Lunch At La Guarida, Havana, 1 March 2007

Janie was very keen to try the famous paladar, La Guarida, in Havana and had been much frustrated by our inability to get in, even for lunch, while we were in Havana in mid February.

So, before leaving Havana to tour other parts of Cuba, we booked ahead; a lunch at La Guarida for our action packed last day in Cuba before flying off to Jamaica that evening. Not the way we would have chosen to do it, perhaps, but as it turned out a very memorable and successful day.

Does Daisy look eager to go in or what?
Is that a happy face chowing down or what?

But when I say memorable, what I mean is that we both remember the event so well. The name, La Guarida, for some reason keeps evading us both whenever we try to remember the name. I can remember that it was in the film Fresa Y Chocolat – you’d have thought it was easier to remember the name of the restaurant…

…anyway, this is what I wrote about the first half of that day – the Havana/La Guarida half:

Despite the late night we both rise early so we take a pretty ordinary breakfast and then (after a short aborted attempt to get money and water) we head towards Old Town, buying water and changing money on the way.

We have a quick look at the Cathedral and then the Museum of Colonial Art. We try to see the Wilfred Lam Museum but it is closed for refurbishment, so we visit the Taller Experimental instead & see etching turned into print and buy the pressing from it (from Pedro Redonet).

Back to hotel for tepid, feeble shower (water problems) & then “checkout” & get cab to La Guarida paladar for the last and best meal of our holiday in Cuba.

Ged started with marinated fish in a subtle herb dressing with avocado & tomato. Daisy started with tuna in sweet pepper with a creamy, tomatoey sauce.

Mains of grouper (Daisy) and swordfish with seafood sauce (Ged). Dessert of Fresa Y Chocolat ice cream (naturally as that film was filmed here).

Lingered over coffee and looked around the tenement-like building before strolling back to hotel.

Tiny place, tiny kitchen back then:

Talk about a galley kitchen
Starters…yum.
Would you like the tenement roof view or the tenement roof view, sir?
Busman’s holiday for Daisy, this tenement, if she sticks around

If you want to see more pictures and or look up other parts of this holiday, there is a placeholder and links page – click here or below:

Cuba and Jamaica, Placeholder and Links, 17 February to 9 March 2007

Some Meals With Friends Ahead Of Trip To Cuba, 20 January 2007 & 10 February 2007

Quite a few crossings-out in that early part of 2007. For example, we were due to see Kim and Micky in early January, but I think that got cancelled/postponed and became instead the gathering on 10 February.

20 January 2007

A Saturday evening out with Jamil and Souad. We started the evening at their place for drinks. Janie and I are straining to remember where we ate.

We know they like to eat at Noura in Belgravia (and have eaten there with them more than once) but Janie and I both have a feeling we ate in Mayfair that night. Perhaps they just fancied the change or perhaps Belgravia was unavailable when they chose to book.

In any case, we had a very pleasant evening as always with those two.

10 February 2007

We had Kim, Micky, DJ and his then girlfriend Julie over for dinner at Sandall Close that night.

We can’t honestly remember the menu, but with two vegetarians in the group (Kim and Julie) almost certainly one of Janie’s takes on Lebanese food (perhaps inspired by the Noura experience a few week’s before) so that four of us got a good meaty main course while the others had loads of dips, tabbouleh and the like to make up a substantial meal.

If it was anything more complex, there’d usually be some tell-tale notes in Janie’s diary, but there are none…

…except for:

collect shoes Kogee

…I don’t think Janie cooked those.

Fun evening it was, that much we do remember.

Nothing But The Truth by John Kani, Hampstead Theatre, 9 February 2007

We really wanted to like this piece a lot.

John Kani is a bit of a legend of South African theatre, having been so influential in Athol Fugard’s plays and the like.

The subject matter – Truth and Reconciliation and all that – was right up our street. It was great to see John Kani performing in his own play.

In truth, this piece did less for us than we’d hoped.

It was well produced and well acted. Perhaps it had been built up so much as a modern classic that it was bound to disappoint us a bit.

It had some good moments and we were pleased to have seen the piece, but it didn’t really grab us the way we had hoped.

By way of contrast, the play we saw downstairs a few years later, A Human Being Died That Night – click here or below…

A Human Being Died That Night by Nicholas Wright, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 10 May 2013

…really did grab us. Coincidentally, our next visit to the theatre was to see a Nicholas Wright – The Reporter.

Click here for a link to reviews and stuff – mostly very good – on Nothing But The Truth.

Below is a clip from a Cape Town production of the piece, but without John Kani himself performing:

Below is an interview with John Kani:

The David Newton Trio, Wigmore Hall, 2 February 2007

At the end of a stressy week, what could be better than an evening of jazz at Thw Wigmore Hall?

And what a stressy week it had been – with the deal to sell most of the business to Aon/McLagan Partners due to complete that week but actually not completed until the following week.

In truth, I don’t remember all that much about this concert other than the joy of sitting and letting a very accomplished jazz trio weave their magic for me.

I couldn’t find a vid of exactly the three who played our night, but two out of three ain’t bad:

While below is a subsequent extract from Portrait Of A Woman including vocals:

 

There Came A Gypsy Riding by Frank McGuinness, Almeida Theatre, 13 January 2007

Janie and I are very keen on Frank McGuiness’s plays and this one is a good example of why that is so.

It sounds like the scenario for so many Irish plays – a family gathers to celebrate a birthday in a remote cottage in the West of Ireland…just take my word for it that this one is/was special.

Click here for the Almeida resource on this play/production.

Wonderful cast, superbly directed and produced – this is what the Almeida does best.

This link – click here – finds the reviews and stuff – mostly excellent ones.

I recall that we felt our year of theatre going was properly up and running after seeing this one.

Gertrude’s Secret by Benedick West, New End Theatre, 5 January 2007

Our first theatre visit of that year, to the tiny New End Theatre in Hampstead. Wicked difficult to park around there and I seem to recall a very cold, perhaps even slightly icy evening.

The evening was a bit of a “West Fest”, with roles not only for Benedick as writer but also second-cousin-by-marriage Prunella Scales and young Jerusha West performing.

The New End Theatre is a quirky place – a converted mortuary, which only seats a few dozen people.

I remember observing to Janie that Prunella Scales had seen me perform in front of far larger audiences than that of the New End. When I was in Alleyn’s School plays, the West Family (Tim, Prunella and Sam, the latter being two or three years below me at the school) would relentlessly turn up to watch. Those evenings must have been an enlightening experience for that theatrical family I am sure. But I digress.

Benedick’s play was actually a sequence of monologues. As such, I recall it lacked dramatic intensity and coherence as a single work, but the miniature stories were well written and were quite interesting performance pieces, especially Prunella’s one.

It seems the production did the rounds for some time after the New End – one or two on-line reviews from the New End itself to be found plus a few from elsewhere – click here.

Lanes Restaurant, Middlesex Street, Preceded By Drinks In The New Z/Yen Section Of St Helen’s Place, 8 December 2006

No photos from that event, but this picture was taken on Janie’s first digital camera around that time in 2006.

Z/Yen had pretty much doubled its space in St Helen’s Place that year and we wanted to show it off to the partners and make full use of that space as part of that year’s seasonal event.

Lanes Restaurant was an excellent place. We didn’t quite have a private room – I seem to recall a curtained-off section rather than an actual separate room. Still, this afforded us enough privacy to eat, drink and make merry.

That venue soon afterwards became the London Steakhouse Company, which it remains at the time of writing (2024).

Michael wrote an ode to our office location – a rare example of Michael writing the seasonal song: “Oh Little Court of St Helen’s”, which I aped in subsequent years as “Oh Little Street Of Basinghall”.

OH LITTLE COURT OF ST HELEN’S

(Sung to the tune of “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”)

Oh little court of St Helen’s

How swish we see thee lie!

Beneath thy deep and wealthy sleep

Z/Yen’s offices abide

And in these dark deep shadows

The everlasting blight

Consultancy adds to your years

When packed as tight as mice

How crowded-ly, how crowded-ly

Z/Yen dishes out advice

Beside the frozen servers

And other bust device

Paper’s overflowing

But Linda’s looking nice

And if we get our Seventh Heav’n

We’ll soon trash Number Five.

The joke about “seven” and “five” related to the address, 5-7 St Helen’s Place. Whereas our original (smaller) offices had been accessed through the door of No 7, this new expanded space was at the No 5 end of the building. Simples.

A Day At Lord’s With Big “Papa Zambezi” Jeff, 7 September 2006

The photo is from a year earlier in September 2005; the day England won the Ashes at the Oval, with thanks to Charley “The Gent” Malloy (also pictured, as are Uncail Marcas, Me and Daisy) – Jeff is the big fella in red.

I am reminded of this day from September 2006 almost exactly 13 years later (on 5 September 2019), as King Cricket described the wind as being the most important element of a day’s Ashes cricket at Old Trafford.

I took Jeff to a day of county cricket at Lord’s, between Middlesex and Nottinghamshire. I wrote the day up comprehensively for MTWD back then – click here.

The most noteworthy thing that happened that day (other than Nottinghamshire batting Middlesex out of the game), was a stray plastic bag that blew from the Upper Compton onto the pitch to temporarily hold up proceedings.

Unfortunately, that rogue plastic bag was ours. I report the matter in considerable detail about half way through the afternoon session section – here’s another chance to click here.

Other coincidences with this week in 2019 include:

Here is the scorecard from September 2006.

Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan, Donmar Warehouse, 19 August 2006

Janie and I were really taken with this play/production. On my log I gave it a one word review:

superb.

Peter Morgan writes these historical/biographical plays really well and Michael Sheen seems well fitted to the lead roles in them, be the role Tony Blair or David Frost.

Actually the whole cast was excellent, with especially memorable performances by Frank Langella, Kelly Shale, Lydia Leonard and Corey Johnson.

Michael Grandage was doing great work at the Donmar at that time.

There is a superb Donmar educational resource available for this production, now in the public domain but not well publicised, which I have scraped to here and/or the image link below:

Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frostnixonposter.png with the same attribution and for the same fair use reasons as stated on Wikipedia.

We saw the original Donmar run quite early in its life – perhaps even still in preview or just after the press night. The play/production was extremely well received, deservedly so. A link to reviews can be found here.

The piece transferred big time and also was made into a film. Janie and I were delighted to have seen the original production before the big fuss broke out.

Dad’s Last Birthday, A Day At Lord’s, 11 August 2006

Today (11 August 2019) I wrote a tribute piece about my dad, on the 100th anniversary of his birth – click here or below:

My Dad, Peter Harris At 100: Born 11 August 1919, Died 6 August 2007, Remembered 11 August 2019

I was reminiscing about his last birthday, 2006. I took mum and dad to Lord’s for a birthday treat. Dad had no interest whatsoever in sport, but he did enjoy a nice meal and my parents had never before seen Lord’s.

It was good fortune that the Middlesex v Hampshire match went to a fourth day – indeed it eventually went the distance on that fourth day. I did have a Plan B, in case you are wondering, but Plan B was not needed.

As I reminisced just now, the piece seemed to be writing itself in my brain, almost as if I had already written it.

Then I realised that I HAD already written it; I wrote a pretty comprehensive account of that lovely day for the Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) website at the time – click here for that piece.

If by chance anything ever goes awry with that site, click here for a scrape of said piece.

Just in case there’s anyone left on the planet who is bemused by the pseudonyms, I am Ged Ladd so my parents are “Mr & Mrs Ladd Senior”.

On re-reading that piece, I have little else to add about the day.

Here is a link to the scorecard for the match – interesting to see so many people who are now involved with England cricket and cricket at Lord’s (not only but including Middlesex) participating in that match. What a good match it was too.

One final reflection. I remember asking dad afterwards if he had enjoyed the day. His reply:

It was absolutely lovely. Thank you so much.

As much as anything else, it was nice to be with so many people of my own age somewhere other than the old age home.

I’m not sure that the Middlesex/MCC marketing people will be wanting to reuse that quote, but if they want it they can have it.