Bas Cuisine

The problem with being probably the best chef in the world is finding anyone to acknowledge that blindingly obvious fact.

I broke my alco-fast this afternoon, and went and took a glass of ale with Oakley, and very agreeable it was too. I was so overcome with wellbeing on the way home that I slipped under the descending shutter door of the local supermarche and beat the 4 o'clock Sunday curfew, and rapidly heaved five quid's worth of steak mince and a plastic sack of spuds into the basket.



I hit the cooker immediately on my return home, having located it (brilliance can be dulled by over-familiarity) and made the wonderful repast pictured here. I apologize for the culinary Tourettes, I often write rude words in my creations, but the cheddar glaze hid the profanity from a hungry family, and it was dispatched with undue speed, with the critics saving their spleen for the post-supper critique that confirmed that Dunn Towers was not being awarded a third Michelin star by the inmates. Bastards.

New Smack Site

Saw this whilst surfing for the old Alberta CK318 site, a very odd sight of an Essex smack with a German flag on her counter. Here is a taster from the site

pict0077

Things that keep me awake at night......

Why does the winner of Miss Universe always come from Earth?

Does a tanker full of helium weigh less when it is loaded that when the tanker is empty?

How does the snowplough driver drive to work?

And that's only last night........

Connie the Cobrador

We have already established Oakley is wise in all things, and the naming of the Dunn family dog saw no dilution of his wit and wisdom. Connie is the result of a night of unlicensed passion enjoyed by two beautiful pedigree dogs (I'm not a dog person - I know one's a bitch, but it spoils the scan). Sadly, they weren't the same pedigree, and soon the bump began to show on her Long Haired Golden Retriever mother, whilst her Collie father was nowhere to be seen. Oakley used the license we afford to comic genii to overlook that a Retriever ain't a Labrador to come up with the handle that she is known by for streets around - Connie the Cobrador

Connie was born in a litter of only two on 20th June 2000, a very convenient year for remembering how old she is. She was born in high Mendip, in beautiful Somerset. At eight weeks, she clawed, bit and urinated all over my then seven year old daughter for the duration of a five hour Bank Holiday journey from motorway hell all the way up to the Former People's Republic of Humberside, to hide under the kitchen table rather than meet her new family. When she did come out, her reign of terror began, the major casualties being three pine doors completed eaten through and every wellington boot the family possessed, which was as ironic as biting the hand that feeds, given wellies equals walkies.

Whilst Connie doesn't do irony, she is remarkably intelligent, which I can only put down to Hybrid Vigour (I once saw that printed on a Nickerson's cereal seed bag in my seed merchant days, and have stored it until now, sure it would come in useful, lobbed into conversation one day). As already stated, I ain't a dog man. Despite my farm background, I am surprisingly a cat man. We had three cats in my childhood; Wally (named after Walter Clarke of Station Road, Tollesbury, whose kind bequest of a kitten was greeted with less enthusiasm by my parents!), Baggy (the one I named, after Bagheera in my still favourite film, Walt Disney's Jungle Book), and their progeny (or that is what we hoped, although Wally seemed a bit dim) was crowned Chairman Mousey Dunn (work on that one a bit, think Great March and Sino-dictator) as she was always in my father's chair. Sorry, back on message - Mongrels? Clever things. Pedigree? Interbred thickoes.

Time for you to see the good woman, herself, as I attempt to glue my first picture to this page:-

Oh, that's odd, they've appeared at the top

Detox - Take Two

I am sitting here reading all the indescribably bad shite that goes into Diet Caffeine Free (disclaimer - insert cola drink name of your imagination here). What am I doing to myself? Draw up a chair and I'll let on..........

I am a Roman Catholic. A practicing left footer. Again, there's enough luggage there to jam the bandwidth of the information superhighway, but I mention it solely to bring up the subject of Lent. Every year, I go absolutely banzai and give up shedloads of stuff I genuinely love and cannot live without. And you know what? Yes, it has absolutely zippo to do with JC's temptations in the desert, that is stuff for the mind, not to be mimicked in body. Nope, it is the only time of year, all 46.5 days of it (my mum said it ends at midday on Holy Saturday, and she's in heaven now) that I can fairly say I am in control of my addictions, which I have now whittled down to two - alcohol and proper coffee.

I actually enjoy Lent when I get the hang of it. I also enjoy looking forward to it, as I find my year starts on Easter Sunday, and I start my precious habits slowly and responsibly. It takes until Mersea Week in August to start getting battered seriously again, a process that usually starts with a post race drink on board, and then ramps up in West Mersea Yacht Club in the apres-race analysis. The next big festival for alcoholic over-indulgence is of course Christmas, and then during the run up to Ash Wednesday, I positively ache to give up the sauce.

The first year I gave up the booze was unmitigated hell for the whole 46 days. I was a social leper, avoiding going to the pub at all costs for fear of my defences being breached, I cut myself off from friends and family gatherings and moped (that's a funny word to type, sounds like the family motorbike!) around the house in me slippers. What put the hell into perfect perspective was starting drinking again on Easter Sunday, and finding how weird drink tastes. I found beer the worst, posh bottled lagers tasted unpleasantly metallic. Consequently, I drank much more moderately, and my slow decline into over-indulgence left me with the memory that being dry felt good.

And being dry does feel good. I sleep like a baby, need an hour less each night, and feel massively more energetic when I wake. I always describe myself as coming off the bed like a long dog. The whites of my eyes are whiter, approaching white, I lose weight and I generally combine it with a get-fit campaign. To paraphrase Gene Hackman in one of his less celebrated roles, 'I could rip the ass out of an elephant'.

So what's all this joining in with the atheists, detoxing on January 2nd? The answer, dear reader, is that I haven't given up the sauce, not entirely.

What worried me was a report in the broadsheet press about middle class drinking at home. I calculated I was wiping out an annual figure dangerously close to three hundred bottles of red wine or equivalent. That is a liver-bursting amount, certainly health-threatening, and I'm otherwise proud of a year in the gym and a good basic level of all-round fitness. So it has/had to stop.

So I analysed why I drink. The biggest reason is for social ease. There is nothing I enjoy more than having a snifter with friends, that delicious feeling when the alcohol first delivers its calming wave. Answer - Only drink in social situations. No nighttime glass on the desk whilst tapping away at the VOIP connection with the office, or indeed typing this.

So I thought I'd give it a go. Another factor is the unusually early Easter this year. Anyone bearing the name of the calendar decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 knows that Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, or March 21st. I think I'm right in saying that Easter can be no earlier than this year, 2008, and I am struggling to find the last year it was celebrated on Sunday 23rd March, great though the power of Wikipedia is. My thinking is that Ash Wednesday is going to be around the 9th February this year, so if I rein in my drinking ahead of that, it will be the easiest year ever.

The real problem with this is perennial. My birthday. March the sodding 1st. A nine in ten chance of being within Lent every year. What the hell.

So, tonight is day three of leaving the booze alone, two nights of wonderfully restorative sleep and easy waking, and the prospect of another tonight. Might nip down the pub tomorrow night for a couple, and my dear neice Jess is coming on Monday, so that's a big night out, but if only I can keep this not drinking at home up until Ash Wednesday, then the chances of continuing the new regimen after Easter portend well.

So I raise my delicious Not Coke in a toast to finer living!! Salut!

One London, Two Boat Shows

It's that time of short days being spent dreaming of long days, otherwise known as The London Boat Show, when an idyllic construct of a Mediterranean quayside is erected in Earl's Court, complete with equatorial temperatures endured wearing Inuit-specked thermals. Why, they even have the ubiquitous Irish bar (otherwise known as the Irish Embassy) in the form of the Guinness stand, where I have always spent an inordinate amount of time, on one occasion it was the only thing I managed to do.

That's the way it is. Or at least the way it was, until a couple of years ago. Exhibitors got fed up with small stand footprints and exorbitant charges, just at the time that the dreadful ExCel was touting for all exhibitia south of the NEC, and the totally soulless experience of the New London Boatshow was born. The overheated delights of Earl's Court were replaced with air conditioned space, rather too much of it, in Docklands, miles from anywhere that isn't mega-expensive on-site parking.

I should state my extreme prejudice concerning Docklands right now; in the 70s, I used to punch aggregate up the London River (barge-speak for the Thames) in an old motor barge. It was in the early days of building the M25, and the project had an insatiable demand for ready-mixed concrete. The easiest way to move the aggregate into London was by barge from seabed dredgers or the quarry at Fingringhoe that my barge worked from. There were seven plants that had jetties or quays that landed the aggregate, mixed the spec required, and the consignment was delivered out to the mother of all motorway hell by lorries with revolving barrels. I'll save the stories of those days (which are many) for another day, but suffice to say that the London River was very different in those days of decay, just on the cusp of the Thatcherite revolution, and I loved it that way. All those beautiful dilapidated warehouses on wharves and in the derelict docks had such a charm that was lost the day the redevelopment started. Call it yuppie envy if you like, it probably is, but I genuinely loath seeing the steel and glass palaces that replaced the wood and brick bosom of the Empire.

So, I don't like Docklands, and I set my hat against the new venue for the Boat Show long before I started to work out how the hell to get there. I went once, loathed it on principle, left early in the happiness of finding it predictably disagreeable.

Imagine my delight to find that a breakaway faction mounted the Earl's Court Boat Show in the early days of December 2007, and my frustration that a various coming-together of immovable circumstances guaranteed I couldn't attend. And the crying shame is that neither did many others, as it seems to have been poorly advertised, and potential exhibitors were allegedly frightened by the bully-boy ExCel show organisers worried about diluted attendance figures. There is talk of a sponsorship deal having been secured for next year, but don't hold your breath.

Now for the humble pie. As I missed Earl's Court, and because the 200 year old Mersea smack Boadicea has been hauled into the Classic Boat magazine stand, I'll turn to for a couple of hours and give the ghastly shed another chance. Also, an author I am fond of, Sam Llewellyn (the Dick Francis of the sea) is lecturing, so I'll try and hit town that day. I'll report back.

Last Night's Fun

All the bacchanalian excesses of old New Year's seemed to be enjoyed on the Eve, going into the Day, but not this year. Sitting in with cocoa and slippers (well, not exactly, an absolutely stonking bottle of six year old claret, and glad rags on in case anyone invited me to a party at the last minute), it was a pleasure to see the new year in with a new and vastly improved cuddly Kylie on Jools Holland's Hootenannay thrash on the electric television. I much prefer Kylie's new real-woman's bum to the bony, much-photographed affair that helped the good woman back into stardom this century.

Aaah, Kylie; takes me back to my first visit to Australia, when they were celebrating the Bicentennial in '88. We found out the shocking news that 'Charlene' had upped and left Neighbours whilst the good old UK audience, mostly male, were getting lumpy trousers every time Kylie rubbed grease into those gorgeous cheeks, wriggled into her boiler suit and played toyfully with her ratchet spanner. The real shocker on that trip was finding out that Prisoner Cell Block H had ceased production, whilst it was still cult viewing and very much alive in the UK, albeit about four years behind. Nasty Ferguson, or the 'Freak' as her customers knew her as was already doing the post-Prisoner chart show rounds there, and the programme wasn't feted anywhere near as much as in the UK.

Other highlights of that trip were staying in the Spike Milligan Suite of the Woy Woy Motel. Woy Woy is so good they named it twice. Also, nearly drowning in the undertow on the beach at Terrigal, where we also saw a minibus that without a hint of sarcasm declared itself to be the property of 'The Australian League of Old Bastards'.

The only downside of that trip was the pommie-bashing that we were exposed to, on two occasions. I was delighted to find that when we returned two years ago for Christmas 2005, we were treated with nothing but courtesy and friendliness. True, we were up in the tourist belt this time, in the unbelievably beautiful environs of Byron Bay, rather than the suburbs of Sydney, but it felt a different country, much more at ease with itself than first impressions. One thing I noted on the first trip and was glad to see had receded the second time was the use of the word 'Australian', sometimes in every sentence - the raw national pride of an emergent nation - usually on television, when the eponymous label was attached wherever possible. Example - the BBC introduces the weather forecast 'and here is the weather forecast'. The Aussie version was 'and now we have the weather for Australia tomorrow'. A silly example perhaps, but a real example. It was as though the more times one could say the word, the more one swore allegiance to the country, a bit like the very noticeable presence of the Stars & Stripes on every building in that country. Anyway, pleased to say that that facet of Australian self awareness seems to have given way to a more comfortable identity.

What wouldn't I give to be back on Tallow Beach right now, 45 degrees, up to my waist in the warm milk of the Pacific. The old SAD has really kicked in this winter, which was bound to happen having tasted the forbidden fruit of Winter Sun. Still, a few more winters at the grindstone for me yet.......


......which brings me back to Last Night's Fun. Not the excellent band from Sligo, but some of the music of that fair country, as last night we had our weekly traditional music session at our local pub. As the evening started with an excellent curry with my good friend Simon Styles, Barrow's principal penny whistle manufacturer, good cheer had already started flowing, and between then and being emptied out of the pub at 1am, I realised that both my fiddle playing and detox programme had gone to hell in a handbasket. Having successfully retoxed, my head has been pounding all day. A half-life of six hours is a new record for resolution-busting for me.