Last Lunch of the Year

One last post of 2012:
Our lovely Lynn is over on the correct side of the country for Christmas with her parents and that's as good a reason as any to misuse the word 'party' as a verb.
So we went to try out the new Patisserie Valerie that's recently emerged from the cocoon of Clark's shoe shop betwixt the Market and the Castle in Norwich.

It's been beguiling me for a couple of weeks now, with its pretty waitresses and comfy chairs and Parisian style cakes in the window.
Who do I know who likes cake?
Aha …

Anyhoo … Other than Breakfast Club, any visitors meeting me in the city are now likely to get dragged inside Patisserie Valerie. It feels genuinely Parisian (crowded, chatty - but not overly noisy - filled with yumminess) but is not so dark and dingy as a genuine Parisian café so you can actually see what you're eating and who you're talking to.

Review time:
A matching pair of Croques Champignons … perfectly delicious, with a bonus point for the excellence of the salad dressing.
Black Americano and tall mineral water (still) … as good as anywhere else that serves illy, which is pretty darned good.
My dessert was an espresso and pair of mini-macarons (pistachio) … scrummy.
Lynne's chocolate cake and cappuccino looked pretty good, too.
Add in a fruit juice for Lynn and two obscenely mouthwatering cakes in pretty boxes tied with ribbon to take home for her Mum and Dad and the whole lot came in at a very affordable price, including a big tip for the excellent (attractive, polite, attentive but not obtrusive) waitress.

More places like this, please, Norwich. I'll be back for lunch on Saturday.
Tomorrow I'm meeting Peahen and friends for the New Year organ recital in Norwich Cathedral.
Hope you all have an unconscionably spiffy 2013.
See you there.

WTF Monday - Fa-fa-fa-fa …

Discovered last week in a Westminster menswear store.

I am SO going to wear this down the gym.

Why Political Correspondents Love The Damart Catalogue

No reason for today's post; I'm steering clear of the pooter for a couple of days so this is filler.
This is a photo I took mid-afternoon just before Christmas of some poor sap from the BBC shivering in the freezing cold, waiting to interview some imbecile politician.

This place is known locally as "Liars' Lawn" because it's where all the political interviews take place for the news channels. It's actually the flat grass roof of Abingdon Street underground car park …

… but where the guy's camera is pointing gives this as a backdrop, which is pretty cool.

Enjoy your run-up to the new year. I'll be enjoying an early night tomorrow, for all the usual reasons.

Meanwhile …

Yay for http://xkcd.com/

Saturday Statuary - Gratuitous Boobage

Meanwhile, on the South Bank, two naked women sit by the river, bewailing the decline of elegance that resulted in their being located by the South Bank Centre, whose utter hideousness only makes them pine more keenly for the unreachable grace of Somerset House away across the water.

Blah di blah

Nothing to say, today. Been shopping, had a haircut, enjoyed two leisurely coffee shop breakfasts and now I'd better get some work done.

Click here to see an article that had me giggling into my coffee yesterday.

Lucy … I Am Your Father

This has to be one of my favourite photos of the year; taken on December 23rd. when Gerry and Old Dive hit the town to find it empty of pre-Christmas shoppers.
What we did find, however, was this Imperial Stormtrooper collecting for charity with his little girl.
How painfully cute is that?
Hope you're all enjoying the post Christmas exhalation.
May the Force be with you.

So Much For The Sales

"Boxing Day Sales! British Public Set To Spend £3 billion!"
At least according to the desperately pathetic pleading of the news headlines this morning.

Consequently, I moseyed on into town to play Gawp and Giggle at the insanity.
Only it never turned up …
The streets have been about as crowded today as the river.
It was a beautiful day, too … the first without torrential rain since the end of the early December Ice Age, so no excuses for staying indoors. I've been walking for hours and it's been lovely.

Castle Mall is usually a lot more crowded than this on a normal weekday. There were far more staff than customers in every shop I visited.
The coffee shop was almost deserted. I sat chatting and laughing for three refills of coffee with a family who had come out for a walk to escape the dreadful misery of Christmas TV. They'd dragged their whiny adolescent daughters out for some fresh air and I regret to say we poked fun at the girls mercilessly as they blinked in the sunshine and whimpered at their mum to let them have their phones back so they could retreat from reality. Hoo boy, I'm glad I'm a non-breeder.

The Forum was so quiet I could faintly hear the screams of stock market analysts and retail shareholders as they plummeted to their deaths from the nearest tall buildings.
I did my best for the economy by buying a new jumper (four sales ladies to one customer … yay!) reduced from £45 to £5.
The high street stores have seen the sign saying "This Way Down The Shitter" and they're trudging wearily after it.

The teeming hordes thronging Tombland bear mute witness to the fact that the rich have bled us so dry that we have nothing left to give.
Look out, 2013 … you're fucked.

Wednesday Window

Cicchetti, on Piccadilly, just for all of you who stuffed yourselves stupid yesterday and woke up in a house filled with leftovers today.
Happy Boxing Day Hangover, peeps.

Merry Christmas, One and All

Christmas Eve for the Lost and the Lonely

… can be a surprisingly wonderful day.
I got all my Christmas crap out of the way a while back, but I do like to mosey on into the city on Christmas Eve to watch the insanity.
After a leisurely late breakfast at the coffee shop and a couple of hours meandering aimlessly, people-watching and stopping to chat with friends I popped back to the coffee shop for a spot of lunch.

It was crowded to standing room only inside (it's been pissing down with rain all day), but it's a ludicrously warm seven (count 'em) degrees centigrade today, so I sat merrily coatless under the big brollies outside in a little pool of dryness and smiled at the sight of the torrential downpour thrashing the shit out of the huddled, bickering hordes of last-minute shoppers.

One scrummy artisan baguette, one black Americano (with that lovely deep ginger-coloured froth of steamed water that I so love), one tall still water, one old and well-read (but still pristine) copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's too warm to feel Christmassy, so I'm playing at Spring.

After a blissful forty-five minutes spent in the delightful company of Miss Holiday Golightly, Chris (the yakuza tattoo barista) came out and sat with me for his lunch break, bearing a freebie Americano and a fresh water (one of the many reasons I frequent his shop is that I get as many free coffees as those I pay for). We sat and gawked, vastly amused by the sheer volume of stress happening all around us and chatted happily about digital movie post-production (what he's studying at uni), tattoos and girls.

We are both fully paid up members of the lost and the lonely but we were without any shadow of a doubt the two happiest and least stressed people in the city today. Sometimes Christmas works in mysterious ways.

I was so happy, however, that on my way to the Cathedral after lunch I got sucked into the Whisky Shop and treated myself to something I've not enjoyed in many a long year: a bottle of cask strength Talisker, my favourite whisky in the whole wide world.
Hoo boy, that's gonna sting on my next bank balance, but what the hell … every last drop will be like Heaven only without all those annoying Christians. Bliss.

Have a stress-free Christmas, folks.

WTF Monday - What Could Be More English?

What could be more English than this year's Oxford Street Christmas lights?

Umbrellas and Marmite in the rain.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Getting Lighter Already

So … The End of the World didn't happen (again).
What we did get, however, was a winter solstice, which in itself is reason enough to misuse the word party as a verb this week, without having to use the excuse that a couple of thousand years ago an underaged girl was being forced to bring an unwanted baby into an uncaring world (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose).

On the subject of the End of the World ™, that gayest of 'manly' world leaders, President Vladiboy Putin gave us some unintended mirth this week (I don't know who else noticed so I'll tell it anyway).
In an attempt to appear intelligent (never a good sign in a Russian leader) he officially pronounced that the earth has an expected life span of around seven billion years (s'true, folks … the Bible tells us that the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen and will have to start burning helium, which will force it to expand to a red giant phase and burn the earth to a crisp - as well as making the sun's voice go comically falsetto) and that as we have already had four-and-a-half billion years of that, we can expect the end of the world in around four-and-a-half billion years from now.
Good to see they still teach arithmetic in Russia.

Back to solstice celebrations …
As you can see from the photo, the crowds of Christmas shoppers in Norwich are a little like the crowds of Christmas shoppers in London, in that they don't exist this year.
This year, the poor have nothing left to give; if the rich want us to spend our way out of their recession they're out of luck; this year they'll have to lift their fat asses up off their yachts,  haul some of their offshore billions back here and spend it themselves … or we're even more fucked than we are now.

Anyhoo … the solstice has been and gone, so now we start the long haul toward that distant spring. This was City Hall at four o'clock in the afternoon, the day before the world was due to end (again). One day soon, we can look forward to a four o'clock where we don't keep bumping into things and can actually see where we're going … and the tacky, never-ending rainbow light show on the front of City Hall will be switched off.
In the meantime, enjoy your festive week; celebrate the turning of the seasons with the rest of us mercifully godless heathens.
And make the most of it … thanks to Putin's arithmetical inadequacy, the world will end two billion years earlier than he expects. Eek!

Saturday Statuary - Gnarl

This is not a statue, but simply an old dead tree by the lake in St.James's Park. I think it's beautifully sculptural, however, so it's getting posted on a Sat Stat day.
What do you think?

Feck This

AUGH!
The boss is playing crappy Christmas songs through the PA system.

The world has definitely ended and I'm in Hell.
Frankly, I'd expected it to be warmer, though the music is spot on.

Lunchtime in the Garden of Good and Evil

Bleah …
Yes, it's that most hateful time of the year once again: the dreaded office Christmas party.
I predict a low turnout at work today.
If last year is anything to go by, a few people will drift in during the day, shuffling like zombies and moaning, others will be missing, some may never be seen again.

A different venue this year, and as I'm still hicking about on my stick I made sure I got the end seat near the door, well away from the more boisterous parts of the room.
The food was good: the usual spicy parsnip soup followed by what was referred to on the menu as a chartreuse but which turned out to mean "wrapped in cabbage". It was yummy: puy lentils, butternut squash and celeriac baked in a cream sauce and then wrapped up in a crisp savoy cabbage parcel and steamed just long enough for the cabbage to soften and go bright green; accompanied by roast potatoes and parsnips and a great dolloping of pickled red cabbage baked with sprouts and chestnuts.
Yum
Oatcakes, Stilton and coffee for afters.

Most of the others went for roast suckling peeeg followed by chocolate cheesecake. Inevitably they were pretty drunk by the time that came around and here's Erin adding a "lemon curd jus" to Dale's cheesecake while he was in the loo, except that she used stingingly hot English mustard left over from her peeeg.
Piquant!

After that, things took the inevitable slide downhill, as the consumption of a combination of beers, wines and sickening kiddie-sweet comedy cocktails accelerated at the usual alarming pace.
I didn't bother taking many photos this year as I was Mister Grumpy on painkillers and just wanted out of there.

They chose the venue this year for its close proximity to the places they would be spending the next twelve hours: strip joints, nightclubs, curry houses and other vomitoria.
Luckily, some of the staff have kids and had to leave early so I slipped out with them. Apologies for no chocolate willies and penis racing this year, but I don't have the stomach to stick around for that stuff any more.
At least I can enjoy a soupçon of schadenfreude today, watching them suffer.

… Unless of course the world really did end and this morning is the afterlife … Oh, fuck; the afterlife is precisely the same crap I had to endure during life. Sigh …

Merry Christmas everybody.

Singing In The Smegging Rain

Today is the day of the office Christmas Party.
Veteran readers will know just how anguished is the howl that accompanies those dread words.
Here is last year's again, for anyone who wants reminding that we'd drunk the bar dry by mid-afternoon or who wants to see Kellie with a chocolate penis on her nose.

For those - like me - who don't want reminding, here's a teensy festive distraction.

I was in London yesterday and - as Londoners know all too well - there's nothing that dampens the festive spirit quite so effectively as a piss-miserable lunchtime of freezing rain in Regent Street.

For some reason I had a bloody Christmas song stuck in my head all the way from Margaret Street down to Mitsukoshi.
And now you will, too …

Cityshapes - The Age of Steam

Cityshapes - Lines

More old and new. The Blitz left so little of the City standing that St.Helen's church - skyscraper of its day - is now lost in a steel and glass jungle.

WTF Monday

Following on from yesterday's post, here's another example of the sensitivity of Architects and their ability to effortlessly blend in with the existing streetscape and to utilise features from adjacent historic buildings in their design.
Er …
This is Victoria Street in Westminster and that's the Albert Pub (very nice) that I used to walk past every day for ten years (and occasionally pop in for a pint). Three of the four modern buildings in the photo were built over that time, all of them during the last boom and now they're ready to stand empty in the recession.
It's a truly fuckwit world we live in.

An Architect Writes …

Never trust an Architect …
Never trust us when we tell you what your building will cost; double it and add a heap of debt.
Never trust us when we say it'll be built on time; double it and add a nervous breakdown.
And above all: never trust us when we say "the building is made of glass and will reflect the skies and become ethereal and invisible and will in no way detract from the historical skyline."
You have been warned.
I've lived with myself for fifty-four years and I don't trust myself an inch.

Saturday Statuary - Know Your Continents

Hokay …

It's time to psychoanalyse the British Empire using the statues on the front of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Parliament Street.

Europe is naturally dominated by Brittannia, proud of her naval power and her empire upon which the sun never sets.

We also like horses and oak trees.

And erect nipples …

Asia.

More erect nipples, but - like Europe - at least covered in admittedly flimsy material.

Asia likes Indian elephants and pepper trees.

Africa!

Proudly bare-breasted (the only porn available to the Victorian adolescent was an endless succession of "native maidens" illustrating their schoolbooks, and … er … statues like these) and sporting great hair.

Africa likes bananas, children and a peculiarly goofy-toothed hippopotamus.

Now you know.

Ah, Australasia …

Land of convicts and sheep.

And that's it.

At least she's clad with a modicum of decency.

Look out! Here comes the New World!

A brazen, bare-boobed maize-wielding woman in a feather head-dress, brandishing a flag;

and behind her, a horse with its head on fire (I think it's supposed to be a bison - sorry: 'buffalo').

That pretty much sums up America.

So what have we learned about the British Empire and its attitude to the rest of the world?

We're patronising, ignorant and we love boobs.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

So which continent are you?

Roll On Spring

November 11th

December 11th.

Yes, I know it's not the same tree but the sycamore at the top is just a bunch of sticks now and not so photogenic.

I'm one of the old school who divides up the year into three month segments: Spring goes March through to May, Summer: June through August, Autumn: September through November and Winter: December through February, and these photos bear me out. The seasons lag behind the equinoxes.

Some fool, on the radio yesterday said it's not winter yet. Pah!

Car Porn Thursday

Remember these?
Car showrooms in Westminster are usually stuffed with Aston Martins or Ferraris, but down Great Peter Street toward the river there's a little Honda dealership that last week was proudly displaying this cute classic Civic. So much nicer than the new ones.