Food, glorious food....

Part of travelling is experiencing new cultures, and cultures are in part defined by their food. My residence may be in Canada now, but there will always be a corner of my heart that is British so perhaps I was not so much experiencing British culture as re-experiencing it.

Scotland was weird, but not in the Mike Myers "Scottish food invented on a dare" weird, but because I was there for a reason, and not to lollygag around and enjoy the experience (per se). I was there to get the job done and my gastronomic experiences were similarly utilitarian. For example, the bike-loop in Edinburgh was ridden on the right, just like we drive in Canada, and I spent so much time driving on the right (as rear-gunner on Moto1) it felt strange to be on the left hand side of the road driving to the airport. So I never really got into the British way of life there, I was just on the blue carpet for a three days and I could have been anywhere in the world. Same with the food. Most of my meals were either refectory breakfasts....

Black pudding and haggis, two food-stuffs guaranteed to raise the gorge of your average North American (and not in a good way). And this was breakfast! No wonder Scotland tops the cardiac disease league table. If it weren't for the dire state of their coffee, espressosnob could make a mint here!

....or something-in-a-bun from the concession stands at race site....

They may look interchangeable, but two of these something-in-a-buns are from Highlandhogroast and the other from a beef-products based company with the saucy seaside postcard name of Well Hung And Tender (titter ye not!). On race day, they were selling branded cups; two pounds fifty for the coffee in a cup and a quid per refill after that for the remaining two days of competition. They didn't make any money from me! TIBS it may not have been, but it helped me in not falling asleep on the back of that Goldwing (the usual caveats of not drinking too much coffee before a long stint on Moto#2 lest a Dumb and Dumber moment ensues; you know the one).

Although I did make a break for it one afternoon and got a "real" coffee from a cafe around the corner from halls

Still, we tried a coffee-shop before we left that made some bold claims

which was ironic as bold was not a word I would have associated with their coffee. Normally I trust the Grauniad; clearly I shall have to revise my opinion of their opinions!

London was better. Think about it; Scotland has a population of 5 million, a fraction of whom live in Edinburgh, whilst 8 million live in London alone. By statistics alone, this has to improve the standards of food delivery.

Any visit to a supermarket was like going to Petes but without getting gouged on the price. Marmalade for 60p, digestive biscuits (and good ones too) for 50p a pack. Then again, the British Empire was virtually built on digestive biscuits, marmalade and tea and if prices rose, there'd be revolution on the streets! Tescos had Jaffa Cakes at half-price; I was so there!

Some of the best words in the English language....

Also at Tescos, I could, if I had wanted, have re-created the Pollack Hall refectory breakfast experience, for the princely sum of two pounds (about $3.50 CAD).

I suppose at that price you could still afford to go private for your angioplasty!

I was also reunited with Soreen Fruit loaf.

Funnily enough, I remember my Grandmother cutting tiny slices off this tiny loaf, perhaps toasting them and serving them buttered. Me, I just cut the loaf in two lengthways and have it for breakfast. Clearly, there are significant generational differences when it comes to Soreen Fruit Loaf consumption!

Brick Lane, E1. Hmmm. Two gastronomic delights in one, perhaps three. The closest tube is Liverpool Street (which actually has a sign directing you to the nearest bike shop, sweet!)

We walked through the gentrified Spitalfields Market, now full of cafes, boutiques and Evans Cycles. It was too early to buy a bike or a tie-tied Indian-look blouse so we settled for coffee from Leons instead.

Suitably fortified, it was on to the Bethnal Green Road end of Brick Lane. The bagel bakery was exactly where I'd left it.

Two pounds thirty later, I was the proud owner (albeit temporary owner) of a salt-beef bagel with mustard.

Salt beef is essentially the same as Montreal smoked meat except, as you can see, instead of shaving off wafer-thin slices, they hack dirty great big chunks off a huge piece of meat in front of your eyes and slap it between two halves of a freshly baked bagel.

If you're looking for it, just find this intersection on Brick Lane and you're nearly there...

For better or worse, bacon, or indeed pork-products of any kind, seem to be a unifying factor in British "cuisine"

Speaking of British cuisine, did you that it has been seriously suggested that Britain's true national dish is the chicken tikka masala? This is essentially an Indian dish that none-the-less doesn't exist in India, the original (chicken tikka) being westernised to certain degree with a creamy masala sauce to make it more palatable to the British Raj.

But I digress! After a day of wandering around the City, SE1 and the Tate Modern it was back to Brick Lane. I liked Tate Modern; even if there are only so many monochromatic canvases about the monotony of modern existence and impenetrable installations you can take in one day, it's all about the space dahling. The coffee shop at the Tate had cool cups though;

with a more personal take on the "warning, contents may be hot" message

Back to Brick Lane, this time the Mile End Road end, also known as Banglatown. Banglatown is curry central, and the restaurants run the gamut from lah-di-dah to sleazy, from large to (seemingly) four tables in the front room of someone's house. We also ran the gamut of people trying to entice us into their restaurants with offers of free drinks or free naans. We stuck to our guns and chose a place somewhere between lah-di-dah and sleazy, of reasonable size and they hadn't tried to aggressively get us through the door. Plus, there were Bangladeshis eating in there, not just white-eyes, so it had to be good. No?

No chicken tikka masala for us! hariyali chicken, biryani, dhansak, rice and nann washed down with a pint of Cobra. The food was awesome and possibly for the first time in a week, I felt full.

and we got a free drink anyway! Djam!

We also came across this place, just south of Covent Garden.

It had the same beers as any other London pub, with it's Canadian credentials only bolstered by bottles of Sleemans and Moosehead and served the same food as everywhere else but with maple syrup. Give it a miss.

Speaking of giving places a miss, when in Chinatown I also had the worse Chinese food I'd ever had, and I've eaten "Chinese" in foot-courts. Through a combination of events which aren't worth relating, I ended up in a place in which the jasmine tea (plus one point for this place at least) was served in a melamine cup (minus three points) and I was given Western cutlery (minus several billion). Forkin' hell.

The Chinatown experience was balanced out by a Dutch (yes Dutch) place on Bloomsbury way. Large savoury pancake (crepe) washed down with Hoegaarden

To give you an idea of scale, here's the plate with la belle's pet Pig puppet

Who as you can see, was lucky to leave there in one place. He didn't have legs when we went in, did he?

Dessert was Poefetjies; little mini-crepes dusted with icing sugar and served with butter and maple syrup

Except the maple syrup wasn't real maple syrup, but I don't suppose your average Londoner would be able to spot that (unless they hung out a lot at that Covent Garden pub). A tip however; if you're ever at My Old Dutch, get the poefetjies without butter!

On our last night we went out with my brother et al to a place in Muswell Hill called Giraffe. It was a kid-friendly place so we didn't need to worry about my three year-old nephew going ballistic, because the place was already full of toddlers going ballistic.

In a interesting twist when asking "what's good here", my sister-in-law had just finished the art design for Giraffe's cook-book, coming to a bookshop near you soon (well in Muswell Hill at least) and consequently was feeling decidedly M'eh about the menu. La Belle had the hoisin duck stir-fry (at least in part making up for the Chinatown debacle) and I had the peri-peri chicken.

If memory serves, peri-peri is a South African BBQ/chilli sauce/spice thing. It seems to be the big thing in British cuisine now thanks to the arrival of Nandos, a South African chicken restaurant solely (in)famous for the innuendo of their advertising strap-line "our cock's bigger than yours". Oo-eer missus indeed.

Nice to see racial sensitivities being preserved in the new South Africa. Amandla ngawethu!

The food at Continental hadn't got much better in the 12 days we were away, but at least my pet cow was happy with the tea.

Those aren't Conti biscuits though, I got 'em at Costa Coffee before we boarded! Speaking of which, Moo preferred the coffee at Cafe Nero.

There's just no pleasing some cows, is there?

As predicted, the first thing I had in Canada when we returned was a Timmies. Purely to keep me awake after a 20hr journey so I didn't drive the car into a ditch!

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Going back to my roots

So, how was it?

Not bad really.

Scotland, well I kinda missed it, spending most of my waking hours on the blue carpet. I did get to see a bit of Edinburgh one afternoon, which was nice, having spent some time there in the mid-90s when my brother was doing his MA. Otherwise I was cocooned on race-site. What was funny was that as the bike-course was right-handed (the same way we drive in Canada) and I spent 120kms on Moto2 on Sunday, I was thoroughly confused on Monday as to which side of the road was which!

That city World Dus were in is pronounced Ed-in-bra by the way, if I hear Ed-in-borrow one more time I'm going to hit someone.

I didn't go to Leeds this time. Ever since my mother used her own father's death to play family power politics, I figured there was nothing there for me now. I might have grown up there, but I think many of my formative experiences, the really instructive ones and the ones that really helped to shape the man I am today (like him or loathe him), happened elsewhere.

So elsewhere would be our destination.

London was always gong to be a different story as this is the city I self-identify with. I can see northern mill-towns when watching independent British films and the sight leaves me relatively unmoved. A shot of the London skyline, even the stereotypical St Pauls/Tower Bridge/Gherkin one, not so much.

30 St Mary Axe

And The Gherkin was built long after I left.

I got to see many of the places that were important to me; the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN), where I did my co-op year (as you'd call it here) in the electrophysiology department...

NHNN

As an aside, around the corner from NHNN (in fact between NHNN and GOS) is, to my sensibilities, this contradiction literally set in stone...

No visit to London is complete without a pilgrimage to Bloomsbury way, the place where I decked out hard and got those titanium screws in my head...

A re-creation of the nearly-fatal moment.

...this is just around the corner from the British Museum, my favourite spot to kill time in London; just grab yourself some time and be immersed in 4000 years of human history.

...and while in WC2 there is Condor Cycles on Grays Inn Road, with all the Tour of Britain leader's jerseys in the window.

After the "emotional" reunion with the road-surface on Bloomsbury Way, Condor meant yet more Ti, but that's another post.

Yup, that's a "Sale" tag; get me outta here, STAT!

Big Ben (or more correctly St Stephen's Tower) at night; arguably a view that hasn't changed for a hundred years

The Eye is new, but somehow it fits in, even to my retro-grouchy eyes

A packed lunch in Russell Square

A stroll along the now-gentrified South Bank, around the back of Southwark Cathedral towards the Globe Theatre and Tate Modern.

In "my day", a walk such as this would have been fraught with difficulties, now it's the proverbial (and sometimes literal) walk in the park.

I was scared when I got here that London would have changed and would no longer be the city I remembered. Perhaps I remembered it as a party town for students and that reality would not fit comfortably with the responsibilities, limitations and exigencies of the 40 yo me.

London has changed, but it's evolved. Some bits are way more tacky; swathes of mobile phone shops, betting shops, Tescos Metros and "British-themed" shops selling a bastardised version of the British experience. But these places are more than balanced out by Cool Britannia; the reclaimed areas of the city which twenty years ago were nigh on unapproachable but have since been gentrified to provided markets and boutiques and coffee shops. The tat might have encroached on the West End per se, but the boundaries of Cool Britannia have also encroached upon the darkness to bring light.

It would be unreasonable to expect London to have remained unchanged in the 20-odd years since I left, but, you know, I like what they've done with the place!

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When you're tired of London....

I'm not sure about Samuel Johnson's old quip, but to be honest there is so much more to do in London nowadays. Granted, most of that seems to be Costa Coffee and Cafe Nero, but Sammy-boy was hanging out in coffee houses anyway writing his Dictionary, so I think he'd be happy today.

We are "doing" London, but not necessarily the touristy London. There's a time and a place for that, but I'm not sure where or when that might be. Yesterday we had to skirt Piccadilly Circus (there was no other way) and it was just as tacky as the Royal Mile in Edinburgh; all things "British", or in other words any old tat with a Union Flag on it. Urrgh! Instead we've stayed a little off the beaten track.

A word about that track; my training might have taken a bit of a hit but that doesn't mean I've been staying off my feet! We ended up doing an 25km walk on Tuesday; not entirely voluntarily as there was a tube strike and getting to-and-from any open tube stations and/or lines took up a lot of that mileage. Add the 12K run we did in the morning, and that was nearly a 20 miler! It was only supposed to be a 8K run but we got a bit lost. Those have all got to count as MDI prep miles! Please?

We're staying a little out of downtown at my brother's place in N22; it's hilly here too; Muswell Hill (as name-checked in Madness's Driving In My Car) really is a hill! It's steep around here as everything climbs up to Alexandra Palace, one of the highest spots in London. You are rewarded for making the climb by a great view of London, from the East End all the way across Docklands, the City and the West.

At least I'm eating. Not quite the predicted diet of pork pies, jaffa cakes and M&S trifles washed down with Lucozade, but I'd be lying if I were to say none of that hasn't passed my lips. Gastronomically, it's been a good trip so far; a couple of low-points to be sure, but I wonder if maybe I don't get home-sick or time-sick as food-sick...

Oh, and a lot of bike shops; but both of those deserve their own posts!

It's also becoming apparent that while I'm over my jet-lag (finally) I suffer from chronic culture-lag. For example, my accent has remained unchanged but my vocab has changed dramatically. So currently I have some weird mid-Atlantic culture going on, and that's mid-Atlantic as in mid-Atlantic Ridge, not Maryland. You know how it takes one day per time zone to acclimate to jet-lag? Maybe it takes one decade per time-zone for culture? I'm currently somewhere over Iceland.

Pickled shark anyone? Eek!

Despite putting the miles in, I'm not exactly doing it in appropriate footwear

Yup, all that walking, but in these shoes? Cue Kirsty....



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Eating my way across the Atlantic

I had this running through my head head yesterday

No, I don't harbour a secret desire to dance on stage in stockings and a basque (or do I? I see you shiver with anti...ci.......pation), but rather "I'm going home".

Anyway, as promised, I haven't gone for arun yet but I have been steadily eating my way across five time-zones (plus one YHZ to EWR then minus five to EDI).

Started out at a diner-style place in EWR which was unremarkable, but at least my pet cow enjoyed the unsweetened iced-tea

Well, unremarkable expect for the Red Velvet cake, which was red and velvety and surprisingly good.

and it even came with a cherry on top :)

On to EDI via very unremarkable airline food, one meal I think I actually ate while asleep (talk about waking dreams). Once in EDI, the eating began in ernerst.

We went hunting for coffee and a sandwich and ended up at Black Medicine Coffee Co. The plaque outside says JK Rowling wrote some parts of the early Harry Potters upstairs which may, or may not (depending how you feel about Quidditch and butterbeer) be a compelling reason to eat there.

We were a) hungry and b) in need of coffee. The sort of "if I don't get a coffee in the next ten minutes there'll be murders" kind of need. That seemed compelling.

The Americano was a bit overextracted but it hit the spot nonetheless. I admit it may also have been a pharmacological need; the junkie doesn't assay the purity of his heroin, he just shoots it up. Still, it came in a cool cup.....

...and a chocolate chip cookie! Their relative ineptitude with the espresso machine was instantly forgiven!

Fortified by coffee, it was onwards and upwards to Marks & Spencer; purveyor of fine trifles

It was hard not to leave with a couple. Their time will come.

I was also struck by this crisp packet

Patriotic chips! Take that Freedom Fries!

Finally, I got la belle to try haggis. Apart from not liking oatmeal, and haggis is basically a savoury oatmeal sausage, she did concede it didn't actually taste that bad!

Finally, no trip abroad is complete without either signs of the bicycle apocylapse or that Halfax just isn't pulling it's weight. For a city of it's size and relative own perceived coolness, there weren't that many fixies about, and even then they all had brakes; but no helmets. Has Edinburgh escaped hipsterism? Speaking of helmets, you can tell the people who are in town for Worlds as they are the only ones wearing helmets. Expect the Team Canada coach, I'm pretty sure I saw him rocking a cheap ten-speed on Georges Street sans casque. Muppet! Speaking of Georges Street (I'm all about the segues today) I saw this beastie in a shop-front. It's a single-speed with a coaster brake like the ones in the Cycle Gallery on Quinpool, not a fixie, but I did like that chain-protector.

I'm sure that as chain protectors it probably doesn't work very well, I mean when you want personal protective equipment, be it a chain-guard, face-shield, steel-toe-cap boots or condoms, you don't want minimalism, but you have to admit that even as you look at your ruined pants' cuffs you'll think "but hey, the chain-guard looks kinda cool".

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