Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Too much eating out, too many ready meals (shame on me) and easy stand-bys

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Hmm. MOB started so well, but last weekend we were away at a wedding in Dorset, and this week business has had me working evenings and most of the weekend… So not much to talk about on the cooking front.

Even a cooking fiend like myself gets overwhelmed and to the stage where he can’t really think about making something really nice.

So, last week we had Sunday lunch in a very nice place in Swanage. If you find yourself in that neck of the woods, try the simple fresh food at the Moonlight Bistro. They were kind enough to serve us a couple of Moby Dick-sized sea bass off the evening menu.

Dessert was some fantastic sorbet from the local producer, Purbeck Ice Creams (Dairies? – someone tell me which is right). Somehow or other, you just have to try their Elderflower flavour – just fantastic!

And, as if someone had been listening in on my brainwaves, when we went to our favourite local place, the Levant, last night, we were told they were just about to stock the very same stuff.

Life is good!

Details:
Moonlight Bistro
67 High Street
Swanage
Dorset
BH19 2lY

Telephone 01929 475615

Informal dining

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OK. I’ll come clean, it’s really eating on or by the beach, one of the great things about living by the sea during the summer.

I’ve been working all this weekend on a rush job for a client, so for lunch yesterday I grabbed some sushi from Marks & Spencer (more about sushi very soon) and took it on to the beach, down by the pier. While sushi is a great sit on the beach food (just don’t let it sit in the sun), I wish someone in Worthing offered the proper Bento Box thing.

Then, last night, we put a disposable barbecue and some of our favourite M&S venison burgers on our bikes, and cycled off to Goring Gap and watched the sun go down over a couple of beers.

The atmosphere was really relaxed with us as the oldest people around – the rest were groups of what appeared to be post-exam chilled teenagers and students. That was, until a van full of police officers turned up and started giving the kids a hard time over their beers and barbecues.

We left. The bubble had burst, and we wondered why the police had to be so heavy-handed. If I’d had been one of the kids, I’d have been mightily fed up. But then the police attitude could be par for the course around here. I just don’t know.

Go see The Aviator

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IMO Martin Scorsese has made more classic movies than anyone living or dead. That’s not to say that everything he puts out is great, but he remains far and away my favourite director.

Sam and I went to The Aviator last night, one of the most mainstream things he’s made, but still a masterful piece of film making. Leonardo di Caprio is fantastic – much better than in Gangs of New York – and the supporting cast is uniformly wonderful.

But the real art is how Scorsese made three hours fly by in about 45 minutes. I’m going to see it again very soon.

An unbelievably bleak world view?

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I came across this in John Naughton’s Brief History of the Future:

“most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

These are the four maxims that guide Ted Nelson, the ‘father of hypertext’, and they’ve been bouncing around my brain today. Reading them the first time, I found the words almost disturbing in their bleakness.

But things got even more disturbing as I realized I agreed that many people are fools, most authority is malignant, and many things are wrong. I do believe in some organizing force in the universe, but not in God as a Father Christmas-like figure with simpler dress sense and a keen sense of megalomania.

This can’t be my world view, too.

Haruki Murakami and two coincidences

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I’ve just been on holiday, and amongst other stuff, I took two novels by one of my very favourite authors, Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami.

Imagine my surprise when I noticed my new client took the photograph on the cover of the first one I read. And, as if that wasn’t spooky enough, the narrator in the second book flew into Rhodes airport, just 4km up the road from where I was reading the book.