Bad Notices

Up until this weekend I have taken a ghoulish pleasure in reading reviews that really rip into inadequacies of restaurants, especially if the establishment concerned is on my list of “places to try”.

When we moved to West Sussex our landlord gave us a very useful fact sheet telling us where good local restaurants were situated and, generally, how they rated. Here were gems like JSW in Petersfield, which to me is one of the finest restaurants in England, and he also mentioned another Michelin-starred establishment in Emsworth called 36 On The Quay, but he wasn’t quite as warm in his praise. We put it on our list of “places to try”.

On Saturday Jan Moir reviewed 36 on the Quay in the Daily Telegraph Weekend section. In fact she did more than review the place, she castigated it. From the opening salvo “The woman behind the bar in 36 On The Quay looks up. Her expression is about as welcoming as a hole in the road…”, through the meal itself “all the dishes are moribund and pretentious, bogged down with rich sauces”, and even to the wine pouring “no-one seems happy in this house of misery by the sea, despite the waitress’s attempts to get as much wine down everyone’s neck as quickly as possible”, Ms Moir slashed her sword. How I enjoyed her piece, how I chortled with pleasure as her lunch (costing £50-£70 for two without drinks) went from bad to worse.

And yet, I thought later, what about the restaurant? It’s a family-run affair operating in a sleepy harbour, near Havant of all places, proud of their Michelin star and trying to make an honest living. Then they have a bad day. They’ve got a big wedding party to do and in sweeps this acid-tongued journalist. I guess that hundreds of thousands of people have read her piece (lead story on the back page), and one can only imagine the feelings of recrimination and anger amongst the restaurant owners and staff. Maybe we should give the place a try if only to cheer them up.

Today, two days later, Ms Moir is back in the Telegraph (page three news this time), condemning the purveyors of pre-prepared instant dinner party food in damning terms. “Louise screams when she sees the beef stroganoff: ‘It’s like two possums in the gutter; it’s like road kill’”. And so the owners of a number of small businesses doing their best to provide instant meals will be tearing their hair out today, rather than enjoying the Bank Holiday sunshine.

There’s Only One – Jamie Carragher

Congratulations to Liverpool FC – winners of the UEFA Super Cup (whatever that is) in Monaco last night. Pardon me if I give you the names of the players in the triumphant Merseyside side:

Reina, Finnan (Sinama Pongolle 55), Hyypia, Riise (Cisse 79), Luis Garcia, Alonso (Sissoko 71), Hamann, Josemi, Morientes, Carragher, Zenden. (Manager Rafael Benitez).

Now can you spot the scousers therein? Okay, so that’s an unfair question; what about "Can you spot the Englishmen therein?". Still unfair; so how about "Can you spot the British players therein?" If you think that Steve Finnan is a likely candidate, then you’re wrong. He’s Irish. Only Mr Carragher comes from Britain (Bootle, actually).

Funny, really, to recall how worked up we all got when English county cricket imposed a limit of two overseas players per side. Football teams in this country are now only as good as the cheque books that buy them, and nothing more.

By the way Liverpool’s opponents last night, CSKA Moscow, seemed to have as many Brazilians as Russians.

Side-Tracked by the World Wide Web

It’s strange how the Internet is becoming such an essential part of daily life:

Last evening for instance I wanted to know how to cook veal saltimbocca and couldn’t find a suitable cookbook. A few moments later (thanks to Google) I printed off an Elizabeth David recipe from www.ochef.com. It was all I could possibly want.

The boys in the office were challenging each other this morning about the meaning of the word wiggers. A quick look at www.urbandictionary.com not only educates me but makes me feel very old. There are so many words and expressions that I don’t know the meaning of (and to think that I considered myself pretty cool to have spotted chav and bling coming into regular use).

Newspaper reports about how wonderfully our young are doing with record numbers of GCSE passes had me musing about the whole issue of literacy and numeracy. Because I have been using English naturally for the best part of sixty years I have stopped thinking about the construction of sentences (gerunds, subjunctives, conjunctions and prepositions, and all that). In fact I have completely lost touch with some very simple basics of English grammar. I had to visit www.primaryresources.co.uk in order to reacquaint myself with adverbs and what they do and how to use them. Through the same site I got diverted by homophones, which was a bit worrying.

Hardly a day goes by without my consulting the fantastically good www.bbc.co.uk site. Weather, lottery numbers and, especially, the sports pages are all checked regularly, and the little box gizmo which shows the England-Australia test match score live at the foot of the screen is an essential item at this worrying time.

Meanwhile my family peddles its wares through www.ebay.co.uk, I run part of my business with two-way-traffic on www.amazon.co.uk and every morning I tend to check my emails before looking for the Royal Mail version. I find my way around with www.streetmap.co.uk, but so far I have refrained from playing online Sudoku and online Poker. How long I’ll hold out before I succumb to these last two is anyone’s guess.

Declivity (and Working in "Safe Mode")

It’s the sort of word you might expect to find on a French road sign outside Boulogne, intended to warn British motorists of a one-in-seven gradient (and, indeed, it is). But "declivity" also defines the sort of feeling of steep decline that tends to pervade the book-selling business during the month of August. Even when my business was successful August was a horrid month through which to try and work. The phone never rang, the postman never brought orders or (better) cheques, and the proprietor was mindful, as now, to pay more attention to cricket matches than catching up on his filing or maintaining his blog.

My little business has also been suffering from worms. Computers have been collapsing despite the best ministrations of our anti-virus software. Strange "kernel" diseases strike without warning and huge amounts of time and effort are expended on restoring lost files and trying to figure out ways of fulfilling our few orders without label printing software, or the ability to actually reply to customer emails.

We’ve all been working in what Microsoft Windows would term as "Safe Mode". The cat moves ponderously from room to room complaining that it is too hot. The wife, who has had her leg in plaster these past three weeks, has become adept at clumping around the house and garden in a Long John Silver sort of way (making a lot of noise, but not moving very far). The daughter and sister-in-law are preoccupied with themselves and the property market, and on Tuesdays the grandchildren have been coming to call.

These Tuesday visits are "full days" from eight am to seven pm and the wife is expected to provide not only a full catering service, but to return the children to their parents fed, bathed and ready for bed at the end of the day. This presented a small problem on the first Tuesday as it happened to be a glorious summer day and there was only one thing for it – the beach!

Needless to say it was early afternoon before children, grandparents, picnic, fly swats, beach chairs, windbreaks, parasol, rugs, towels, sun-block (factor 20), Hello magazine, Daily Telegraph, book, buckets and spades, swimwear, towels, nappies, pot, sister-in-law, the camera, mobile phones, money for ice cream, bottled water, things mysteriously called "wipes" and assorted footwear were all unloaded onto the West Wittering shoreline. But the concensus was that it was thoroughly worthwhile. West Wittering beach on a good day is as good as the British seaside gets. However we failed miserably to meet the deadline for evening baths.

Oh heck!