when I saw the number of Italian teenagers boarding the flight. We used to have to share buses to Colorno with this species on occasion, and in quantity they are among the loudest, most obnoxious and charmless creatures that walk this earth. But other than bolting out of their seats only seconds after a rather bouncy landing (and after a stern voice-of-god reprimand they hastily sat down again) they were surprisingly, gratifyingly well behaved.

Our welcome gift at the micro-airport was at the luggage carousel. The light started flashing, the beep sounded, and through the rubber curtain emerged… the guy who’d waved us into the passport control. He waved and smiled and then disappeared out the other curtain. I do love the way life can be so weirdly casual here.

All else in Parma is calm and quiet.

I have made lightning strikes on some of my favourite eateries – so happy everything is open again! Lunched at Sorelle Picchi and supped at La Croce di Malta (gorgeous torte of melanzane followed by a layered thing with potato and anchovy – interesting but a bit of a waste of a perfectly good anchovy I thought)

The meals have given me occasion to think about the matter of service in restaurants though. I’m thinking is it better to have friendly but inept service, which is more or less the case if you are recognised here, or snotty but correct service. Though usually the snotty service is also bad. So I’m settling for friendly. But it grieves me to see good restaurants losing points with new diners through simple ineptitude.

That having been said, I must praise once again my favourite chef in town, Davide di Dio, whose well deserved holiday seems to have given him some new verve; and I was pleased in the interests of his continued health and sanity to see he had more helpers on board at Ristorante Mosaiko. I hope they can keep up with him. I had a starter of Baccala on a wedge of what looked like a crouton

but turned out to be artichoke, drizzled with balsamico, yum: and I can honestly say I now see the point of Baccala. Then on to a primo piatto of prawns wrapped in crunchy blankets – Involtino di Gamberi Croccanti

with a puree of fennel and lemon cream. Perfect. And then Rombo in crosto di patate alla zucca:

some beautiful turbot, perfectly cooked in a potato crust, docked on a few perfect roast potatoes in a thick orange sea of pumpkin soup. Since it was a night for overindulgence, and as I hadn’t had tiramisu since arriving in Italy, I thought I might as well. Very very nice. I went home well fed and looking forward to my next, and probably final, visit in November.

Tonight will be a quiet night of packing and resting.

Grey becomes us

So, I’ve been two days in London, which has been grey, damp and deliciously cool.

Leaving Parma scorching in its 32 degrees, I arrived to a 22 degree Friday afternoon and hopped the bus that all the Ryanair passengers were not taking because they’d bought the more expensive “cheaper than airport prices” bus tickets on a different service. So five of us enjoyed a roomy and peaceful ride through green countryside, occasionally lit dramatically by shafts of English sunlight, steered by Tony the driver who’d showed us two emergency exits to the bus and assured us we wouldn’t need them. Our route took us down Finchley Road, my old stomping grounds, and I was happy to see many landmarks still where I left them, on past the Wellington Hospital where I had my knee operation years and years ago, down Oxford Street, past Hyde Park looking lush and stately, and finally I was released into the modest zoo of Victoria Coach station. My host was waiting for me and after a quick drink and a tour of my new temporary home, departed for deepest Berkshire, generously leaving me an Evening Standard, a pint of milk and a loaf of bread to settle in with.

Saturday morning I did some larder-stocking. My first thought, as it often is when arriving in London, was for the dark aromatic coffee I buy from Markus Coffee, a little operation on Connaught Street that has valiantly, serenely and deservedly survived its proximity to a Starbuck’s that opened on Edgware Road seven or eight years ago. Walking there from the bus stop I crossed Connaught Square and passed parallel rows of traffic cones preventing parking in front of one of the homes (a pricey neighbourhood, this, where I imagine house prices vaulted the million pound mark a good decade ago); two other curious features about it suggested a story. One was the hand-written sign affixed to the wall, reading “No Reporters” and the other was a policeman cradling a machine gun and glaring at me as I passed; ditto his two colleagues who were pacing up and down the street. I wondered at first if it was a crime scene, but my friendly coffee dealer told me it was only the Blairs, who were not around much these days anyway. I picked up my package of heaven and wandered up Edgeware Road, wafting dark coffee fumes everwhere I went. A little preliminary shopping and a dolma stop at my favourite Lebanese grocery, The Green Valley, and I was headed back home.

Saturday afternoon brought a welcome last minute invitation to join Nancy and Mike at the How We Are: Photographing Britain exhibition at the Tate Britain. I was buffetted by grey winds on my way but got there to find a blue pixie dancing on the steps in welcome

and we spent a happy, somewhat overwhelming couple of hours exploring British photography of all kinds by all sorts of photographers (Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Martin Parr) from all points in photography’s history. There was even a visual explanation of where the term “blue print” comes from which was a bit of a revelation, as were three photographs of the Horn Dance of Abbott’s Bromley, ancestral home of my mother’s family. Afterwards we enjoyed a couple of pints and some fairly stale crisps in a nearby pub, blissfully smoke-free since the smoking ban came into force here last month.

Then we thought we’d catch a bus to Islington — only the bus stop had a big yellow sign on it

advising us that due to an accident on August 7, the stop was closed for as long as they jolly well said so. As the wind now had damp substance in it, we were disinclined to do as the sign suggested and walk over the bridge to the Vauxhall bus station, and while we were dithering, a bus pulled up, so we got on, victorious over signage.

Then, carefully avoiding low trees,

we made it to the Afghan Kitchen

where we managed to come away with Lavand-e-Murgh (chicken in yogurt), Qurma -e- Gosht – kachalo (lamb with potatoes), Qurma Suzhi Gosht (lamb with spinach), Bajnon Borani (aubergines with yogurt) and Sarah’s (a vegetarian concoction of kidney beans, chick peas and potatoes in yogurt) and off we went to Cross Street where we cleaned the plates as best we could. Delicious welcome to London.

Penultimate Parma

Well if the shops and restaurants are closed, my classmates have left, the larder is bare, the river is dry and the nutria have fled, I guess it’s time I thought about moving on as well.

Here’s how the optimistically named Torrente Parma looks today, as it has for weeks:

I guess that goes some way to explaining why we haven’t been attacked by mosquitoes as we were led to believe we would. Though others not so close to the ‘river’ have had it worse.

It’s going to reach 34 in Parma today, and will only manage a grey 20 in London, with more of the same in the near future, so I’ll be packing my brolly and leaving the sunblock behind. Watch this space for endless whingeing about English weather over the next couple of months…

Everybody’s gone away…

A final lunch yesterday at Sorelle Picchi, which afterwards closed for the holidays. One more bowl of cappelletti in brodo for me and tortelli di zucca for Kathy. Yum, we did it.

And here’s how the rest of the neighbourhood’s looking:

Andy whipped up another wonderful Taiwanese dinner last night; then on the way home Jenn, Tim and I paused for a K2 conetto. Mine was passion fruit (sooooo goooood!) and peach.

Friday in Parma

Happy to say the weather has continued to be bearable – verging on glorious. Amazing what a couple of weeks of devastating heat can do to your standards of what is ‘hot’. It does help not to have to get on a sweltering bus twice a day as well, of course.

It’s been a week of catching up – on sleep, on correspondence, and cleaning and packing up ready for what lies ahead. We are all heading towards our internships: a couple of months of assorted projects. Some will go to Slow Food, others to Eataly, another to the Barcelona markets; others will be slinging curds at Murray’s Cheese or bopping round Bordeaux Quay. Me, I’ll be back in London, and working at London Food Link.

Meanwhile, a couple of lost friends reappeared in various guises: like Aileen Downey, a fabulous voiceover actress whose history has included a role as a rabble-rousing Russian revolutionary at the ill-fated London MOMI, as well as time spent slaving over database entries. (Some of you will be able to guess which of those career highlights converged with mine.)

I filled in my registration form for the Food & Morality conference in Oxford, and looked over the offerings at the Bristol Poetry Festival. I’m doing a reading in Bath in September and sniffing round for others, though it’s probably too late to set anything more up at this point.

Cousin Tina sent me to this article about losing your parents in adulthood, which I share now with my fellow orphans. I liked this bit:

While the fact of your parents’ death ceases, with time, to be your first waking thought, the map of grief has many roads which, I suspect, one travels in some form or another for the rest of one’s life.

Slightly cooler and ever so much nicer in Parma

It’s a mercifully cooler day here in Parma, and I’m sitting with my windows boldly open at 11.30 in the morning, fans off, enjoying a breeze. I can honestly say that’s a sentence I haven’t been able to write for months, and I’m grateful to be able to do it now.

Last night we had another farewell gathering: they get smaller and smaller as people take off for their summers ‘n stages. About half a dozen of us were having a glass of wine together around 9pm when our chairs began to shake gently. We’d been talking about fast food, and although at first we suspected it was the Wrath of Carlini, we swiftly arrived at the conclusion we’d just experienced a mild earthquake (measuring 4.6, as it happens).

Oddly enough, I had been reading only on Sunday in my guidebook which told me that Parma’s duomo was

“erected on the present site by heretic bishop Cadalus, who later became antipope Honorius II, but was destroyed by the violent earthquake of 1117 that shook the whole Po valley and left only parts of the apses standing.”

We finished our glasses and headed into a breezy, almost chilly, evening and washed up at Sorelle Picchi, where I’d had my lunch, and this time ordered a big bowl of cappelletti in brodo, which were absolutely delicious.

While we were waiting for our food, we saw a man who’d stopped us on the street to ask if we’d felt the earthquake. He was in his seventies, I’d guess, and had his white table napkin draped around his neck: he and his wife, who hovered in the background, had been eating supper in their fourth floor apartment when they felt the vibrations and fled into the street, thinking Parma must be at the epicentre of some awful disaster, and were too afraid to go back inside. He paced up and down stopping everyone – passers-by, tourists, policemen – looking for some kind of reassurance. he disappeared eventually, but I saw him out on the street again this morning, still anxious but lacking his napkin.

Meanwhile I was spending some time today looking at YouTube videos and happened upon one for Unisg. It starts off well but then gets a little draggy with fuzzy tourist shots of Delhi and chops off suddenly at the end. But it was a delightful surprise: