Big up the pub.

According to the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) twenty-nine pubs close down every week in Britain because pints are too pricey for the punters and they've stopped coming*, but you wouldn't know it if you lived in Tooting. In the twenty-odd years we've lived here the area has gentrified its socks off with newly-renovated pubs and wine bars springing up all over the place. Now even our local has joined ranks and come over all craft beer, retro lighting, and full to the brim with people. Consequently I was in there on Wednesday night last. And on Friday night last. And on Saturday night last... 

"WHERE WERE ALL THESE PEOPLE BEFORE?" shouts a friend, over the roar of the rugby-watching crowd as we stand at the new bar, perusing a new set of pumps sporting a brand new assortment of beers.

"WELL," I shout back, "IN MY CASE I WAS AT HOME AND NOW INSTEAD OF BEING AT HOME I HAVE BEEN IN THIS PUB FIVE TIMES IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS."

"WHAT?" he shouts back.

"I SAID..."

"OH, RIGHT," he shouts. "ME TOO."

I look around. It's changed beyond recognition. The fruit machines have gone and so has 'Polish Elvis,' as my boys called him, who played here every Thursday, apparently. I never actually saw him myself, I only saw his advertisement on the window. I've no idea where he's gone to, hopefully not all the way back to Poland. Perhaps he's found a pub only slightly further down the Northern line where the demographic is only slightly less millennial. Morden maybe. 

I say millennial but in truth there's every age-group in here, including families. I can see frazzled-looking parents with toddlers playing chaotic games of Connect 4, bright-eyed hipsters with gleaming beards, middle-aged soaks with too many drinks in front of them and too many years behind them and even elderly people, in the form of a couple who have been coming here for years, according to the bar staff, still resolutely clinging on in the midst of this new swell of people. I've seen them here every time I've been in, tiny and frail and looking more than a little surprised by the changes wrought around them. They sit side by side near the back, marooned in the middle of a huge leather sofa, their matching pints on a low table in front, unable to hear themselves think - or each other speak - over the boom of the slightly-too-loud music, and on this occasion the rugby. Not that they ever seem to say anything anyway. On Saturday evening I noticed he was holding her hand, quite tightly, perhaps for anchorage. 

"Have you seen those two over there?" I say to a different friend, having battled my way back from the bar with her glass of sauvignon blanc.

"I know!" she exclaims, nudging her husband. "Look, so sweet, that'll be us when we're old."

"If I'm still with you," he replies.

I look at her crestfallen face. "Tell you what," I say, "when we're old and our husbands have left us, or died, let's sit in here together and hold hands."

"Thanks, mate," she says.

On Monday I'm in the kitchen working on my laptop when Eldest comes in to make his morning coffee. He has a train to catch back to university later that afternoon. 

"So," I say, "and your plans for today are?"

"Well," he says. "I thought I'd hang out with you and we could go back to the pub and have a pint and some pizza."

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. * http://www.camra.org.uk/home/-/asset_publisher/UzG2SEmQMtPf/content/new-pub-closure-statistics-revealed

Here are ten more great pubs and restaurants in Tooting.

http://www.thewheatsheafsw17.com/

http://graveneyandmeadow.com/

https://www.thelittletaperia.co.uk/

https://tootingtramandsocial.co.uk/

http://www.tota-restaurant.co.uk/

http://www.theimperialdurbar.com/

http://www.mezarestaurant.com/

http://www.chickenshop.com/en/tooting

http://theantelopepub.com/

The Little Bar - 

https://www.timeout.com/london/bars-and-pubs/little-bar

In memory of Martin Pannett whose bar this last one was.  

Hello Mr Chips.

Women are less likely to eat chips around handsome men, according to a recent study.* This might go a long way to explain why I eat so many chips, I tell the men in my life (just kidding). Personally I don’t know any women who forego chips, no matter who they’re dining with, although I do have a friend who won’t touch croissant. She says "pas de pâte feuilletée" because she can, and because she says that's what skinny French ladies say and is the reason they are skinny. Croissant is made with feuilletée pastry, she says, and feuilletée pastry makes you fat, but "ça va sans dire," she says. I have another friend who says she won’t touch cheese. She says it makes her elbows squeak. In English. What can I say? I have weird friends.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2017/04/further-back-in-time-for-dinner

I liked that programme Further Back in Time for Dinner because it's a bit like an old schools programme back from when I was a kid, called How We Used to Live, mixed together with a cookery programme, topped off with a sprinkling of likeable family (the Robshaws).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Used_To_Live

The last series of FBITFD used a terraced house just up the road from us near Wandsworth Common. Did you see how much meat they ate in the Edwardian era? It was meat, with meat, with meat on the side. Strange how food goes out of fashion. Who decides? Remember luncheon meat? Spam? Vesta curries? No, me neither, but lots of my friends do because they're older than me (ha ha) and they talk about them with great affection. You don’t see people eating luncheon meat nowadays although I do know plenty who eat ‘rillettes’ which I reckon is the modern-day equivalent, just a load of bits off the slaughterhouse floor, shoved in a jar.

It’s incredible what we used to feed children in the old days. In Britain in the 70s we all lived on rosehip syrup and Alphabetti Spaghetti, fresh fruit and veg was an alien concept. Someone I know says he’ll never forget being served marmite fritters on his first night at boarding school: white bread, smothered in margarine, with marmite on top, deep-fried. Try explaining that to a skinny French lady. No wonder British children can be so self-restricting. When he was little my little brother ate nothing but breakfast cereal, Frosties mostly, and we had a neighbour, a scrawny Artful Dodger sort of a kid, who ate nothing but prawns for six weeks. And that was before prawns were invented round our way. 

Picnic.

I love descriptions of food in books. I recently read Heartburn by Nora Ephron and she intersperses her bitter-sweet account of marital breakdown with sweet and savoury recipes, Key lime pie is one of them. And I’ll always remember Ratty's picnic on the river bank in Wind in the Willows. “There’scoldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater…" said Ratty. And that wonderful image of little Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie, tripping off to school with a warm potato in his pocket to keep his hand warm and eat later for lunch. And then there’s food in movies. Putting aside 9 1/2 Weeks, because I think we should, who can forget Juliette Binoche and her sexy chocolate truffles, Helen Mirren in the kitchen with her lover, and Babette with her feast, plus, of course, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which I watched on repeat in an Italian hospital once when Youngest and I got holed up there on account of his appendicitis during a skiing holiday. Incidentally, the food we ate in that hospital was the best hospital food I've ever eaten and will probably ever eat. We got a pasta starter every day. We got confit of duck with Puy lentils.

Fifty shades of pasta.

It's a cliché to say that cooking for people is an act of love, but it’s true. I certainly love to cook for my family. One son told me in the heat of an argument once that my cooking isn't as good as I think it is, because he knew it would wound, which it did. Mind you, another son recently said the opposite. "Every night's like a dinner party round here," he pronounced. But perhaps those two comments tell you more about the sons than about my cooking.

The other son only wants nuggets and chips, so currently I'm doing a popular line in a homemade version using free range turkey because now we're told turkey is good for us, it's a 'superfood' apparently. So here's the recipe, Nora Ephron-style. Cut up and bash the meat flat with a rolling pin, dip it in egg, roll it in natural bread crumbs mixed with Cajun spices, lightly fry in oil. I use rape seed oil, which is also having a bit of a moment in the sun. Serve with purple sprouting broccoli or kalettes (that's baby kale to you plebs). And chips.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S.* http://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/women-are-less-likely-to-eat-chips-around-handsome-men-and-choose-salad-instead-study-finds-a3485181.html


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Designer birthday.

A visit to

for my father's birthday, in pictures.

 

\

Love E x

P.S. https://designmuseum.org/

Nuts.

What do you do if someone is rude to you? I asked my husband this question. He said a woman once walked past him in a nightclub when he was 18 and gently caressed his nuts, which was not the sort of rude I meant at all and which had me in fits of laughter. Especially when he added she was about twenty years older than he was and later winked at him from over at the bar. When he recounted the story again that evening to friends at a dinner party, all the women collapsed laughing and all the men agreed they would find this funny if it happened to them, and quite nice. But no, I didn't mean that sort.

A few years ago, just before Christmas, a man pushed in front of me in a queue for the cashpoint on the high road. I did nothing until he'd finished retrieving his money and turned to leave, when I cheerfully wished him a Merry Christmas. Another example, a woman interrupted my swimming the other day to tell me I should move to the slow lane, despite the fact I was in the fast lane before her and wasn’t swimming particularly slowly and there were already four people swimming very slowly in the slow lane, and no one but us in the fast lane. "Why?" I asked, losing my rhythm and standing up. "Because you’re doing breast stroke," she said, "and this is the lane for crawl." It wasn't, because there isn't one, but I moved anyway. But not before issuing this stinging reposte. "Okay," I said.

On reciting these two incidents to my sons I was told I was pathetic. I shouldn’t have let the man push in front or the woman bully me out of the fast lane, they said, I should have told them both to ‘fuck off’. But I would never do that. Mostly because it's rude but also because I'm a coward and wouldn't dare. But some people do dare, and can be quite witty with it.

I once overheard two women having an altercation in Primark in Tooting, with one apparently calling the other a racist. "Fuck off!" the second woman shouted at the top of her voice. "You calling me a racist? You want to take a look at my kids!"

Another friend is hilarious when dealing with unwanted sexual advances, which she gets a lot because she's beautiful. At a party a creepy old man sidled up to her and whispered, "I’d really like to lick your *****." 
"Yeah, yeah," she responded, not missing a beat, "everybody does, mate."

And my brother once followed another driver a very long way out of his way because he had been dangerously overtaken by him on the inside lane of the motorway. He said he wanted to tell him where to get off. I told him this was dumb. And dangerous.

But occasionally I will respond, especially if I'm premenstrual. Years ago I had a row with a woman in the dairy aisle at Waitrose, who was tutting at my children. "I don’t want to be here, either!" I snapped, as she glared first at me, then at the three little boys who were rearranging the Actimel. "You want to try taking three boys grocery shopping." 
"My mother just died!" she replied, just as one of my boys started laughing. "And there's nothing funny about that!" Which kind of took the wind out of my sails and I suppose went a long way to explain why she was so grumpy that day. "I’m sorry," I said. "That’s terrible." And she burst into tears. I ended up hugging her in front of the full fat milk.

"You see," I told the boys, when they told me you should always tell someone to ‘fuck off.’ "You never know. Best to do nothing, try biting your tongue and counting to ten. Any number of things might be going on behind the scenes in that person's life. Perhaps they're mentally ill, on drugs, suffering from domestic abuse or irrational with depression or grief. And perhaps one day you’ll be really unlucky and run into a proper nutter who could do you some actual harm in response."

Because what inspired this blog post in the first place was one of my boys planning a big night out just after I'd been reading about Oliver Dearlove, who was standing talking to a group of women late one evening in Blackheath, when someone took a disliking to him. "If you don't get out of my face, I will knock you out," that someone reportedly said, before punching thirty year-old Oliver to the ground. Sadly he died a few hours later in hospital.

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. This blog post is dedicated to him.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/oliver-dearlove-trevor-timon-sentence-murder-trial-killer-six-years-single-punch-death-manslaughter-a7597336.html