ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Don’t have my laptop and so unable to download the squillions of photos I took in Pompeii and Herculaneum last weekend… will have to post these retrospectively when I can. Suffice to say we had a delicious time with perfect weather.

There were three celebrity sightings to round things out: I was seated on the plane next to Bob Geldof (who might not be a foodie, as he ate the horrible BA sandwich and said he thought it was tragic that I had brought my own food on the plane… though whether he meant it was pathetic behaviour on my part or that the tragedy is that the airlines serve such abominations wasn’t clear, so I can choose to believe the latter). Upon disembarking we saw him hook up with star journalist John Simpson. And on Sunday we returned from Herculaneum and Vesuvius in time to see the pope leave town after his all-day visit to Pompeii.

After a day in Rome – main excursion was to see Keats’ house – and two good meals, I left yesterday for an epic train journey. It took about seven and a half hours to get to Turin and I arrived to mild foggy weather. Just about to set off for Terra Madre. More as it unfolds.

Treated myself to a soothing time at Borough Market today; Thursdays are less fraught than Saturdays, and the weather was fine and the food looking good as ever.

Some Spanish cheeses at Brindisi..

Nice sausages, and plenty of them.

Tis the season of squash.

No visit to Borough Market complete without dropping in at Neal’s Yard:

And it is, again and no doubt about it, mushroom season.

Note the giant puffball slices at the front…

and all manner of others.

Ginger Pig has lovely ham, and bacon, and a few faggots. And lots of sausages.

Fish, looking fresh.

But it was, above all, lunchtime. The man at the fish stall puts together a stew…

The Argentinian empanadas were popular.

Maybe a chocolate to finish?

And now I’m away to Italy, not taking my laptop so postings may be erratic till I catch up with myself. A presto…

Have spent a pleasant – if still snivelly – couple of days wandering familiar streets and revisiting what old haunts remain, like my beloved Food For Thought, whose quiche and salad plate has changed little in the 20 years I’ve been eating it – still a good deal and a good meal with no room for the unfailingly tempting desserts. You still queue up on a narrow staircase, take your earthenware plate to the nearest corner of the nearest unfailingly occupied table, grab yourself a glass and drink from the unfailingly replenished jugs of tap water, and sprinkle on a bit of salt and pepper from the bowls in front of you.

No mistaking mushroom season is here. I had a really nice wild mushroom soup the other day at a most unlikely place. The croutons were particularly good (I suspect nice bread that was given a good dredging in tasty olive oil helped them along)

and the bruschetta wasn’t bad either.

Speaking of fungi, some of the more interesting mushrooms on sale at Mortimer’s just now..

The Bath House, although part of the evil empire, (since 1996, the Greene King chain has bought up 2,200 pubs in Britain, taking its total to 2,587 pubs and restaurants across the country; it’s notorious for buying up small breweries and closing them down, reducing the number of traditional beers on the market) has for the moment at least agreed to host Ambit’s poetry readings (as long, goes the dark clause, as we spend enough money to make it worth their while)(Ambit could use a hand too, having become one of the latest casualties of cultural funding cuts – they only need 200 subscribers to break even).

I passed on any “home made coleslaw” or “British beef” they might have on offer in favour of a lotus seed bun from an old familiar Chinese bakery en route.

One of Tony Blair’s London neighbours overstayed his welcome and is going nowhere fast.

A visit to the most lovely and useful of bookshops, Daunt’s on Marylebone High Street.

I saw a most astonishingly fabulous film in a favourite old cinema in Notting Hill.

In other news, there was an update in the Guardian the other day about the debate over GM crops which makes interesting reading. Although how anyone can say they will solve world hunger is beyond me, when they are developed with corporate interests in mind: corporate profits for multinationals inevitably have pretty questionable benefits for everyone else, in the old ‘someone has to win’ equation. That is, such profit-oriented products (in this case, remember, this time it’s food) are marketed in order to create an enduring economic bond with purchasers (farmers) by requiring the annual purchase of seed (an attempt to eliminate the rights of farmers to develop and save seed) and associated technologies (e.g. specialised pesticides and fertilisers) so that they can be grown in some cases (e.g. soya in Brazil) in eco-systems that cannot sustain them, with the profits going to multinationals while the local economy is driven ever lower.

Time has been slipping by and a bout of flu stopped me from catching up earlier.

Here are a couple of pictures from a French market which sprang up out of nowhere in the N1 Centre in Islington one chilly day. This one’s for the Prosciutto di Parma consortium sleuths to track down… These certainly didn’t resemble any Parma Hams I’d ever seen.

Nice looking garlic though.

I was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to one of Islington’s more sought-after culinary hotspots, chez Nancy et Mike, where I dined on a Moro-inspired paella

and an Ottolenghi tart (reminds me I must go and worship in his temple of goodness before I leave town)

a Torta Especial Almendra, from Brindisi

and a nice bit of fruit and Manchego.

I was at a housewarming party last weekend, for a neighbour of this property. Big houses are hard to heat in the chilly sea winds they get on Sheppey and the small but beautiful fireplace I huddled near was apparently not enough to protect me from cultivating an ominous sore throat, which I took along on Sunday night to Tammy and Leah’s reading at Torriano, hosted as ever by John Rety.

I then succumbed to a brutal cold/flu thing which laid me low until Wednesday, when I dragged myself into the dusk to attend the Forward Prize do, which was – by spooky coincidence, Georgian properties occurring rather often in my life lately – held in the Georgian Group headquarters on lovely Fitzroy Square. Overcrowding (a superfluity of poets?) led to a dramatic incident – one person fainted – and was tended by paramedics, followed up by an ambulance.

Afterwards we wandered down Charlotte Street in search of a food type that our Lake District companions would be unlikely to find (passing along the way Passione, the restaurant of Jamie Oliver’s now slightly eclipsed mentor), and settled on Phillippine cuisine at Josephine’s. Although I wasn’t fully in control of my taste-buds at the time, I’m inclined to agree with the “not bad, not great” review of the place that I read later. We had the set menu which included a kind of chicken soup with green beans (and one green chili hiding on top)

and a pork dish which looked good

but was a bit sweet for my taste. I ordered it because it featured annatto seed; when I asked what this was, it appeared to be untranslatable: “from a tree” was the answer. I still don’t know what it tasted like; maybe next time.

And that, other than the previously reported efforts to exercise my civic duty, is it… for now.

I will just interrupt the cheery flow of poetry and food to have another virtual temper tantrum. In case you ever doubted that even young countries can have hopeless bureaucracies, I want to share with you the sorry tale of my attempts to vote in next week’s Canadian election, which have resulted in my being disenfranchised. Just when you think it can never happen to you..!

The story begins September 30 when I thought I should check on the exact date of the election which I knew had been called just around the time my plane took off for England. I discovered that it was scheduled for October 14 and I would need to register by October 7 to vote from abroad.

I checked the Elections Canada and Canadian High Commission websites but found them confusing and ended up phoning Ottawa to find out what I needed to do, as I thought I should be able to cast my ballot from here, through an advance poll.

The first person I spoke to at Elections Canada assured me that I could do so; all I had to do was take my proof of address down to the high commission and as long as I knew the name of the person I wanted to vote for, I could do that up until October 6.

Off I went on my fool’s errand on October 1, only to be met by a stoic receptionist who handed me an Application for Registration and Special Ballot and said I’d have to fill it in to have a ballot mailed to me: there was no earthly way I could vote there. Home I went with my form to phone Elections Canada, and spoke to someone else who double checked and agreed it was so, I could not cast an advance vote, I’d have to apply for a mailed ballot using the form, but if I faxed it in to the number she gave me she’d keep an eye out for it and process it as swiftly as possible.

October 2 I set off on my fool’s errand, form in hand, and presented myself at the High Commission again. For those who haven’t been here, there are two buildings housing Canada’s overseas mission here, and they are separated by a twenty minute walk (if you know the way). The receptionist on duty that day assured me there was no way she could touch such a dangerous object as my form and only the Consular Office was qualified to apply it to a fax machine on my behalf.

Off I walked to Canada House on my fool’s errand, form in hand, and got myself up to the Consular Office well before their unholy closing time of 1.30pm. Having already shown my passport to get in there, I handed over the forms, the special fax number and my driver’s licence. The friendly soul shortly returned saying the fax number I’d given her wasn’t in service and should she fax it to the main Elections Canada number? Indeed, and she did, and she handed my forms back and home I went, thinking all was taken care of and I need only wait for my ballot to arrive by mail.

Jump forward to October 9. I had someone check my phone messages in Canada on October 2 and again yesterday. This morning I received an email from home saying there were two messages from Elections Canada – one impossible to understand, and the second saying my driver’s licence was too dark on the fax and it needed to be re-sent. As I had no idea when this message arrived, I went down to the High Commission on my fool’s errand and found the Consular office closed, and everyone I spoke to said you’re too late you’re too late the deadline was October 7. I managed to find someone who was willing to help me. She tsked when she saw the forms; I shouldn’t have been given them back after faxing, apparently. She duly faxed them through and put a call through for me to Elections Canada.

Then the fun really began. I was told that two phone messages had been left for me on October 2 and 4 and that I’d missed the deadline for sending my application in so there was nothing I could do. My position – that I’d sent my application in ahead of the deadline and re-sent my supporting document as soon as I knew they needed it – was worth nothing. And clearly the fact that a consular official had seen my passport as well as my driver’s licence did not qualify her to attest to my identity either: only a photocopied driver’s licence sent over a fax machine can prove to Elections Canada who I really am.

When I asked why they’d left messages in Canada when I was clearly in England, and had provided an email address, the answer I got was that “we only email when we can’t reach people by phone”. Which rather seemed to me to be the case. Why, she countered, had I entered my home number on the form? May I point out that this is exactly what the form asks for, the home and work numbers, with Canadian formatting for area codes – there is no space to provide a contact number in the “present mailing address” fields.

Things got really entertaining when she put her supervisor on. I asked him to explain why nobody had attempted to email me, and why this wasn’t considered standard practice when handling forms from people who were obviously abroad. He replied that the policy was to leave four phone messages before emailing. When I asked why I had only received two of my four messages and no email, he hung up on me.

Thanks Canada. Good luck in the election. May the other guy get in this time.