We had some wine downstairs in the bar first of all. Busy but not so heaving that you couldn’t hear – helped by the open nature of the bar area on a warm light evening in June.
The restaurant had that shabby chic look of painted wooden tables and chairs – well spaced out though, so upstairs really was spot on for a get together and a chat. The food and wine was excellent.
We ran into Tina Ellis, formerly of Bodyworkswest/Lambton Place, there. Of course I knew that she was a Parsonsgreenista, but still a surprise; a pleasant one I should add.
The young couple still lived in Bow in those days, so it was a relatively easy journey for all of us to get home from that place; not long after dark or possibly even before dark at that time of year.
After an early exit from the office, Micky helps me out by looking at mum’s old engagement ring, I then help him out (not that he needs help) by sponsoring dinner at The Bleeding Heart.
An old haunt of the Binder Hamlyn crowd, perhaps I have known the place for as long as Micky has known it…no probably not quite as long. Since 1988 in my case.
Still, I hadn’t been for years and what a treat to get glorious spring weather so we could take our dinner in the yard.
Micky found a particularly good rose wine with which he persevered all evening; I joined him after trying a couple of the excellent Kiwi whites (a speciality of the otherwise resolutely French establishment).
Micky knows the Bleeding Heart crowd well and has more stamina than me, so in the end he suggested that I leave him to it. Having done plenty of eating and drinking, moreover with fatigue creeping up on me, I was delighted to comply.
…it didn’t happen on 5 February. It happened on 12 March 2015 instead. Richard had to cancel 5 February at the last minute; so last minute that I didn’t even get around to scribbling out the appointment in my physical diary. We rescheduled for 12 March.
Which explains why I had a partial memory of eating and chatting with Richard outside at Harry’s and then thought, “no, not possible in February”. But it was possible with terrace heaters in March. I also remember Vedad, a friend from Bodyworkswest, discovering me and Richard there on St John’s Wood High Street during that lunch.
My e-mail trail has helped me to establish the above and the arrangements for dinner.
I think I should also report that the e-mail trail provides some evidence that I actually did some work on 5 February and 12 March, I didn’t just have lunch and dinner and stuff. But Ogblog’s not for work stuff, unless it is “work life” stuff.
So, John White e-mailed on the Tuesday to say:
I have booked Medlar on the King’s Road for dinner at 7.00 p.m. on Thursday. I hope you approve. Lets meet up beforehand for an aperitif.
I replied:
Tremendous choice, well done. Not tried Medlar but am very much looking forward to trying it with you.
Given that we are going the very end of the world for dinner, I suggest a pre-dinner drink at The Henry Root from c18:15:
I like the Henry Root; a good casual place for any time of day. Friendly staff and friendly people in it.
A short wander across Chelsea to Medlar, which I thought was a truly excellent restaurant. Helpful staff, high falutin’-looking clientele, but not to the level where you feel intimidated. I liked it so much that I went again a few weeks later, for lunch with Stephen Barry.
John and I spent quite a lot of the evening talking about my plans to reshape my working life, a change which, I suppose, has played a major part in my development of Ogblog. I’m pretty sure we talked about plenty of John’s stuff and many other things too, but I do especially remember the Henry Root part of the evening being mostly, if not all about me.
I did think about making that line one of the strap lines for this site, btw.
Ogblog: It IS all about me.
Except that I’m not really aiming for such extreme self-centredness – hence my desire to widen the blog out to friends and family; not least encouraging comments.
Anyway, that evening at Medlar with John was all about great food and good conversation. A good one for sure from my point of view. John might remember it differently and in any case might choose to add a comment or two.
After Jilly’s super party back in January – reported here – I wanted an opportunity to return her hospitality and also to catch up properly; it’s never sensibly possible to do that with the host of a party at the party itself.
So we arranged to meet for dinner a few weeks later, settling on Barshu. Jilly’s always liked my taste in oriental food and I thought top notch Sichuan food might be novel to Jilly and make a change for me.
Jilly left it a bit late to respond to a few choices I put to her:
You’ve guessed correctly. I think I’d prefer Chinatown rather than City, and the Sichuan does sound intriguing, but if it’s that good, I understand that it may be already booked.
It wasn’t already booked so I booked it.
The e-mail trail also informs me that Jilly was running a little late:
If you get this message, forgive me, I’ll be a little late. Running time of No 55 somewhat/entirely misjudged…?
I like the penguin.
I think I got some reading done while waiting and I don’t remember waiting all that long.
We talked about all sorts of things, but of course a major topic was the parent situation; all past tense in my case, some past and much still tense in Jilly’s.
The evening flew by, like it does, very pleasurably. The food was excellent; it always is in Barshu.
Jilly and I agreed it had been too long since we last had a meal and a chat. We agreed not to leave it so long again next time; which we won’t, but still we’ve left it longer than we’d ideally have liked. That’s what grown-up life does to us all.
DJ very generously wanted to treat us all to dinner at Scalini. It is hard to refuse such offers.
I suspect we arranged this some months in advance; it is not so easy to get all of us together at the same time these days.
I think it was just the five of us that evening; if one or both of Max and Jo are around they sometimes join such an evening, but that night I think was just five of us.
I’m pretty sure Janie and I stayed at the flat afterwards, as it was deep midwinter and we also had a Wigmore Hall concert the next night.
I can’t remember exactly what we ate and drank; only that we did a bit too much of both and that the evening was very good in all departments.
Janie might remember more and chime in…but then again she might not.
I’m pretty sure we were still going to the now defunct Café Rouge in Maida Vale the previous autumn and I missed the 2014 Christmas bash, which had been a bit shambolic by all accounts, ending up in Pizza Express Charlotte Street.
This February evening was therefore my one and only visit to that Pizza Express.
My post evening note to John Random was the following:
John
Good to see you and the gang last night.
Many thanks for that wonderful-looking bottle of wine. Extremely generous of you and quite unnecessary.
Janie and I will save it for a special occasion and enjoy it then…unless the Bulgarian merlot runs out and we need an emergency bottle in a hurry.
John, knowing little about wine, grabbed a rather long-in-the-tooth bottle of Bulgarian Merlot from his home and brought it for that 5 February evening at my house. We all agreed that the bottle was undrinkable and offered the bottle’s contents to the kitchen sink drain gods.
Being John, he wrote me an own-liver-eating e-mail the next day, also agonising about the fact that he didn’t know that my mum had recently died until some way into the evening.
I responded, amongst other stuff 6 February, specifically on the Bulgarian Merlot:
It was good to see you and do stop fretting about the wine. But on that note, I do recommend the film Sideways, if you haven’t seen it, a very funny sort of road movie about an introverted wine snob on a California wine tour with his extrovert actor mate. The wine snob has an irrational thing against the Merlot grape, btw, which happens to have been the grape variety in your Bulgarian curiosity.
So, again being John, he brought me a rather splendid bottle of wine when we met at the Pizza Express for the Ivan Shakespeare 19 February.
The only other matters of note, which emerge from John’s post evening messages, are:
Gerry did the quiz;
John approved of Pizza Express, but the venue did get moved the next time. That might have been down to Tottenham Court Road Central Line closure more than the venue itself;
We all recorded birthday messages for Laurie, John and Jenny’s son, just ahead of his 15th birthday, which Laurie apparently appreciated very much.
Always good fun, Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners.
John had chosen the place (well done him) so I had to deal with the damage; it was well worth it.
I wonder whether John can remember what we ate. I remember describing the meal in detail to Janie afterwards and all of us (including Mandy) agreeing that it would be a good place to try together, but we didn’t get round to that. Nor can I remember now what I ate.
But that evening and meal at Dabbous was marvellous…tremendous even.
The main plan was to have a tapas meal at Barrica. Janie and I were perhaps inspired by the tapas at Providores a few weeks earlier, perhaps we were all inspired by Charlie’s suggestion that some of us might be eating more than others of us due to various lunchtime arrangements.
Anyway, we met for a drink first of all at the trendy MyHotel just the other side of Tottenham Court Road. It is now (2022) called MyBloomsbury. I went with some trepidation as, some months earlier, I had taken coffee there with Mary, debriefing after a meeting nearby. A miscommunication meant that both of us thought the other had paid and we had both walked out without paying. I discovered the inadvertent wrongdoing only come expense claim time at the end of that month.
I thought openness and transparency would be the best approach, so on arrival I informed the waiter of the mistake on the previous occasion and said that I owed the place for a couple of cups of coffee.
The waiter laughed nervously and told me not to worry about it. I think he thought I might be a dangerous lunatic.
Still, the place is indeed trendy so cocktail hour had the right buzz and the right sorts of drinks. I enjoyed a dry white wine as per usual.
Barrica’s food was pretty good, authentic Spanish tapas, although it seemed a bit crowded and noisy (I guess it was a Friday evening) compared with the other excellent tapas places I had previously tried around that area.
Janie and I went to this fabulous exhibition early evening on a Friday – this notion of late opening of museums and galleries on a Friday evening was quite new then…
We had arranged to meet Anthea and Mitchell at Salt Yard later that evening. A couple of months earlier I had enjoyed a superb meal at Salt Yard with John Boy:
I recall Mitchell being there when we arrived at Salt Yard and then Anthea arriving last, in a bit of a “sorry I’m late” flap…very much in character.
But the excellent food and wine soon had everyone in a chilled and good mood at the end of the week. For me and Janie, with the fascinating cultural exhibition before the gathering too, it was a super start to the weekend.
Very soon after Janie and I returned from India and Sri Lanka, Janie said that she wanted to start looking for a house.
Kim was a very helpful friend in the early stages of that process, spending time going around with Janie looking at quite a lot of unsuitable properties which helped also to sharpen the mind on what might be suitable. I would not have been a patient friend for that part of the process.
I had my first sighting of the house that was to become our Noddyland home on 2 April. Janie and Kim had seen it a couple of weeks earlier, I think, but it was not so easy for the agency to get us access via the tenants, so my visit with Janie took some organising. I recall seeing a couple of other properties ahead of seeing the actual Noddyland house that we bought.
We made an offer on the house within minutes of seeing it (2 April) and I realise, looking at the diary for the next few weeks, that we managed to get the trnasaction completed remarkably quickly. At the time, it seemed to be taking for ever, but that’s “impatient me” for you.
14 April 2011 – Yet More Mock Tudor – An Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner
Ivan Shakespeare
Ivan Shakespeare was the first of our NewsRevue gang to shuffle off this mortal coil [did you see what I did there?], in February 2000. We’ve been holding gatherings in his name, usually three or four times a year, ever since.
I have little on the record about the 14 April 2011 gathering. For certain it happened, as John Random, as usual, sent out reminders and I had correspondence with him before and after the event. Not least, John thanked me for a plethora of Indian language newspapers for him to use as teaching aids.
John’s post dinner round robin note did not name names of those who attended, nor of any who did not, so it would have been some but not all of the usual suspects. In those days, we still gathered at Cafe Rouge, Clifton Road…now long gone.
23 April 2011 – Return To Noddyland
That morning we met the charming Saffari couple who were selling us the house. Janie also arranged for someone (presumably Johnny Carpet) to come and measure up so I think we all sort-of knew for sure that the deal was going through by then, although there were still some i’s to dot and t’s to cross.
There was some peculiar business about a ransom strip in front of the gate that had been put there for conservation estate purposes but which had landed itself in some sort of legal limbo which meant that, technically speaking, The Queen might have inherited the right to squat outside and deny us access to our own house.
“One is so happy to be here in Noddyland”
We didn’t discuss that technicality with the Saffari couple that day; we mostly talked about what a lovely house it is…which it is.
The next day we went to Kim & Micky’s for lunch, primarily to help Kim celebrate her birthday a few days early. I should imagine they went off to St Trop for the birthday proper. We also almost felt that we were celebrating our house purchase, but not quite, because you don’t celebrate that sort of thing until the ink is on the contracts.
13 May 2011 – Sealing The Deal With Ink & Tapas
The diary note says:
5.00 Brian Fraiman => tapas
Janie and I went to Brian’s office to scribble on various pieces of paper to make the house purchase happen. Brian declined to join us across the way at The Providores & Tapa Room, where Janie and I celebrated properly on a glorious spring evening by eating some tasty tapas and enjoying a couple of glasses of wine. The tapas int his place was a sort-of Kiwi fusion with Spanish tapas style and was very good indeed. I think Johnboy and I went there to try the restaurant proper some months or possibly more than a year later.
