a thumping heart and coursing veins

The tubes rumble and steam under this great, beating city. They stop and start, shudder and moan but always, onwards keep going.

It all links together – a web of botched causeways, slip streams and dead ends, haphazardly, organically united under the coarsely slashed circle.

Its lifeblood, pumping through its veins 19 hours a day: we, the greying commuters. We seeth along its clogged ducts, feed into bottle-necks, cram behind the lost tourists, tut at the trundling, obese bags and three-wheeled prams and relentlessly pant in search of fresh reality.

It’s another world down there, the monoclinical lighting, globs of chewing gum – usually, perfectly, lodged in the nostril of a star on a poster – and stink from the bowels of life above. Every day we file down, rush and push, squeeze, raise eyebrows, grimace and shove, sit, avoid eye-contact, stare, lean, welcome, pour out, rush along, bustle and beep beep into the blinking morning. Then the formula flips and it’s dark and the mood is different and more foreign is ringing around the tin carriage, people who haven’t worked, first timers on the system, oh how weird that must feel… and once again we’re spat into cold, shivering energy.

The cartes huitres, the lights, the whirring wind forced through the pipes. Beggars, bad buskers, lovely drunkards and the occasional, fleeting glimpse of a face with a future you’d like to be part of.

Welcome to Monday.

 

 

wild salmon in tranquility

Imagine the world’s best salmon, added to the world’s most decadently naughty foie gras, tickled by oyster tapioca, licked by air-thin daikon radish slivers, punched by immense hits of umami and sweet, smoky soy wafts. A crunch of immaculately trimmed and fried silver skin, a sand-pit of unidentifiable edible dust. All kicked into perfect, spankingly fresh touch by a slice of sharp, crunchy granny smith and peppery ginger.

Aside, a diminutive dollop of thick, black, elemental salmon belly fat, cast into the night by shots of squid ink.

I was lucky enough to be at the World Sushi Awards on Saturday. I still can’t get over the flavours of Swedish chef Sayan Isaksson’s mouthful of fresh sushi. So utterly brilliantly thought out that I can’t help but wax lyrical, sail close to wind of verbosity and slip into raptures at the thought of it.

I’m making myself sick with envy.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

So said Mark Twain.

Surely sartorially spot-on Frances Cumming-Bruce, 97 and three-quarters, would agree.

sock by david yeo

udder shudder

A technical term, I think you’ll find, for the involuntary reflex that besets those who have over-eaten at St John restaurant. May also affect those who have recently come to learn the provenance of many industrially farmed livestock products (timely cross-ref: Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece).

All meat and dairy products succumb to the stuttering reaction – a flinching, grimacing cheek, pulled in revulsion. Sufferers are prone to worry peers with Tourets-like nervous rictus motions of the mouth and face. It aint pretty.

After a meal of bone cups of stinking molten veal marrow lava, a whole suckling pig – some perfunctory cabbage thrown in – and a load of sickeningly heavy suet ginger puddings, udder shudder followed by veganism seemed the only option.

Sorry Joe, I know you’re tutting as you read this. Many vegetables, minimal meat and perhaps even some home-made almond milk, here I come.