It takes a little while to come to terms with living a pseudo civilized, routine life in Hampstead and although not unhappy it seems that our zest for life recently has been somewhat tempered. So we’re living in a pretty swish part of London – we have the odd 17th century public house (with some fantastic Ales to had), this amazing French creperie (that’s been around for 27 years) on the High Street, a boulangerie or even two for that matter selling pretty decent French breads and patisseries – but it seems like there’s just that something missing. I mean having to suspend yourself like Superman over a crowd of people on the Central line Tube every morning while trying to make it to the office on time (though mildly amusing at first) doesn’t really tell the whole story either. No, to fully appreciate it, you need to feel the gloom descend on the city gradually, observe it engulfing the commuting public, sense the tiring mood in the office and find yourself reading in the Daily Mail that “20% of British children are vitamin D deficient”.
You wonder why really? So the sun only gets out of bed after you’ve had to. You spend the first moments of your day sandwiching yourself into crowds of people so as not to risk having to let every train pass you by. But you’re indoors all day absorbing reasonably healthy doses of ultra-violet radiation from you computer screen – surely your body’s metabolising that somehow? Ok, so by the time you finish the daily grind it’s already been dark for a few hours but hey there’s always 2 or 3 hours of sunlight that you could catch on the occasional sunny weekend… I mean you could get lucky! Then again perhaps you could even spend a couple of hours every week in the solarium to get your daily dose… that said, not wanting to risk potentially becoming some manic depressive statistic we instead headed to the Alps for that very much needed vitamin D hit (see title pic).
It was just in time too I reckon as having been uninspired to write anything for a while chances were that the soap opera of our lives could have been pulled off the air… hmm perhaps not (as I do like the sound of my own voice) but it was really good to be back on the continent, get some sun, spend some time with friends, put a few turns in and contemplate the meaning of life. (The answer by the way we figure isn’t actually 42 it’s more like 44 when you add more ski time into the equation – very important!).
Rewind back to Nic’s last post in late October and though the weekends always seem just that little bit too short we’ve nonetheless managed to keep ourselves manically busy. As mentioned, the day after her post we found ourselves at the London Wine Show and it didn’t take very long at all for us to have tried sufficiently enough wine for me to be tasting all sorts of things in the wine on offer – interestingly most things did in fact have strong overtones of ‘plums’:). It’s worth mentioning how good it was to get such a broad exposure to the product on offer from across the world. Literally every “new” and “old” world region was covered. We sampled from Chile and Argentina to California to some of the best from France – mind you, despite their trying to re-gain market share we had to pay for the 50 pound a bottle ‘premier cru’ from Bourgogne that we tried and just refused to pay 10 pounds a taste for the 150 pound bottle on offer at the same stand. (Don’t these guys get it? It’s supposed to be free… it’s a Wine Show!). Anyway, bang for buck the Goulasz award for ‘best at show’ goes to a 12 pound Malbec from Argentina – fruity, velvety and awesome. As for the Frenchies, the fact that their product is so stupidly overpriced here really isn’t doing them any good – drink French wine only when in France I say! Nor is the fact that Australian wine is very well regarded here also; be prepared to pay through the nose for anything that’s worth drinking – Jacob’s Creek, Hardy’s, Rosemount, etc, aren’t actually worth drinking, nor are they worth the 10 pounds they’re selling for! Guess it’s probably a good thing that English don’t know any better… the half price Spanish Tempranillo from Sainsbury’s is usually the better pick we reckon.
Moving from Wine onto Cars, MPH the following weekend was in fact just as the ad said… Car Heaven! An impressive amount of beautiful toys for me to drool over followed by Jeremy Clarkson (who interestingly is being petitioned to replace Gordon Brown as PM – what would happen to Top Gear if that happened?), Richard Hammond and James May suggesting the introduction of new Olympic sports for 2008 such as; dodge ball played with 3 series convertible BMWs armed with tennis ball canons and; car football played with Suzuki Swifts and one great big soccer ball (sorry I mean foot ball). I wonder if we’ll see them in Beijing?
A couple of weeks hence we found ourselves doing the Friday night after work run out to Heathrow for an all too rushed weekend with Scott in Amsterdam – great to see you again mate. It was all a bit dazed and confused really but we visited a few ‘typical tourist hang-outs’ (mum I didn’t inhale I promise) and somehow managed to avoid getting run over by those crazed “farjars” on their bicycles (ref Goldmember if you’ve never heard the Dutch being referred to as that). While we did also manage to make it into the Rijksmuseum for a brief visit – we’re really not as uncultured as would seem – we mostly wandered the beautiful canals, noted the roaring trade being done in the red-light district on Saturday night, ate these really tasty deep fried pastry balls and took entirely too many average happy snaps. (Damn this flat, hardly existent northern European light!)
Other notable highlights since have been; our visit to Worthing to see Nic’s Aunt Marian, Uncle Colin and cousin Amanda – this was followed by staying a night at the English seaside town of Brighton (inviting isn’t it? – see pic below); paying homage to John Lennon at the Abbey Road studios; strolling down the canals of Little Venice; and finding a recognition of Australian greatness while on a visit back to Brighton to catch up with Mike and Daisy (pretty self explanatory really, though I will add that given that there just aren’t enough Australian trained baristas here we’ve both just switched to drinking tea in any case).
Of course it would be remiss of me not to admit being somewhat taken aback by British greatness too – despite the fact that they can’t do something as simple as make a decent flat white… in fact most of them don’t actually know what one is… and for the record a Gingerbread Latte from Starbucks doesn’t constitute a real coffee!! Its American crap catered to the unsophisticated, jacket potato with beans and cheese eating English palate!! Anyway, back to noting British greatness (could be the only time ever you know), I was particularly awestruck on a visit to Greenwich, where after seeing John Harrison’s first attempts at solving the problem of longitude (he was the inventor of the world’s first marine chronometer – H4 was accurate to 5.1 seconds over a period of 2 months on it’s test sea voyage) and looking down the Prime Meridian of the World from Observatory Hill, you really have to acknowledge the fact that this is the epicenter of Western civilization.
Coming into Christmas its worth noting too how beautiful a festive London is (see pics of Covent Garden below), as is that this year was my first ever traditional English Christmas – being Polish we’ve generally always celebrated on Christmas Eve. It was fantastic to spend Christmas with Anthony, Amanda and Maya (who we were meeting for the first time – congratulations again on a beautiful baby girl guys) and Amanda’s parents Steven and Jenny in their home in Wantage, just outside of Oxford. We really enjoyed spending time with all of you and also feasting on the traditional English Christmas lunch foods of Turkey, Goose, Gammon, roasted vegetables (including parsnip), and of course Christmas pudding with custard and brandy butter.
Starved of sunlight and carrying an additional 5 kilos each following all that Christmas cheer, need I mention how good it was to end the holiday break with an all too short a visit back to Val d’Isere. It was fantastic to be so warmly received by the entire crew (you know who you are – you seem like family to us), to spend an amazing New Year’s Eve with you all and to be back in our surrogate home in the mountains – can’t wait to get back there soon. Also, a brief apology to all those whose lack of physical condition we were so completely oblivious to last season. Gradually working ourselves into the skiing we didn’t even notice how physically demanding a sport it is and the pain felt on day 2 this time around was I guess our comeuppance.
Finally a very Happy New Year to everyone… we wish you all a fantastic 2008 and look forward to reporting on our further adventures as they fall due.
