In Cornwall

My old friend Morag who I worked with about four years ago invited me to visit her in Cornwall before I leave. Morag's from New Zealand and we sat side by side for two and a half years. During that last year she fell pregnant to her Cornish husband and her maternity coincided with Dodge and I taking some time off to visit Mexico, LA, New Zealand, Fiji and Canada.

Morag knew she was having a boy so we called him Spartacus, 'Sparty' for short. As Matt and I ate ceviche and downed Modelo at Playa del Carmen, Sparty was born in a hospital in Reading. They named him Piran. I saw him at five months and again at around one, then Morag and Dorian moved to Cornwall to start an online television business. Now he is three and a half.

I'd been to Cornwall for the first time last year - we went to see Calvin Harris at the Eden Project - but Momo and family live right at the end of the country at Marazion beside St Michaels Mount, on the opposite side of the bay from Penzance, and I'd never been there before.

I arrived on a small plane from Gatwick. Cornwall is awash with yellow in spring as it is a major growing region for the UK's daffodils. There are also huge china clay pits and abandoned mines. Cornwall's mining history is everywhere - from the lack of trees (burned to fuel the mines) to the smoke stacks of the engine houses punctuating the landscape.

Piran chats away, hatching plans to take me to the water park, to see Thomas The Tank Engine, to eat ice-creams and to go to the rocket museum, every so often pointing out buses and tractors and helicopters. I tell Morag that he is like a cartoon kid. He has a mop of bright red hair that sticks out in all directions, a little button nose with a scattering of freckles across the bridge, a cheeky smile and an endearing giggle. Someone should write children's books with Piran cast as the hero.

It's getting dark when we arrive at Marazion, the small village on the edge of the sea - a full moon gleams above us. Morag's husband Dorian tells us that it's a 'super moon', the closest the moon's been to the earth in 18 years. We go to Amelie's at Porthleven for dinner and I have delicious Cornish pollock with mussels. We all eat ice-cream for dessert. There is so much Cornish ice-cream that we try at least four varieties during the weekend.

The next morning, I wake to Piran shouting at the top of his lungs outside my room. It is seven o'clock and clearly it's time to get up. Piran grabs his bike and we walk out to St Michaels Mount, a small island with a medieval castle which connects to Marazion at low tide and is surrounded by water at high tide.

We spend the weekend whizzing around the countryside, through the fields of daffodils and 'earlies' (new season potatoes, force grown under plastic), from village to village, walking, talking and eating ice-cream. Dorian and Morag are hugely knowledgeable about the local area and tell me all sorts of stories.

They tell me about a mad festival that's held once a year where all the villagers dance through every house to cast out the devil. They tell me about how miners jumped from swinging beam to beam (called a 'man engine') to make their way down to work, that they worked naked because it was so hot and how Dorian's great grandfather was killed in the Levant mining disaster in 1919. In Penzance, they point out the roughest pub in the UK, the quaint Swordfish Inn. They also tell me that there are lots of mental health issues in Penzance not only because it is the end of the line - apparently people try to get away as far as they possibly can when they lose it so there are large concentrations of loons at either end of the British Isles - but also because the houses are built from granite, which is a natural source of radiation.

We visit Land's End and the Minack Theatre, a Greco-Roman-style theatre built in the 1930s on a cliff overlooking the spectacular Porthcurno Bay. In summer tourists flock to this open-air theatre, the somewhat wacky masterstroke of a local who thought that her garden, with its breath-taking view across the sea, would make a good stage for productions of Shakespeare.

On Sunday, before my flight, we have lunch at a wonderful beach-side restaurant in St Ives. Run by an Australian chef, the highly-rated Porthminster Cafe serves up fresh, delectable food. I opt for the fish and chips with tartare sauce and white Balsamic. It is excellent. Morag has the same and Dorian, who is vegetarian, chooses the haloumi and beetroot salad. Piran is content to eat chips, more chips and ice-cream. 

The Porthminster is known for its imaginative and delicious desserts and for £5.95, I order the rhubarb and apple taste plate. It includes several small lengths of poached rhubarb wrapped in apple, a multi-layered serving of apple jelly, rhubarb jelly and pannacotta, a spoonful of apple granita and a shot of rhubarb infused vodka. What a bargain.

Morag and Dorian share a beautifully presented banana plate which includes a crescent of banana topped with a thin layer of toffee, a cinnamon-dusted meringue with clotted cream, pistachio ice-cream with shortbread, and a banana sponge.

Before we finish our dessert, Piran has decided it's time to strip off and have a swim.

Despite the freezing water, the only problem we have is getting him out again in time for my flight.

To the Cotswolds

Matt has been working like a maniac, through the weekends, for the past month or so. And so I decided we should take a little break from London last weekend. It had to be somewhere relatively close, no more than an hour and a half away. Somewhere small, with good food and fresh air.

Some searching on the internet turned up a place called The Kingham Plough, which is a pub with rooms and a great reputation for food. Apparently the chef used to work with Heston Blumenthal and every paper from The Guardian to The Times has given it the thumbs up. They were fully booked so I worked through the list they gave me and the third establishment had a room available. I booked two nights and dinner on Friday at The King's Head Inn in Bledington, with dinner at The Kingham Plough on Saturday. Our weekend awaited just an hour and a half from Paddington.

We arrived at 7.30 on Friday night and after a short but pricey taxi ride we pulled up at a stone building on the edge of a pretty green. The air was crisp and smelled of wood smoke. We had a courtyard room, which is apparently larger and quieter than the ones over the pub. 

After dropping our bags off, we headed into the pub for a pint beside an open fire. It's a lovely low-beamed space with plenty of nooks and crannies. Locals sit at the bar with their dogs and exchange pleasantries with the staff, while diners occupy heavy wooden tables where they eat large plates of fish and chips, saddle of rabbit and Cotswold sirloin.

Our waitress asked us where in New Zealand we are from. It transpired that she's a kiwi, from Pukeohe. When we asked her how long she has been in the UK and remarked that her accent has vanished, she laughed. She said she's been here six years and was astonished that we have been here for ten and still have ours, mate. Apparently she heard us from across the room declaring that the fireplace was "awesome".

 

We ordered our meals, both choosing the Windrush goats cheese & mixed beetroot salad to start. For mains, Matt had the roast skate with caper butter and I had the whole lemon sole with Anya potatoes, greens & lemon butter. The starter was huge and both mains were excellent. 

After several pints and a few glasses of Malbec, we relocated our heavy stomachs to bed.

The next morning we had a delicious breakfast of juice, coffee, muesli and yogurt, followed by a full English. I told Matt how amazing the bread was - so light and crunchy - only to discover that it was fried bread (I immediately felt my jeans tighten). Then we wandered around the village for a while and through some fields and ended up at The Tollgate Inn in Kingham, where we indulged in a lazy afternoon of beer and wine in the sunshine with the papers.  

 

That night we headed to The Kingham Plough which is like a posh caricature of a country pub - it seems to cater almost exclusively to Londoners who probably buy spray-on mud for their 4X4s. Three women sit at the table behind us talking about "tits", Pandora's hens party at Soho House and how 'the children' know not to venture downstairs until at least 6.45.

AA Gill reviewed The Plough with equal measures of mocking and admiration: "You may not have heard of it, but if you lived in Notting Hill, you would have. I grudgingly have to admit that the staff are charming and not remotely local. Well, they were local to Sandhurst and Andalusia". 

Matthew Norman from The Guardian found it smug and separatist: "At The Kingham Plough the embers of that infantile inverted snobbery were fanned by the noise from the adjoining bar, where female voices lowered in pitch by three decades of Silk Cut and male ones raised by three hours of overly tight mustard cords melded into one monotonous bray of merriment".

Indeed, the Cotswolds seem to be full of visitors with money - later that night we met a sozzled Goldman Sachs banker back at the King's Head who told us how he loves the countryside, hates London, recommends The Cow and Bumpkin in Notting Hill (the stalwart favourites of flush Hillbillies) and that it is dangerous for him to go to Walmer Castle as his girlfriend is likely to cost him a packet in the Diane von Furstenberg across the street.

We ordered the 1999 St Emilion, starters of venison ham and mushroom mousse, followed by a main of Hereford beef, triple cooked chips and salad. Unfortunately, everything seems to be cooked in a sous-vide and so the steak was not as we like it - tasting of flames or embers - and was curiously one dimensional in texture and flavour. 

I'm a bit concerned by the whole sous-vide movement - it seems to be the default mode of cookery of the moment for anyone with Michelin aspirations. Apparently this low-temperature water bath ensures that the integrity of each vacuum-packed ingredient is not compromised. I'm not convinced. I am sure it has its place, but The Kingham seems to have adopted it carte blanche. I've just looked sous-vide up on Wiki and found this somewhat incongruous fact: "It has also been used to quickly produce significant quantities of meals for hurricane evacuees". Odd, given that the entry also says it is a long cooking process and "72 hours is not unusual".

Hopefully we can squeeze in a visit to Jamie Oliver's meat restaurant in the next couple of weeks. Barbecoa's website says it's a "celebration of the relationship between fire and food" - just the antidote to sous-vide overkill in the Cotswolds.

All in all, it was a nice little weekend away, the last we will have while we still call London home.

Livin' La Vida Loca

I really need to learn some Spanish before we get to Mexico. Last time we were there, all I had was a European Spanish phrasebook and was gripped with self-consciousness every time I needed to communicate in the local lingo.

Matt was utterly useless. Deeply unhelpfully, he immediately starts speaking the local language at the exact point that we leave that country. Last time he spontaneously started speaking Spanish when we flew out of Mexico City and into LA. Possibly not the worst place in the world to speak Spanish, but Matt's dogged pidgin version still raised a few perfectly shaped eyebrows.

After ten years in the UK, he has adopted a few Englishisms - faffing about, mincing along - but claims that these are ancient Gisborne expressions. However, his accent remains strongly Kiwi and has possibly actually strengthened since we arrived.

About a week ago he declared that he knows it is time for us to leave as he thinks he is starting to lose his accent. If he sticks to his usual MO, he will arrive back to Gisborne talking like a proper Pom - probably a geezer.

Back to Mexico. Despite the fact that neither of us spoke any Spanish whatsoever, every time someone spoke to us in Spanish, Matt would turn and stare at me, indicating that I would be the one responding.

In 2002 we were travelling in Thailand and met a couple of very sweet professional rave dancers from Germany. I can't remember her name, but the guy's name was Kai. They told us that he had smoked so much weed in Pha Ngan that he forgot how to speak English, a temporary case of linguistic amnesia if you will.

They were in a restaurant when it first struck. The Thai waiter came to collect their order and Kai made a very long, complex order in German. Alarmed, his girlfriend told him to speak English. Kai said he thought he was speaking English. His girlfriend told us of her anguish, saying that for five days he "abandoned" her, leaving her to speak English alone. I feel her pain - but at least she could actually speak English.

There comes a point where the necessity of speaking a foreign language overcomes the embarrassment. From that point on, you are emancipated from the shackles of self-consciousness and can have a go, make mistakes, and perhaps even enjoy it.

Mine came when we were staying in San Cristobal, a beautiful colonial town nestled in the clouds in Chiapas. We were staying in an old hotel, and like many of the places we stayed, it was not advised to flush toilet paper. One morning, in a groggy haze, I instinctively tossed the paper into the bowl. I pulled the lever and suddenly realised my mistake. In horror, I watched the water rise. I broke into a cold sweat and leaped up on to the step as the water poured across the floor.

I told Matt what had happened and instead of helping me, he pulled a Kai and told me that he was going to the hotel restaurant for a coffee and would wait there while I sorted it out. I grabbed my dodgy European Spanish phrasebook and, using the back of our ticket stubs as cue cards, I prepared my lines. Then I made my way to the concierge and delivered my speech.

"Buenos dias"
"Grande problemo"
"Bano blocado"

I walked him to our room, said "Gracias" and made a run for it.

At breakfast, ordered by me, in shamelessly bad Spanish, I explained to Matt that bano-gate had been a cathartic experience. This most embarrassing incident had purged me of The Fear. After you've told someone that you've flooded their toilet, it puts ordering breakfast into perspective. Matt suggested that I start a Spanish language school based on this methodology. Humiliation could literally remove one's barriers (or blocados). The only problem with Matt's suggestion, I pointed out, is that I DON'T SPEAK SPANISH!