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.