What a friend we have in cheeses

The Borough Market is the place where Georgina and I thought we had died and gone to heaven. For Georgie it was not The Houses of Parliament or The Globe or The Rosetta Stone that is the marvel of London; it is the cheeses at The Borough Market. And, as Annie Lennox said: who am I to disagree. At one stall, I asked to try something unpasturerised: that would be all the cheese they had; something not available in Australia: again all the cheese they had, something really unusual... well, you get the picture. We tried to repress that wierd cross between panic and excitement that we were experiencing but only barely managed it.

Just as we thought we had found some sort of capacity to digest all that we had seen and all that we had tasted, we spied Neale's, a stand alone shop just across from the main market. I recognised the names of one or two cheeses: stilton, gorgonzola, but the rest were new to me. Dribbling, oozing, bleeding rounds of creamy delight. What is a girl to do? We tasted more and more until we become an embarrassment, and then we only thought about stopping. In the end, I bought oat biscuits, raspberry jam, apple relish, balsamic vinegar, fig infused balsamic syrup and cheese. I don't even know the name of the cheese I took home, but that did not seem to matter to him at all. He sat quietly in my handbag all the way home waiting to meet his doom. Georgina left the market with almond croissants and fudge packed in her bag, just in case we needed something to tide us over on the 500 metre walk along The Thames to our next engagement.

The only fitting follow up to the market was The Sainson Poetry Library in London's Festival Hall where we briefly snuck into the members' lounge. I looked up some Yestevshenko and literary criticism on Philip Larkin. The Poetry Library was inhabited by two librarians and two parties of guests. One man sat with his two sons reading and drawing, and Georgina and I grazed through the stacks and compactors. It is a great spot for a quiet retreat and we spied a party of homeless people picnicing on their meagre rations in one of the quiet rooms in Festival Hall. It summed up something about London that those who live a truely wretched life in England's winter, take refuge inside these lovely living monuments to the best the western culture has delivered. We had seen first hand the night before what happens after dark. After our play, we walked down the underpass to the station where people were laying out their sleeping bags in one corner and pissing in another as they prepared to bed down for the night. And a winter's night in London is truely bitter. I don't think they were singing "What a friend we have in Jesus" or singing the praises of the cheeses they had tasted in The Borough Market for that matter. This is England.

Top floor, top theatre, top day

Georgina and I are now in a pattern. We go to a gallery or museum, say the Tate Modern or The National Portrait Gallery. We go to the cafe on the top floor, get a seat against the window and have a hot drink, very, very slowly. We look out over London: St Paul's, Nelson's Column, Westminster, Trafalgar whatever Monopoly acquisition was the favourite- inspecting carefully the gargoyles, statutes or oranmental florishes that decorate the rooves of the buildings many of which were completed well before Australia was even discovered. We watch the London Eye as it turns imperceptibly, then eventually gather up the energy to view the artworks. It is a winner of a plan.

We had followed the advice of one who knows (thanks Grant Exon) and bought £10 tickets to whatever play at The National Theatre has leftover tickets for that night. It turned out to be Gethsemane. We knew very little about it but thought that standing room for 2 1/2hours for £10 might work, anyway we could always leave half way through, we thought. It turned out to be a brilliant play about the last days of the Blair government. It starred the woman from Black Books and a whole assortment of the great English actors whose names I can not remember but who can act and then some. I had my prejudice against Australian plays ie Murray-Smith and Raison confirmed, as we forgot that we watched a play standing up and wallowed in the whole thing.

Tate oh so modern

This relief was in the medieval section of the Science Museum.



Georgina and I are staying in a lovely flat in Notting Hill, or Notting Hill Gate, or somewhere related to Hugh Grant. This means that we get to trawl around London ticking things off the must see list. I went to the Science Museum and the ancient medicine section seemed really ghoulish til I remembered that I had just watched back to back episodes of House at Sandy and Benny's. I really liked an installation that randomly selected chat rooms and set the words to music and visual display.

Today was The Globe: so off we toddle, only to find that because it is an open air theatre and they do not stage anything in the colder months (read half the year). What a stupid idea a theatre with only a partially enclosed thatched roof was. I thought history had already proved that, but it seems the Brits needed to prove it again.

So we went next door to the next thing on the list where we were overwhelmed by modern art. Georgina was taken captive by a fantastic thing made of broken crockery and I was happy to see some Kandinsky paintings. We looked at London Bridge and climbed to the top of St Paul's where we looked back at The Globe and The Tate Modern. We tried to finish off with some West End action, but I draw the line at The Sound of Music, no matter how half price the tickets are. Instead we went to the movies and saw The Reader.

Oxford and the Cotswolds

In College
Here is a partial list of names: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Charles Darwin, WH Auden, Charles Dodgson, JRR Tolkien, TS Eliot, Oscar Wilde, CS Lewis, William Golding. It is hard to go anywhere without tripping over these guys. They all came here and lolled about with the gargoyles, sundials, giant quads and the dining hall at Christ Church College that was used as the dining hall at Hogwarts in Harry Potter. Benny tells me that it is possible to walk from Oxford to Cambridge without ever leaving college grounds. There are over 30 colleges and less than 20,000 undergraduates. To look at the colleges you would estimate that they house tens of thousands instead of just hundreds. One college (All Souls) only admits 4 undergraduates per year and the entrance test is a quiz on table manners involving difficult questions about what to do with cherry pips, another college does not have any students at all.

Poaching
One of the colleges owns a herd of deer, but Benny and Sandy tell me that I am not allowed to go poaching. I really like Danny the Champion of the World have been given a talking to about my plans to reenact it. I am also not allowed to herd, claim or kill a swan because they belong to the queen, yes, every last swan in the UK. I don't know what she does with them, but every year she sends out an army of people to count them, so she will know if I have been messing around with them.

Rambling in the Cotswolds
On Boxing Day we drove off to the Cotswolds (a series of towns that looked at Oxford and decided to be ever cuter). Famous people live in these tiny towns, Kate Moss, Coldplay etc but we didn't see them. We did exert our rambler's rights over hill and dale. There is no such thing as bush walking, because there is no real bush, but it is the tradition to wander about along fence lines and rivers across the paddocks and fields of tweed wrapped farmers. One such farmer explained the details of how a hedgerow is made and the importance of instilling these traditional skills in the youth of today. Apparently hedgerow making will ward off the tendency of the English youth to join nasty gangs and commit unseemly crimes against the unsuspecting folk who live on council estates.

For rambling you need: boots, gaters, a scarf, a map, a hat and most of all a walking stick. People set out like they are going off into the wilderness and I refrained from telling them that they were never more than 5 miles from a pub. (We only had wellies and beenies, not real high tech spring loaded sticks, so did not get a proper welcome at the pub.)

Christmas in Oxford

Christine, Ganeal, Rapheal and I have been installed at an apartment up the road. It is a very new large apartment with two large bedrooms, bathrooms and a very sleek finish. We are pretenting that we are young lawyers and that we have well paying jobs thus enabling us to live in an apartment with a heated towel rack, an invisible (built into the cabinetry) fridge and beautiful wall paper. Ho hum! When we were quite rested we walked down the hill to Sandy and Benny's and they fired up the baby Gaggia and that little darling takes care of us all.

Christmas Eve was a big walk along the Thames over the bridges, across the locks and along the tow roads. Christine thought we might find a body and was prepared to call Inspector Morse or Miss Marple, but this proved unnecessary. We picked up the seafood at the covered market and the fruit and vegetables at the uncovered market. I kept an eye out for Prince Charles possibly selling the organic veggies that he grows himself, but was disappointed. I branched out and went off to a few op shops because the second hand books are great. James has pointed me in the direction of the best secondhand bookshop in Oxford. God help me when I get there. Eventually, we all wound our way back to the house for oysters, aoli made by a French man, gammon (smocked baked leg of pork), figs and sweet wine.

Christmas day was a late start with us guests emerging from the gatehouse strolling down to the mainhouse for coffee, then more walking along the Thames. The extended family and workmates arrived and the topic of conversation involved really complex mathematics whereby the amount if time it takes to cook a turkey the size of a three year old, the amount of time it takes to prepare potatoes to be cooked in turkey fat, and all the other variables had to be calculated. There was no fighting but you know how it is when people like me try to relate to numbers. Presents were unwrapped, party hats were donned, bon bons were pulled and glasses clinked all around. The highlight was the delightful company, Sandy's cousin and family proving to be champion conversationalists.

Then the real tradition began: the watching of the Dr Who Christmas special. The hierarchy of the seating arrangment was announced and everyone piled into the loungeroom to watch. Luckily Katerine Tate was not on screen, so I coped. Somehow we missed the queen's Christmas greeting.

Lesson of the week

Ryanair are just fine. And a free (yes I told you before; free: I only paid the taxes) airfare is a wonder to behold. But getting to the airport at an ungodly hour when no public transport is unavailable and taxis cost a fortune (multiplied by 2.5 for euro conversion) equals getting up at 2.45 am to catch the backpaker bus.
So the trick is to really think abut the logistics of it all before booking. If I ever move to the UK, I will move right next to an airport. Then I will dash off to Spain on a whim.

Toledo

This is the "Youth Hostel"/Castle where I stayed. Amazing heh?

I think they made this place up just for me. Last night I went to an artisan market. Not hippies selling handcraft, but real old fashioned artisans who were part of a guild or whose parents had taught them the trade, or who were hippies with a sense for commerce and looked like authentic artisans. In the market was a troupe of musicians. The had drums and a bagpipe made of a goatskin. They wore ballet slippers, white stockings, knickerbockers and sashes over puffy shirts. They skipped about as they played their music and most people just seemed to ignore them as part of the usual background.

For sale was lots of stuff, but I had no idea what it was. I tasted everything on offer including the a salami the likes of which I had never eaten, until I tried the salami next to it. (This is a bit like the Madrid handsome waiters thing.) I decided on olives, but they would not sell me a little bag. After pleading my tourist status, they sold me 2euro worth. I am trying to imagine life without these olives and feel sad about it.

Toledo is a dream. It is the pictue of Spain that I had in my head, only better. The streets a tiny and winding, there are castles, churches, museums everywhere and stories abound. About half the stories go like this: There was once a a) Christian b) jewish c) muslim prince who fell in love with a a) Christian b) jewish c) muslim girl (the story only works if the first choice is different to the second choice) blah, blah blah. The story ends badly and this is how we get a) bridge of the decapitated lovers b) the war of 100 days c) the great cliff where they threw themselves to death. There are churches, mosques and syngogues all built on top of each other and some where they just changed the insignia because it was a lot easier that way.

And to my delight, today I learned that Ei Cid actually stayed at the youth hostel where I stayed. Only it was not a youth hostel then. I did not know El Cid was real but now I am going to read all about him on Wikipeida and pretend that I knew all along

Look up Toledo on Google earth. You will see for yourself.

Wait for me

In the jazz bar in Madrid that I found, one of the fellow tourists I was with asked for food. The waiter said that they did not have food, just really good waiters, and indeed it seemed to be true. He even pointed to himself as the proof. In a bar near the Rasta (Euorpe´s biggest flea market) I stopped to have a coffee and each waiter was more handsome than the next. Eventually I gave up dignity and took a photograph.
These guys are not students with a part-time job, they are career waiters who know exactly what they are doing and perform with just the right balance of efficiency and cheek. They shoo away the pests trying to sell flowers or Chanel No. 5, watch carefully for the right moment to take away the dirty plates and offer you another drink, and they move with grace and style. The food was delicious too.

Albergue Juvenil en San Servado

This has got to be the best thing yet! I am staying in a castle, a real live castle. With all the old trappings; giant carved wooden furniture, huge wooden shutters, works of art just sitting there on the walls, sweeping staircases with brass bits and pieces and lots and lots of velvet. I have never seen anything like it. It is a youth hostel, but for 3 euro more they let people over the 30 stay as well. That means the cost to say here is 13 euro (less than $35). It has two full sized soccer fields and a 25 metre swimming pool, sitting in the terraces. It is perched on the hill over looking the little own of Toledo which is an ancient town with mosques, synagogues and Christian churches, built by whoever was winning the war at the time in 1058! I was not even born yet. In the morning I will explore.

What´s more they have had the good sense to renovate and introduce all the mod cons. In fact it is immaculate. I have my own room with en-suite, two desks, heater, everything a gal could want. The lights come on automatically as you walk through the oversized corridors, which saves the bother of the servants having to light all those candles each time. There is an assortment of lounge rooms, dining rooms, TV rooms, bars, patios, terraces and more. To really give it ambience, the place seems deserted.

The chef is standing at the bar chatting to the waiter who serves the diner. The guy on the desk has this set expression on his face that he must have developed over a period of time from greeting the newly arrived guests who just can´t believe their luck. Right now I am having a moment where I wish someone I know was here with me to pinch me and tell me that it is real. I love Madrid, but had I known about this, I would have been here sooner. So do me a favour, all of you out there who are making a list of places to go and things to do, put this right at the very top. I will take photographs, I will upload when I get back to Oxford.

Museo Del Prado

It starts with a huge sculpture of Velazquez mounted on his mighty charge then gets going as one of the best galleries in the world. If you like blood, dismemberment, gashes, slits and cuts deep in human flesh, disfigurement, cannibalism, classical gore and all things Goya, then this is the place for you. There are also naked fat babes, court portraits and rooms upon rooms for various biblical scenes. I think I saw the same bible story of Judith bathing about six times. I really liked the mythical stuff: very beastial and dark. They all really like Jesus and seem to like him best either half naked with slightly blue/grey skin in some tortored, dead or nearly dead pose or as fat, sweet baby Jesus. Me, I prefer fat, sweet baby cheeses; so what ever your preference Madrid has it for you.

There was a special exhibition of Rembrant and I saw some of those pictures that are in the public psyche, but you don´t realise it till you see them. The texture was really arresting. The ones he painted at the end of his life seemed more simply composed and reflective, but perhaps I've overdosed on gallery jargon.

My favourite for the day was Las Meninas, a portrait of a brat with blonde hair and her courtisans. Finally, I staggered out into the last of the daylight and chatted to a lovely young Indonesian/Singporean/Canadian guy who bubbled on full of life's offerings. It was a very healthy debrief.

I tried to go to a flamenco club last night but the 20 euro ($50) cover charge stopped me. Tonight, I have my eye on a jazz bar. Ham is everything and everywhere. I found a produce market and became overwhelmed with the assortment of types of ham. I will go back tomorrow and try to point at something in a meaningful manner. I am pleased with myself for managing to buy a little bag of olives, huge green, almost, crunchy with bits of lemon rind in the mix. I am telling you these things not because I want to make you jealous, but because I know that want to hear about all things I eat. The beer is lovely and I even drank sangria and enjoyed it, never thought that would happen!

Guernica

When I was in Italy, I thought that you could be excused for thinking that during World War Two the country was decidedly anti-fascist. Apparently everyone was a partisan. The same goes in Spain. Everyone was anti-Franco, if you judge by the art, the street names, the public culture. It is not that I want a celebration of Franco, but a little honesty in history would help.

The gallery (Centre de Arte Reina Sofia) was wonderful. There is one huge room with just Guernica in it and several even bigger rooms with the sketches, photographs and lead up. It is a huge work and you have to stand right back from it to get the scope. One wierd coincidence is that I am currently reading Slaughterhouse 5 (a surrealist novel about the bombing of Dresden) . The painting and the novel sort of entwined.

There is also several rooms with the photos of Robert Cappa including the really famous one of the partisan at the exact moment a bullet hits him. In the temporary exhibition was a really masterful collection of works by someone motivated to protest against the thousands of disappeared people in Chile. There was lots of political art in addition to this, and you would get the impression that the Spanish have always been very sensitive to torture and war. Nobody, it seemed wanted to deal with Spain in the Americas or Spain in Iraq today, or even the recent bombings in Spain.

The gallery Centre de Arte Reina Sofia is right next to the Atocha railway station where 191 people died in the bombing in 2004. Such is the price for the Coalition of the Willing. Checklist: USA, England, Spain, Australia. All bombed (if you count Bali as an attack on Australia). So it was Slaughterhouse 5, Guernica and the Atocha Railway Station all within my view at a single gaze.

The gallery itself is really terrific, and unlike most of the world's first class galleries does not contain an assortment of colonial plunder. Perhaps they are all in one of the other galleries in Madrid. Most of the works I saw today were actually Spanish.

Madrid itself is quiet, it is about the same size as Melbourne and many people leave for Christmas apparently. The shops do not open til 10am and no one seems in too much of a hurry to get anything done. It reminds my of Italy except that it is cleaner and less chaotic.

Hola Espagna

I have impressed myself by getting from Oxford to Hackney to stay the night at Lynne's, then to the London City Airport, to Spain, then to my hotel all on public transport. I need accomplish little more in my life. The cheapest leg of this journey was London City Airport to Madid Airport, yes the flight!

I have done little myself worth reporting and because I doubt you want a blow by blow account of every train interchange that I had to made I will present a summary of the things going on in the world as I know it.
1. Woolworths is closing on 6 January. Every single last store in Britain will shut its doors and tens of thousands of people will be unemployed.
2. Interest rates are extremely low and could get down to zero, but this is not good news.
3. Some people are sick of Nigella Lawson but it is universally agreed that Jamie can cook.
4. Everytime something bad happens to a child it is the fault of a social worker for not being vigilant enough.
5. Football is really important.

I will go and eat tapas, drink wine and be merry now.
Hi to those who have commented.

My five special minutes

Yesterday was the first in a series of days were I managed to get into places that I am really not supposed to be. The included the print room at the Ashmolean Museum, Bodlien Law Library, a post-graduate college for lunch and the main law lecture theatre. So far so good.

I told a very long story at the Ashmolean Museum about what I wanted to see: classical sketches of mechanical things where the image implied movement and especially if the sketch also showed human interaction with the machine. I was particularly interested in Italian drawings and like it best when they had something to do with architecture. The reason I wanted to see this was because I was interested in fabric printing and was looking for some ideas. I had to present this explanation four times to get in. (The only way to get in is to describe exactly what you want to see and why.)

When I did there were only three people in the room viewing the sacred stuff and three people working there. The attendant got out a huge felt mat, put on cotton gloves told me where to sit, got a special viewing frame, then went and got the print I had described. It turned out to be a Leonardo de Vinci study for a bigger painting. It was of course the original (this is of course Oxford). It was really beautiful. She then told me that I was now allowed to get out my sketch book and begin. I got out my diary and started pretending and then she gave me a folio of all the things written about this sketch.

Anyway for about 5 minutes I had my very own da Vinci. It was very special. I took some photos without the flash off course and will upload the images as soon as I work out how.

Everybody loves Greta

I have very quickly gone into that holiday time warp where it gets to be 10 o'clock just 5 minutes after if was 9 o'clock.

I have appointed myself Benny and Sandy's wife. They love me for it! My duties consist of reading their recipe books, making suggestions, conducting an inventory of the pantry, acquiring supplies and providing a meal. Last night it was sundried tomato ravioli with roast butternut pumpkin, pine nuts, goat cheese and deepfried sage that I picked from their garden, followed by lemon delicious pudding and cream. Tonight it is pea and ham soup with sourdough bread followed by rum and rasin ricotta tart (the raisins are soaking in the rum as I type). Sandy and Benny are drawing me up a very specific list of the ingredients that I am to bring back from Madrid. So far I have giant green unpitted olives in a lemon and chili marinade, chorizo (there will be very detailed specifications later) and the list has just started. My instructions are to take the biggest bag possible with nothing in it, and return with not a gram less than the onboard luggage limit will allow. No wonder they love me!

My domestic duties are enjoyable and really quite engrossing. It gives me a reason to go into various supermarkets where I stand staring at all the types of butter from Sussex, or Surrey, or Cornwall or Cardiff and wonder who cares. I have had discussions with butchers which go something like this:
Greta: "What is that?"
Butcher wearing a funny white hat: "Pheasant love."
Greta: "What is that?
Butcher wearing giant blue and white striped apron: "That would be a goose love"
Greta: "What is that?"
Butcher with giant hands: "It's a Mallard love."
Greta: "What is that?"
Butcher with apple cheeks: "It's a Christmas haggis love."

And on it goes. The only conclusion I can draw is that everyone here loves me. This has been confirmed by the woman on the checkout, the bus driver, the mobile phone salesman, the girl who sold me a coffee and the very grumpy, snarly woman in the Tourist Information Centre. They all called me love, so it must be true.

Touchdown in Oxford

The flight
The trip was really pretty good. I lucked out and managed to get an aisle seat next to two people who did not want to climb over me to get to the toilet even once, they sat very still and kept entirely quiet. This left all the wriggling and getting up and down to me. We flew low over western China and Afghanistan when it was light. It was a most amazingly beautiful scene.

The money
So far I have spent
£25 on the bus from Heathrow to Oxford
£30 on a mobile
£2 on a coffee
£8 on a taxi
That is about $150
Exactly how it is that people manage to live here is one of the mysteries of the world. And don't go thinking that the wages must be high.

Benny and Sandy manage by both having good jobs, never, (really never ever) eating out, rarely buying take away, walking whereever possible, riding push bikes to work and the boys ride or walk to school including during the depths of winter, not eating meat very often, investing in a baby Gaggia so they can have coffee on a daily basis, buying the daily paper on campus where the usual price of £1 is subsidized so it only costs 30p.

I walked around Oxford a bit and saw an add for a job at £6 per hour which Sandy and Benny say is really good money for a waitress. I think I might apply.