pointless ladders

192. Brookside on Bangladesh on Huguenots.

Tights. You wear them once then they die.

A night on the plank and the ninja recline.

A one-finger slap is delicately sly.

Naked flitters between the rooms – a stealthy flummox will get you by.

My new home. The plank is the bed. Last night I dreamt I was camping, it is that unforgivingly hard. The recline to pillow level is executed with stealth and speed – as uncomfy as the ancient futon may be, bed itself is always blissfully welcome. My tights might as well be compostable, their micro webs unzip at such an alarming pace I wonder whether I am the only woman in London to get through five pairs a week. Please Nasa, invent a 10 denier that lasts. Next time you want to slap someone, try the one-finger slap. It’s subtle, it’s to the point, it’s pathetic. It does the trick. A stealthy flummox is nothing more than a decoy for the greater good. Useful and utterly necessary. Naked flitters are not only possible but cockle-warmingly ordinary when it comes to a landing around which it would be impossible to truly swing Hello Kitty’s runtish little brother.

no shoes

There is a strange thing that I have observed.

Perhaps a mere trifle of the confounding intricacies of time: a piffling coincidence. Nothing to think about, maybe. Not worth a ponder. Without grounding, possibly.

This thing, I am sure, is more than just random, terrifying synchronicity.

The girl who was bombed. She was pictured alone, lost, frightened, bloody, matted. Wandering, dusty, metallic taste in her mouth. Ringing ears, pink dress, utterly scared and shoeless.

The five year old who, disentangling herself from a minor wipe-out on her little skis – mistakes teaching new tricks on a daily basis – met her match. It was a man up the hill who let go. Who dropped the dead weight of wood, metal and rubber, and watched the cable drum hurtle down the hill – it had nowhere else to go, gravity will do that. Who slipped and made his small mistake into her largest ever. A tiny girl in the path of a gravity-guided missile, one minute fully dressed – overly dressed, even, it was the mountains, afterall – the next, shredded, hat and gloves torn off. Skis, poles, goggles yards away. Footwear – plastic skiboots – snatched from her still, baby feet.

The car crash. A hundred guesses. It was horrifyingly raw. Freshly crumpled metal, tears, blood and blank, almost blindingly white confusion. The people stood, not understanding and the empty pair of shoes sat neatly next to to the wreck. An audience quietly, yearningly trundled by on the silent tarmac. A thousand guesses.

The autorickshaw and the mountain track. Perhaps twenty kinks in the potholed road, hugging the dry, rocky, steep valley sides. Winding, suddenly flicking back, moving forwards and back on itself again. A bad road. The tuk-tuk careered into a corner, didn’t brake and flipped. Flew. Lunged, lurched, collided, crunched, rolled, slammed, punched, popped then exploded. Then stopped. And in a sickly silence, dust falling, glass tinkling, three pairs of bare feet, laid naked by the journey. Six lost shoes and one soul, expired.

It may be coincidence. But it seems to me that No Shoes is an eventuality of disaster.

two-and-a-half drinks down

“OMIGOD! Didn’t he sleep wiv what’s ‘er face? You know, er!”  She tuts through gloopily varnished lips, whilst her right hand lingers, poised in mid-mascara stroke, the caked black wand humming around the side of her head like a conductor desperately attempting to control a microscopic orchestra. She tuts again, the summons isn’t working and the name, it seems, just won’t come. “What’s ‘er face?!” she half-tuts, half-sighs, shocked with her slippery grip on such juicy gossip amongst such a captive audience on such a promising Friday night.

We, the passengers of the Central Line tube rumbling towards Liverpool Street, are just as interested to know who he is as her three mates are.

It’s the end of the week, the venn diagram time of the evening when two diametrically opposed forces converge on the tube. That twilight zone in the forever crepuscular life of the underground, when each carriage becomes a temporarily interlocked front line of the post-work-had-a-few-pints-and-feeling-decidedly-in-the-mood-to-rip-it-up camp and the weary, urban-tanned, work-laden, exhausted, mentally bedraggled, spreadsheeted-to-death heavyweights.

The swaying bodies either reek of offices or booze or both – the carriage wobbles, so do we and it’s a tipping point. It’s home or game on.

Hardly an argument for the poor souls on their way to the nightshift, or the beaten young father on his way back to his baby. Or the tourists, tired and lost and ripped-off. Or to the lads, nervously jiggling with pre-piss-up nerves, pints in their eyes and girls in their dreams. And earshot.

Laughter the sound of fluffy picture frames and bags of fresh chips brings me back to the tutter, who is now declaiming the virtues of make-up application on the tube. She smears a worryingly khaki coloured paste across her forehead, leaving a no-mans land between her hairline and the painted skin. The odd thing is, her skin was fine beforehand. Better, actually. But that’s not on their minds – least of all hers as she squints into a swimming, stamp-sized mirror.”‘E gets around! Omigod, didn’t he sleep wiv that other one as well? E gets around doesn’t ‘e?!” They all shriek with alcopop-fuelled excitement and more lipgloss – the single most powerful tool in the urban girl’s arsenal – is passed around with cooing reverence and a round of bubblegum-scented appreciation.

atlantic

Guess where I’ve just been? More stories to come…

Me in the Indy!

Time for some shameless plugging…

Check out my feature spread in today’s Independent newspaper!

“Essential to Japanese cuisine, umami is the elusive flavour dimension that gives foods their moreishness. So can a collaboration of scientists and chefs harness its effects to help tempt hospital patients to eat?”

Read more here

jerk off

I’m lying in my darkened bedroom, grey light creeping in around the curtains.

The air is humming with the pulsating blades of a helicopter, hovering pretty much directly above my home. It sounds like a noisy tractor, chopping away at nothingness instead of a harvest.

The tractorchopper started whining at 7:30am. On a Sunday.

Somewhere in the background – don’t think we don’t hear you, brother – is a bass beat, straining against the sabbath calm and heavy with the anticipation of bigger, better, louder tunes.

The crafted oil drums are out, lying idle under cheap B&Q pergodas, ready to billow and belch out half a ton of jerk chicken. The blades keep on chopping.

It’s Carnival and I’m scared. And tired.

I hear a click of key in lock and the clunk of a chubb bar falling back. The door squeaks open and old uncle Jamaica’s obscenities, muttering murmers and self-banter drift in through my open window. Slippers shuffle along stained concrete towards relief. Any second now, I will hear the trickle of old man’s piss falling pathetically into the gutter, meandering down the red brick wall and dousing the weary drainpipe.

a propos of something

I apologise for my lack of devotion to nfan of late – it’s been a strange few months, very busy, very tiring and very distracting.

There’s been writing, interviewing, thinking, working, drafting, baulking. I have worked harder than I excpected to this summer. And every day my feet itch, and itch and itch. It’s an itch that calamine won’t help and a scratch won’t ease.

I will do my blogging more, I promise.

stone circle

we’re all animals, afterall

Who’d have thought it? Eleven girls – sorry, ladies – one leisure vessel, optimistically named the “Random Harvest” and one very happy skipper, Andy.

A choppy sea, bolshy skies, a bucket full of Pimms. Bouncing pink balloons, jostling along the bow. Random it may have been, but as for harvest? All signs pointed to a guaranteed drought.

Mackerel hunting rods launched and spinners flickered weakly with the prospect of a dunking in the English channel – autumnal on an August day.

Fishing, they say, is a waiting game. A sport of patience, calculated idleness, concordance with mother nature and the grace to know when a day is a day and that an empty net means an empty plate.

Ah, so you thought.

No sooner had the hen whipped up her shirt and flashed her sunkissed baps at the passing fishermen did the harvest come tumbling in. Oh how we feasted that evening.

Nature is, indeed, a bountiful giver.

greenness, soundsystems and love

It’s been a great week for treehouses. I broke a story last week about Nick Weston’s Essex treehouse and every Tom, Dick and Harry from every newsroom in the South East wanted a piece of the Crusoesque action. I had a message full of gratitude from Nick and a promise of a dinner in the woods. Report back I shall. I’m so jealous of his life amongst the elements, surrounded by nature and with nothing but books and a fire for company… Green with envy? I’m glowing like the very incandescent  and oh so un-eco nugget of plutonium Bart Simpson catches as he rides past Burns’ factory.

Happy August! Tis the month of the Carnival. Coincidental etymology of the pleasure-inducing word: carnage + festival = carnival. I read a slightly odd reference to the wondrous NHC in ES mag this weekend. Something along the lines of “get down to Notting Hill for soca beats, shimmying bottoms and buckets of jerk chicken”. The first bit was made up - but “buckets”??? It’s not a KFC hootenanny, love. No, the chicken bursting from the blackened oil drums along Kilburn Road is served on high piles of dry rice and anyone who’s ever balanced a Red Stripe, a wobbly paper plate of jerk and their dwindling sobriety whilst surging through the sweaty, grinding masses knows, really knows that there are no buckets of chicken at Carnival. Prepare to suck bones, drain cans and get messy.

And finally. This is the last month of singledom for my lovely Ro. Only one month today until the knot is tied, double-knotted, triple blessed and left to tighten in the ever-changing rain, sun, snow, drought, storms, deep blue skies and shifting winds…

emptiness

On death.

I am feeling morbid at the moment. Not morbid in a down, dragging at my heels sort of way, rather in a scary, eye-opening, ah, so that’s what this is all about! kind of way.

Every day in the newsroom I read of another soldier, baby or unfortunate, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time expiry. Another soul poofs into nothingness, leaving a bank account, some clothes and a yearning family behind. Cameras flash, pages are filled and stories, stories, thousands of chinese whispers of varying degrees of ludicrous wrongness trickle and seep through the mass.

It is starting to feel like every news story, every account, tale, yarn, history, missive and poem is irreconcilably forged around the eventual empty space that will one day just be.

The strange thing is that the world keeps on turning and the streets keep on droning and the bees keep on humming and all of those people who have been torn apart and are left behind keep on walking, talking, eating and sleeping – and agreeing to being photographed and interviewed for the day after tomorrow’s bin linings.

It sometimes feels like the living live to take care of the dead.

It happens to thousands – probably millions – of us every day. And we are all replaced. As we, too, need to be taken care of.

ashes and ironing boards

One of my mother’s proudest moments, she won’t admit, is visiting Lords and standing inches away from a crumbling clay urn, paper label curled with age, handwriting spidery and faded. The Ashes, secreted in this diminutive and unexclamatory mini vessel, mean a lot to her. The glass that protected and separated the icon steamed with our breaths as we admired the odd little signifier of so much of her identity.

She’s not what you’d describe as sporty and doesn’t own a black labrador, a barbour or a cricket bat. She doesn’t even have a son and as I far as I know has never played cricket as an adult. She has introduced a hundred friends to avocados and is never knowingly beaten in the kitchen. She’s Australian. A closet hooligan and creative soul, she’s banished to the guffawing countryside, wellies-and-pearls brigades of the home counties, and is a unique and rudderless woman.

Test cricket is the only time when much ironing seems to unfold (or fold?) at her helm. Having ironed all of Thursday, Friday presented obstacles of the aeroplane variety that meant distance between my mother and a telly. This is how our texts went:

11:22 Cricket results please x

me: 4-1 aus, england 425, hope that makes sense x

11:34 Help does that mean an aussie is out already? X

me: Yep… The office went wild. Sorry mumma x

11:37 Who, katich?

me: Oh no you’re not going to like this. Ponting has just been knocked out. Hughes was before. 10-2. X x

11: 41 ohmigod

me: You have to start a blog on this. It’d be a classic. x

11:45 I might have left the country

Phone call – mother checks that I am not laughing or going wild with rest of office. Shocked at the possibility. Sounds despondent, saddened and even desperate.

14:15 Dare i ask the score? X x

me: 63 for 2. getting better! X x

17:29 Do you know the score now? X

me: Ok cricket 156 for 8 bad light stopped play xx

I haven’t heard since…She is, of all places, in Turnberry this weekend. Not watching golf.

bhag

I’m getting myself a bhag.

It’s going to be lovely and shiny and a bit smelly and definitely very scary. I am going to be sucked into the gloopy sea, pop around the fizzing stars, bump into flame red Florence on the dewy, messy Stone Circle and bump along on the hot coals of the deep underbelly.

It’s going to be filled with answers, questions, magic, rage, mystery, wonderment, power and dreams. It’s going to smell of honey-suckle and frankincense and sizzling garlic and warm sun-kissed skin. There’ll be clanging bells, weeping angels, wooping whistles, love and friends.

It’s my big, hairy, audacious goal and I am scratching, clawing, searching for the courage to take steps to its edge.

a b c d t g m j x y z

Everything’s behind at the moment. My time-keeping (although it was ever thus), my blog post-keeping and my brain. I can blame all three, I hope, on Glasto. The aftermath is still cooling off. I can’t work out, for example, why the words in my last post are tiny – perhaps it’s just my computer, but they seem to be stuck hovering somewhere round the font 7 mark and are really terrible to read.

I blame it on seeing Tanya Gold rolling around in a soupy brown moat of portaloo-flavoured bin puddle on day 4 of the Festival. Clean as a whistle, she approached, plopped down and rubbed away, dumpily slopping her ample behind in its stinky filth and trying her absolute hardest to do what pretty much no-one else did: get muddy. All in the name of accurate reportage.

Back to London and back to the wider world and that, this week, means the mournavision that is MJ in death. I have just cooked dinner watching the last chunk of the memorial. Surprisingly, I even managed to eat and keep my food down.

I tried to summon a little bit of emotion, just a teeny drop of teary reflection, but I couldn’t (perhaps my heart is also a bit behind, on Glasto time), no matter how hard I tried, I felt zilch. It’s hard to feel sad about someone who is so iconic, so god-like, so globally super-dooper-mega-famous and so seemingly untouchable that he never seemed like he was human to me, anyway. He was a car stereo speaker, a worn-out record, a brand new cassette tape, a full dancefloor, a sparkling dance move, a trilling warble, a funky bass, a hot, hot dancer, a first song, a last song, but never a real person. To me.

So, there you have it:  from Tanya to Michael in one neat sweep of the emotionless spectrum. Next time I will have my full brain back, I promise. And fonts shall be legible.

tweet off

I have just signed up to Twitter. Two years after my techgeek friend (everyone really should have one) claimed it was the future, I have finally come around to its simpering ways. Work made me do it, actually.

I’m heading to Glastonbury in a matter of hours – and the queues are looking shambolic. The weather, too, is looking more than a little restless, with various forecasters flippantly interspersing words like sunstroke, heat and scorcher with rainstorms, downpours and clouds. I’m practically indecently assaulting my faux veneered desk, such is the level of my enthusiasm for touching wood for sunshine.

I’m going to try to Twitter from the Festival as much as my phone battery, wherewithall and sobriety allow. I’ll be keeping an eye on celebs in the VIP area, eavesdropping on band gossip and sampling the local delicacies – ie, cider.

I also want to check out the eco goings-on and speak to some of the sustainability guys down there. It’s a miracle that 150,000 bodies decamp to a corner of Somerset and leave very little trace. Leave no trace is the ideal, but tent pegs are horrible to locate with a hangover.

So, back to Twitter. It’s occurred to me that if the rainforests are the lungs of the earth, then celebrities are her twittering vocal chords. I’m not sure where this leaves us mere mortals, but follow my progress, keep updated and stay in touch via twitter.com/daisydumas.

Hmmm. I just wrote the above for work – but I’ve abandoned the mission. The reality of actually logging on and twittering (yuck) from the world’s biggest music festival for the benefit of my boss is very, very, veeeery remote. In fact, let’s face it, it’s as good as extinct.

I can imagine it, though. Fast forward 20 hours… Pink ice blocks and goblin fairies floating in red sea of wellies, mud is frothing from the speakers and my cider is full of imps… Mad, I tell you.

jam making junkie englishmen

Last night was spent making my first ever batch of elderflower cordial and a few rounds of sinful, puffy elderflower fritters. I did everything they say you shouldn’t and they turned out amazingly. Beginners’ luck, I suppose. The cordial should be ready to strain tomorrow, golden and summery and very, very English…

One of the (few) ingredients in the cordial is citric acid. It’s not as easy to buy as it once was, on account of it being one of the (few) ingredients in a heroin junkie’s teaspoon of dark joy. The trouble with this is that, whilst clearly a necessary piece of legislation, it also means that every jam-maker, cordial conjurer and summer-fruit potting wizard must queue at the pharmacy counter to secure their little 50 gram baggy of the not-so-hard stuff. Up and down the country, apron-wearing jolly pudding makers and possibly not quite so rotund junkies stand in the same line, waiting in turn for the same potion to make their different spoonfuls tastier. Or maybe this only happens in city pharmacies.

The irony wasn’t lost on me as I stood and waited. I looked around for surveillance, searched for an immigration-hall-type trick mirror and generally built up jam angst. How can they tell, anyway? When my turn came, I – inexplicably overcome by naughty shame – completely over-compensated for not being a junkie and excused myself for being a cordial-making beginner at citric acid procurement.

The 16 year old behind the counter mumbled something and disappeared into the hallowed area where the huge rotating Christmas tree of drugs is kept. Bingo.

The elderflowers were easier to find, once out of London – a geographical situation that, I imagine, is the exact opposite for class A narcotics. Gripped by early summer fever and fresh from picking our bounty (along the main road, oops, but in the countryside nevertheless), David, overcome by the poetic loveliness of an English June day, came up with the ultimate appropriate anathema to the picturesque scene: Chap My Ride.

Roll over pimps. It’s time to tweed the steering wheel, Chesterfield the seats and install the G&T hamper. Eldeflower cordial and teaspoons optional, old chaps.

beer wellies mud tents portaloos tapioca

and press passes! BLOOP… I’m going to Glastonbury.

My virginal body shall be offered to the festival gods in the name of journalistic integrity and all I ask in return is for some sunshine.

In two weeks I’ll be there, pitched, purposeful and partying, poised to discover a messy, colourful, crazy Mecca at the end of my own little festival Haj. It’s only taken 28 years.

In other news, I’d like to say thanks to all of you who provided no help whatsoever in my quest to make perfect tapioca pancakes. Your disinterest/inaction/befuddlement has, on one hand, given me little hope in the overall mission, my chances of perfection in the task assigned now hovering around slim to none. And on the other – fortified by my worrying obsession with Brazilian ebay clips teaching me, via various Mamas in various headgear, how to make the bastards – made me more determined than ever.

Ha. So there.

runny honey: number one

Welcome to runny honey: number one, the first in a hunger-selective series of food snippets.

TAPIOCA

Brazilians in London, answer my prayers.

I’m trying to make tapioca pancakes, the amazing white half moons that beautiful bodies breakfast on day in, day out along Brazil’s northern beaches. It’s a very unBritish thing to picture cooking, but tapioca melts and forms a pancake without any liquid or oil. I think, I hope. It’s worth experimenting, even to capture just one Proustian droplet of the warm, squidgy, chewy pancake filled with melted cheese, sweet condensed milk and shaved coconut that I ate on Jericoacoara beach in 2002.

It’s been an eventful and convoluted journey, one that I hadn’t expected to be quite so blind and, frankly, unchartered in these necks of the woods.

Having read The Hungry Cyclist, I got all excited and brought a big, easily accessible bag of tapioca, poured it into a hot pan and waited for the sago seeds to magically bond. Needless to say, nothing happened. At all. Not even a little bit burnt sago seeds happened.

I tried blending them, hoping to powder the stubborn pellets. I tried frying them in butter. I tried soaking them. Nothing worked.

I then ventured all the way to Clapham to visit very ooh-la-la restaurant, Trinity, and ordered the prune tapioca, hoping to learn a bit more. It was delicious, but eating the boarding school variety didn’t aid the quest for knowledge of the pancake variety. Trinity, by the way, is a marvel.

I have researched virtual and far for the elusive farinha tapioca – grainy flour that should, I am told, do the sticking trick. Having scoured websites, Brazilian shopping forums, Harlesden supermercado tips and the Brazilian Embassy in London online, I’ve finally found it, sitting, alone, on a dusty shelf in a tiny Brazilian supermarket all of two minutes from my home. Amazing.

So far, so good? Am I doing it right? I can’t quite believe I don’t need any glue, not even water – or is the joke on me? Here goes…

rudeboys love the burn

From a distance, there would have been a shimmery wobble over London at times last week: a hazy heat hit the city and we were treated to our own oasis of warmth amidst a wintry late spring chill.

Needless to say, the damp bite’s back, making the heatwave seem nothing more than a mirage in the verdant distant past.

But – mmm – that sun. It beat down like a massage after a marathon ( I can only imagine), like a hot shower after camping in the rain, like warm rays after a year of cool days – precisely what it was. And when the sun shines in London, the whole city throws down a collective tribal dance and goes bananas.

Brixton swealtered. The whole samba-rhythmed Caribbean community poured into the streets – and out of  an acreage of skimpy lycra – as Red Stripe cans rolled, tunes beat on and policemen slowly prowled up and down Coldharbour Lane. Fixies teetered along Brick Lane, glass and bad haircuts everywhere. Farringdon burst onto the pavements, cigarette breaks for once a damn delight. Harrow Road’s pavements smudged into stringy stickiness as globs of chewing gum melted and clung. Reggae, Irish jigs, fortifying Guinness and the obligatory police van all as omnipresent as ever, but with sun in their steps.

And from SE2 to N2 and beyond, rudeboys, ripped-off mountain bikes, labels, cheap jewellery and Jafaican accents took up sentry on every junction, street corner and Costcutter doorstep. Fried chicken shops went into overdrive and water guns sold out. With the odd bass-heavy BMW surrounded like bees to a honeypot, neighbourhood posses multiplied and dominated the streets last weekend. ‘Young professionals’, drinking lager on the grass in combat shorts and Havaianas, didn’t stand a chance.

More than any city demographic, subculture, vein or branch, rudeboys love the urban burn.

a gulf between us

I’m sitting looking out of huge dusty french, make that international, windows onto a 30th floor balcony. In the near distance, a 12-lane strip of traffic hums away. Further away, blocks – tens, scores, even hundreds – of highrise towers stretch and grapple skywards, dumpy and out of place. Yet more distant are what look like small towns, clusters of wobbling unnatural lights and the outlines of turrets, roofs and domes.

And from every level on all three dimensions, thousands upon thousands of lights blink, scream, twinkle, flash and stare at me, their blue, red, orange, white, green haze providing no need for any lamps or candles, the nebulous haze striking every surface with a moonlighty glow.

It’s 11pm and the temperature is in the late thirties. The humid wind carries a wave of desert dust, a drone of air-conditioning units and no whiff whatsoever of a dwindling bedouin spirit. These winds – never mind their blastier cousins, the shamaals – have blown these ways forever.

They’ve seen war, piracy, British outposts, imperious telegraph and oil lines, shipping lanes, camel races and formula 1. They’ve tickled ladies’ necks at the horse races, wafted the dish-dashas of many a shawarma-eating shebab, stopped the play of a rugby game or two and delayed many, many international flights. They’ve powered beautiful dhows towards Iran and back and have brought everything from cheap labour to musk-scented fortune-seekers and Persian rug hustling philanderers to the Gulf.

What they encounter now is unquestionably the most startling incarnation of the Gulf they have ever seen.

The winds that blow past my sister’s glass-clad balcony are a force to contend with. They push their way past tower after tower, building site after construction project after development after reclaimed island. They force themselves through the tight lattice-like scaffolding whilst making a mess of westerners’ clean washing and maids’ cleanly swept marble floors. They lift veils, expose weaknesses and strip surfaces.

By the time they get to Abu Dhabi and beyond to the F1 track at Bahrain or the flaming pires along Kuwait’s coast, these winds aren’t surprised by a thing – why would they be?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Dubai.

canteen

Like its Tuscan three bean soup (provenance at a push) and ‘freshly packed sushi’ (a leap of faith by any standards), the work cafeteria is a place of questionable quality.

Yes, it’s cheap, subsidised, ‘buzzy’ (read many suits) and well, very convenient, but it’s also pretty nasty. It’s not that I don’t eat there – I do, often – but it is just not what you’d choose if the weather was good, the soup wasn’t such tantalisingly excellent value and the location weren’t a few metres below your desk.

But there’s another canteenational pull besides the ever-irksome convenience factor: the talent. And by that I don’t mean the wonderful ability to construct a perfectly formed sonnet, a useful wicker basket, or even a Yorkshire dry-stone wall. You know what I’m talking about.

We have new building blood and it must be sniffed out. Not that I am at all interested in anything other than ogling - this is simply a question of self-preservation in the office environment. In this monochrome minefield of urban tans (grey pallour) and black, black and more black (womens’ fashion), a fresh, pleasing visage is a boost to morale and a reminding blast of out-of-office life.

Anything – be it a lovely face, a lovely dress or a lovely pair of shoes will suffice - newness and change, even dodgy newness and dowdy change, is a good thing. Not that my standards are mirrored throughout the glass-lifted edifice, but then that is the point, really.

Suddenly the chinese spice soup doesn’t seem quite so dishwatery afterall. But sorry, that sushi won’t tempt me in a month of days off in lieu.