The Missing Days

Having left East Midlands Airport on Monday morning to fly to Malaga and then drive to Granada, I left Internet access behind until Thursday evening. However, trying to keep my Facebook status up to date means that I regularly find myself thinking in terms of status updates. I therefore collected my thoughts about our three days in Granada:

• Richard is unsure how people with such little knowledge of Spanish driving laws can be allowed to hire cars. He is nevertheless going to get into the driver’s seat with confidence and aplomb. When he remembers which side of the car it is on.
• Richard feels that six forward gears on a hire car is at least one too many.
• Richard has a bruised left hand from hitting it against the car door every time he tried to change gear.
• Richard thinks that roadworks, an outdated satnav, and black and white copies of Google maps are not an ideal solution to navigating around Granada.
• Richard has now calmed down enough to appreciate a lovely hotel.
• Richard realises that he knows no Spanish words.
• Richard now believes what the guidebooks say about nowhere opening until 8pm to serve food.
• Richard has fallen foul of the tourist trapping terrace and is paying an additional 10% for the privilege of sitting next to a smoker and having a stray dog run around his feet.
• Richard found his dinner unsatisfactory, but has learnt the hard way what ‘raciones’ meant when he just wanted a supplementary snack.
• Richard never ceases to be amazed at the vulgarity of the decoration of Catholic cathedrals around Europe.
• Richard enjoyed watching unsuspecting people having rosemary foisted upon them outside the Cathedral as it made him feel smug for reading the back of the local map.
• Richard feels very virtuous for having walked so far up hill in the sweltering heat, but – unlike his wife – is not entirely convinced the views are worth it.
• Richard is embracing the concept of a siesta.
• Richard was impressed by the barman’s spatial ability allowing him to write the entire order upside down on the bar in order to work out the total.
• Richard feels that sitting inside at the bar of last night’s restaurant getting served free tapas with every drink is the way in which Spanish food should be enjoyed.
• Richard has been asked to record his wife’s delight at discovering Prosecco is served on the tap next to the beer pump.
• Richard has now added the word ‘cerveza’ to his collection of Spanish.
• Richard feels that getting a different tapas dish with each drink is akin to completing the levels of a computer game.
• Richard has been tricked into visiting an Arabic bath by his wife. He will report back later.
• Richard is pleased to report that warm and hot baths, a steam room, a somewhat terrifying exfoliation and massage made up a very enjoyable couple of hours.
• Richard thinks that hookahs on the table distance Moorish tea shops from English tea shops.
• Richard thinks the Moroccan tea his wife chose from would be more suited to a roast leg of lamb. He hopes she is regretting pooh-poohing his choice of Pakistani tea with milk.
• Richard has been forced to admit that Pakistani tea with milk is not really Earl Grey.
• Richard has enjoyed another siesta: only this time lying on a bench like a tramp while his wife went shopping.
• Richard feels that trying to find bars which give free tapas by ordering a beer in each one is a dangerous game when there is no free tapas.
• Richard is pleased to have found free tapas, but is a little disappointed that having no seats inside makes it a short visit.
• Richard has changed bars and is unimpressed by the claims of ‘traditional homemade tapas’ on a chalk board outside.
• Richard has fallen back on the safety of yesterday’s bar for free tapas as he’s getting hungry. He is, however, a little saddened to have started at level one again.
• Richard can now count the words of Spanish he knows on the fingers of one hand.
• Richard is pleased to have avoided the lengthy queues at the Alhambra having picked up his tickets from a cash point yesterday.
• Richard thinks the Alhambra is very pretty, but tessellation can get a little repetitive.
• Richard is pleased he remembered which side the driver’s door was when leaving the hotel car park to embark on the drive to Sotogrande after a glorious few days in Granada.

Gins and Tonics

Over the past few weeks I have found myself discussing, rarely at my instigation, my favourite cocktail with a variety of people. A gin and tonic is one of the simplest cocktails but I am not sure whether it is the drink’s simplicity, its quintessential Englishness, its inevitably refreshing and invigorating effect or a combination of all three which make it such a welcome start to any evening.

The fact that it is the start to an evening – there is only one person I know who chooses to drink gin as a post-prandial cocktail – is something which is worth bearing in mind. We spend money on finding a good bottle of wine to drink with dinner, but by then, the pre-prandial drinks and the concomitant food detract from the drinker’s appreciation of the wine. While I am not advocating scrimping on the choice of wine, I am advocating thinking about the importance of the choice of ingredients in the pre-prandial gin and tonic.

At this point it might seem likely to comment on the choice of gin. While I will, the dominant ingredient, by volume (in most people’s cases, at least) is my first port of call. Schwepps and Britvic are the mainstays of many bars and restaurants and my heart always sinks if I see the bottle is Britvic. Schwepps had always been my favoured tonic – the full fat variety, not the bitter saccharine laden diet equivalent – until I was introduced to Fever Tree whose unique selling point is that they only use natural ingredients, which means that the artificial sweeteners in other tonics are eschewed in favour of sugar. While I know some people find it too sweet (arguably they are too accustomed to the bitterer chemical taste of artificial flavourings) I was a convert on my first tasting and now just have to ignore the price: while twelve individual cans of Schwepps cost around £3.50, four individual bottles of Fever Tree cost approximately £3.00. However, as the majority of the all important first drink of an evening, this is an expense worth bearing.

I mentioned individual bottles and cans of tonic and it is, of course, always essential that the tonic is freshly opened; larger bottles – unless catering for several – are without any question a false economy.

When it comes to gin the choice is much wider. Everyone has their own favoured brand, so I will merely set out the gins I have discovered and embraced or shunned. For some reason, I have ended up trying more new gins in the past six months so these are all recent impressions.

For a long time, my favoured gin was Bombay Sapphire. Its range of botanicals was a departure from the staid and long established Gordon’s and Beefeater and it was responsible for waking me up to the intricacies of gins in the first place. Tanqueray proved a satisfactory alternative and as it often now seems to be available on special offer, and therefore more cheaply than Bombay Sapphire, it has become my standard ‘house gin’.

I had always shied away from trying Tanqueray 10 because of its cost, but coming back from the USA last year, it was on special offer in duty free and a purchase ensued. It is a delicious gin and its smoothness, but complexity of botanicals made it a worthy replacement for Bombay Sapphire.

As established and readily available gins, I would recommend all of these. However, the ones I have encountered recently are more interesting and worth comment. Another from the house of Tanqueray is Tanqueray Rangpur: this is a smaller production run and uses Rangpur lemons to give it a more citrusy and refreshing taste; it quickly became a regular in the range of gins at home.

Hendricks is probably best noted for its quirky bottle, and it is a heavier gin with flavours I associate more with a pink gin. A friend drinks it with a slice of cucumber (one of its flavours) instead of the traditional citrus fruit but, as cucumber is not one of my favoured fruits, this is an embellishment I am yet to try.

Sipsmith is a small, independent distillery in London and it is possible to find the date on which your bottle of gin was produced on their website. It is a very easy drinking gin and, to use the words of many TV pundits, full of flavour.

Sacred gin is from another small independent distillery and their interest in mixing botanicals is shown through their website from which you can purchase the different distillates to experiment with mixing your own gin (a feature for which they have trademarked the name ‘OpenSauce’ with more than a nod to the technological community). Their standard gin is again a very smooth drinking gin, but there is a brighter edge to the taste than Sipsmith. Interestingly, their name derives from the fact they include Frankincense, or Boswellia Sacra as one of the botanicals.

Williams gin is from Herefordshire and made from organic cider apples which gives it a unique taste and sadly one with which – despite trying several times – I am still not entirely convinced. Tesco’s Finest range gin was recommended to me by a friend whose opinion I value: sadly on this occasion, I was unable to agree with them finding it nearly undrinkable neat (part of the obligatory tasting routine) and a subsequent waste of tonic water.

As this post is already rather cumbersome, I will refrain from commenting on my choice of citrus fruit – either lemon or lime – with particular gins, apart from saying that with Bombay Sapphire it must be lime; the other gins seem to be more forgiving but lemon is (currently, at least) my general preference.

I know there are lots of gins available which I have not touched upon and I recently discovered www.thewhiskeyexchange.com from which a remarkable range of gins can be purchased. While it is easy to stick with old favourites, I encourage every gin drinker to explore the different varieties available from smaller distilleries: the past six months have been my most enjoyable gin drinking months since I discovered the attraction of the drink some eighteen years ago.

Coffeshop? Coffee Shop? Cafe?

Britons are perceived to be a nation of tea drinkers and I am happy to be included within the generalisation. What is more refreshing, in any season, at any time of day or night, than a cup of tea? What is the one thing that is always missing on holidays beyond British waters? The typically idyllic (but generally fallacious) view of an English town always includes one or more tea shops serving leaf tea in bone china cups accompanied by crustless cucumber sandwiches and a three-tiered array of sweet delicacies.

However, over the past decade, the proliferation of coffee shops – note the two words, not to be confused with the Dutch single-word, and slight misnomer, ‘coffeeshops’ – has marked a change in the British hot beverage appetite. Looking at the companies’ histories, Costa began spreading its tendrils throughout the UK in 1995 when it was acquired by Whitbread, and Starbucks started appearing on every other street corner in 1998. Despite Costa having been retailing in the UK for longer, it seems to have been the American style Starbucks that led the nation’s change of heart.

I remember several years ago being in a Starbucks in the US and gawping at the incongruity of people sitting with laptop computers, or books, or a pad of paper and pen, working. Yet, I am now sitting in a Costa writing this in long hand (a strange experience in itself), watching people come and go with their cappuccinos, lattes, and sickly flavoured coffees; despite making my coffee last for nearly two hours, I have yet to see any of the British public with a pot of tea.

Being a weekend, most people seem to be coming in to relax, meet friends or to read the newspaper, but during the week, I have seen business meetings take place and exchanged the silent acknowledgement of solidarity with other people working and monopolising a seat for more than the twenty minutes it takes to drink a massimo coffee. While I have been scribbling, a teacher has just taken her seat: she has, like me, bought a combination of school work and personal reading and the obligatory bucket of coffee.

Apart from the increase in coffee as the drink of choice, the blurring of the boundaries between the spaces of work and home and the public and private is interesting. (Eavesdropping, I learn that she is also a secondary English teacher.) While people have always brought work home, the concept of bringing it home to take it out to complete in public feels indicative of the exhibitionist lives that many of use now lead online when we tweet our every move or regularly update our statuses. Through the internet’s democratisation of society (more blurred boundaries) we seem, as a nation, to be slowly losing our stiff-upper-lipped, tea-drinking identity. But are we becoming more European with our café (a word deriving, of course, from the French for ‘coffee’) culture? No. We are becoming more American with our adoption of the coffee shop as a space for working and thereby losing more of both our personal, and previously private, space and identity.

Tabula rasa

When faced with a blank piece of paper, a blank canvas, a blank sheet of manuscript paper or, most likely in the twenty-first century, a blank space with a cursor flashing expectantly at the left hand side of the screen, the prospect of all the emptiness to be filled is – to me, at least – frightening. I said this to a friend recently who suggested that I should, instead, see it as an opportunity.

I can understand that it is the opportunity to write, draw or compose and the possibilities are therefore endless – and for that we should be pleased – but the question of what to write, draw or compose worries me. Choosing words to fill in blanks, or colouring in a paint-by-numbers or reharmonising a tune all appeal to me as there is a structure in which to work or at least to provide a starting point for my own attempts.

But, when faced with a blank page, I panic.

I admire the discipline of columnists and diarists who have to write a certain number of words each week for publication and this has spurred me to decide to endeavour to write a regular blog post of a fixed length. A ‘blog post’ is a somewhat nebulous term as blogs can – and often do – contain many things, but in the age of the internet it is one which we must use. In using the term I want to see it as an electronic equivalent of a diary or a column which thereby satisfies the part of Wikipedia’s definition of a blog post which includes writing commentaries or descriptions of events.

Having decided I wanted to blog (on the internet word classes seem to be interchangeable) I tried to decide what I should focus on as a subject. I have previously never successfully kept a diary – or blog – or done any regular writing on any topic; however, I realised that I do enjoy using my status updates on Facebook and the ability to post links to newspaper articles as a form of ‘micro-’ (or even ‘nano-’) blogging’. Having been doing this for some three years now, and regularly receiving comments and ‘Likes’ in the process, I feel that the wide range of topics on which I ‘microblog’ are all legitimate topics to include.

It is therefore my intention to write about things I know about and understand: this means that I would hope to write about English (both the language and literature), technology, cathedral music, and food and drink at a bare minimum. However, I do not want to prevent myself from writing about those things which I appreciate and attempt to fathom such as science, or fine art amongst many others. In order to make the whole endeavour manageable both in terms of writing and reading, I have imposed upon myself a limit of 500 carefully selected and judiciously edited words.

And with that, my screen is no longer blank and I look forward to the opportunity to try writing.