It was John’s turn to chose and mine to pay – John almost apologised for booking a place we’d been to before; The Modern Pantry in Clerkenwell. That place needed no apology for a revisit – I remembered it being excellent.
A couple of years ago, we tried the newer Finsbury Square Modern Pantry – click here or below – and we had agreed that Clerkenwell was far more interesting and to our taste.
The Modern Pantry – Finsbury Square with John White, 31 March 2016
John suggested that we meet at Ye Olde Mitre, as he had some vital business to conduct in there ahead of our evening. This idea also seemed like no hardship.
I had a very interesting audience with Nathan Myhrvold that afternoon, before getting some bits and pieces done at the office and then joining John in The Mitre.
John’s vital business seemed, to me, to be a few beers and a chat with some friendly colleagues, at least one of whom I had met before. Actually I had a feeling I’d met both before at one time or another.
Vital business concluded, John and I then strolled from Hatton Garden to Clerkenwell proper for our dinner.
Here is a link to The Modern Pantry website.
Here is what we ate:
- Smoked burrata, roast romanesco, pomegranate molasses roast red onion & kaniwa salad, roast apricot relish, seed crisp bread – John’s starter
- Cornish brown crab rarebit, yuzu guacamole, shichimi – my starter
- Lime leaf & red chilli marinated chicken breast, braised rainbow chard, crispy salsify, black garlic & ginger dressing – John’s main
- Red wine & star anise braised ox cheek, truffled celeriac puree, mange tout, runner bean & turnip salad, lemongrass & Aleppo
chilli dressing – my main.
We talked about all sorts of things, like we do. I should write up the highlights…
…or should I? That would be predictable almost to the point of being dull. I’m always writing up the highlights. This time, here are the lowlights.
John informed me that he would be going to see Leyton Orient play in the FA Trophy that Saturday. When I playfully quipped that, like him, Janie and I had nothing better to do that day, John informed me that it was only £10 a ticket and that Janie and I would be most welcome at Orient.
I explained that Janie feels cold at Lord’s in June and that she is probably, if such is possible, even more averse to football than I am.
John and I then hatched a small practical joke along the lines that I really wanted to go to this football match…which, as I suspected, didn’t work very well, as Janie knows only too well that I’d be hard to persuade to the football even for a very big match on a very warm day.
I then announced that it was the 40th anniversary of my being in the school play, Andorra, the very next day:
John and I then swapped school play stories for a while. John had played Private Hurst in Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance at school. John especially remembered finding the scenes between Hurst and Annie very difficult for his (then) shy nature:
I think Hurst would be the deep-set eyes geezer watching on from behind in the above image – that Hurst bears more than a passing resemblance to John, as it happens.
When I got home, I read the play for the first time in decades. I reckon John’s shyness in the liaison scenes would have worked fine. My reading of the Hurst character is that he projects himself as a soldier who is/has been a womaniser, but the character is in the zone for his mission during the play, with no interest in the attentions of poor Annie.
Not exactly the Stanislavki or Lee Strasberg way to achieve the desired effect, but as long as the young woman was showing the requisite enthusiasm, I should imagine that John’s lack of electric response would have made those scenes worked better than John imagined.
Perhaps John is now planning to reprise his role as Private Hurst using “the method”; that might explain him conducting his vital business in traditional taverns like Ye Olde Mitre.
However, the later scene which, as John described it, went as wrong as any scene in any school play could possibly go wrong, was so amusing a story I laughed long and loud. I felt bound to insist that John write it up as a guest piece for Ogblog and now feel bound to pre-announce it.
No rush John, no pressure.
Anyway, once again we’d had an excellent meal at the Modern Pantry. The food we think is outstanding. Perhaps the service was a notch below the level I remembered from the first time, but that might have been caused by as little as being as little as “one down” on staff, which can happen to the best of places.
If you like TripAdvisor links – click here for The Modern Pantry.
As always, it was fun to catch up with John – even on a bitterly cold February evening…
…I didn’t envy John’s journey home…
…nor his impending afternoon at the Leyton O’s.
It was a superb evening as usual. My afternoon at Brisbane Road the following Saturday started so well. A couple of warm up pints in the pub before the game began and for 60 minutes we looked like we were waltzing our way to Wemberleey courtesy of a Gateshead team that couldn’t get near us. 3-0 and cruising to victory….and my afternoon was only the entree to an evening with my wife and sister watching Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri up West and a probable Chinese meal in Chinatown (we went Thai in the end).
However, Orient seemed to be thinking like far too many of the fans, namely that the game was won. Cutting a long miserable story short the game ended 3-3 and Orient will have to travel to Gateshead on Tuesday for the replay. Although the forecast is -4 and snow so I for one have not factored a trip North into my plans for the week.
Ian kindly mentioned my starring role in Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance. It’s a play I like and being one of the main characters, got to know in some detail aged 17. Our Director was a tall newcomer to the School. He had come from a private school and seemed incredibly erudite to us grammar school kids. The one thing I remember about him in particular was his desire to spend the rest of his life on a desert island reading the classics, by which he meant the Greek and Roman classics rather than anything even remotely contemporary. Still he had the energy to get us to perform a play, the first for the school I understood for quite some time.
It was the press night that will stick forever in the memory. As Ian has remarked my attempt to look remotely interested in the prostitute in Act whatever it was, embarrasses me to this day. She was one of only four girls in the sixth form of this all boys school. I recall standing stock straight with my arm round her waist as I delivered my lines, conscious all the time to avoid any other part of our bodies touching. Naturally I had never been to a brothel so was unaware of how these things were supposed to be done, but perhaps my incongruity made the point about Private Hurst’s shyness and doubts in a way I didn’t appreciate at the time.
Oh that the rest of the evening had progressed so well. For those of you who don’t know the play the final scene consists of Sergeant Musgrave and his fellow deserters calling a rally in the square of the town from which they come. After much ranting by Sergeant Musgrave he reveals the skeleton of local boy Billy, to drive home his antiwar message. At this point some regular army recruits arrive to arrest the deserters.
In the version performed at Newport Grammar School in the Spring of 1980, when Billy’s skeleton (borrowed form the biology lab before you ask) was dramatically raised from his coffin, his right foot had magically become entwined with his clavicle giving him the appearance of a three-armed one-legged midget who had hopped himself to death.
Despite the tittering from the audience of parents and press we actors bravely carried on to the point at which I delivered my speech telling Sergeant Musgrave that he was basically a myopic nutcase and that I was going. “I’m off’ I cry which was the cue for a resounding gun shot from the back of the school hall, which was then to cause me to double up in a heart-rending death scene.
Unfortunately, there was no shot. ‘I mean it. I’m off!” I improvised. Still no shot. Something must be wrong with the gun I thought so decided that I would mimic the arrival of the fatal bullet to the stomach, as rehearsed, screeching a piercing shout of pain. Two seconds later as I fell to the stage floor in agony the shot rang out provoking more than titters from the audience and even a few laughs from the cast as I gazed back at them from my death prone position.
How hard was it for you Matthew Kemp – yes I remember your name after all these years – to fire a gun when I said ‘I’m off’. It was your only job ffs.
Nevertheless, the press were very kind about the play and we got the resounding applause we deserved from our families and friends.
And in one little aside, this was a play which I insisted a girl called Mary must attend. She really didn’t want to. I was trying to get off with her at the time and she was not interested in me let alone Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, so I think had a thoroughly miserable evening. Subsequently, I married her sister, Mandy.
Many thanks for the comment, John. I can see parallels between your Saturday 24 February 2018 football match and your 1980 Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance experiences – it basically all seemed to be going fine until the last few pesky minutes when it all went pear-shaped beyond reason.
I think your Private Hurst death scene might have been worse than you remember it. Unless your school bowdlerised the play, Hurst doesn’t threaten to leave the stage, he is threatening to gun down the crowd with a Gatling Gun when he gets shot by the dragoons and there is no particular reason for him not to start the massacre unless he is shot.
Your description of the Billy skeleton above is even more vivid and funnier than your oral description on Thursday night. Well done.
And thanks again for the write up.