Valley of the Trolley Dollies

“Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.  He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes.  Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
–James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

In this age of supermarket meats, with the disappearance of the local butcher, we end up eating the meat – the cuts, the types, the parts – that the monolith megamarts want to sell us; the stuff that’s easily packaged, transported, stored; the meat that can be most easily sold to the largest mass market. Anything that’s oddly shaped, a little too delicate for slam-bam-refrigerated truck-to-warehouse-to-cold shelf gets dropped, and, slowly but surely, vanishes from the repertoire.

I’m reminded of this because my parents are visiting. They’ve always visited “The Butcher.” Sometimes – usually – daily. My Uncle was the butcher when I was a kid, and I can still remember the sawdust floors, the hanging carcases – marbled in fat – so removed from actual animals and the glistening, dark scarlet to palest pink spread of product in the windows.

And hearts. A true comfort food, and one which you don’t ever see at supermarkets. Sheeps hearts – a little bigger than, and almost the same shape as, your fist.

A cross section would look like one of a capsicum pepper; four chambers surrounded and divided by a thin wall of meat. Not a huge amount of meat by any accounts, but so good when roasted long and slow in the oven.

The gentle heat pulls out the fat inherent in the meat (a fatty heart? Thank god humanity doesn’t appear to be the only creature open to coronary disease). It reaches the surface, and cooks, then scorches, then caramelises, making a red unctuous and almost impossibly savoury shell, inside of which is the velvet smooth, deliciously creamy meat, then the four ventricles, filled with savoury air.

Of course, the empty space can be stuffed; I’ve often seen them this way (although my mother never stuffed hearts when we had them). Rice – a mixture of white and wild – is good, often mixed with minutely chopped red and green peppers. Or, for a nice Arabic feel, try couscous, made up using a good stock or bouillon, then lightly fried with toasted and smashed coriander seeds, then speckled with teeny-tiny jewels of reconstituted dried apricots, almost preternaturally green slivers of smashed up pistachios, a little dusting of cinnamon, and perhaps a finely diced red chilli pepper or two.

I’ve always wondered whether the luxury could be upped by filling the parcel with a rich pate, but suspect that that much cream and fat would result in a messy – and possibly too rich – concoction.

A really wonderful weekend, thanks for asking.

Friday, we picked up Phil-the-ex-lodger at Heathrow and headed up North to Kniveton, a tiny hamlet between Matlock and Matlock Bath, to celebrate Claire’s 40th birthday.

We paused, en route, at Bicester, for several hours of retail therapy. Ralph Lauren had a huge sale on suits, none of which fit me. Bummer! That’s the downside of shaping up - all the odd sizes that end up in bargain bins are no longer any good. I’ll have to shape up further into an odd shape. Then, I’ll be good to go. Still, I managed to get two fabe new jackets for the summer. And what a summer it’s promising to be: weather this weekend was GLORIOUS! I got some sexy new underwear (a must now I spend half my time undressing in the gym - where everyone is checking everyone else out; god forbid your scanties should be found wanting). A trip to L’occitane provided some lovely smellies for the summer, and a couple of pairs of shoes and new socks completed the damage.

And then it was off to the delights of Derbyshire. The cottages were beautiful - comfortable, modern, clean, and very much in keeping with the country cottage, without ever sliding into Twee. The countryside was gorgeous - rolling and green and filled with bleating lambs and frolicking horses.

Our fellow guests were a total joy, ranging from the quiet and sweet to the very loud, very straight, very crude and (despite my best efforts to find him brash and annoying), very very Hot. I made some lovely new friends who I’ll want to keep in touch with, and spent large parts of the weekend reciting Round The Horne scripts with the lovely Paul & Len, a couple whose relationship predates even D and I!!!

Friday evening was a barbecue, and, as usual, I consumed waaaay too much alcohol, which always happens when in the company of Trolley Dollies (who, as D reminds me, “Train for this; they sit in hotel rooms in Islamabad and drink. For two days solid!!”), and paid for it for much of the weekend.

Saturday daytime was a trip to Matlock Bath (home of the chip shop and shirtless stud; but you already knew that), and the evening was a wonderfully catered dinner - Stilton and Pear Pate, Beef and mushrooms in Oyster sauce with Dauphinois Potatoes and the most delish cherry tomatoes, olives and tallegio bake. And lashings of champagne, of which I partook minimally as the memory of the previous night hung around haunting me.

Then, after a brisk walk around the locale on Sunday, it was the long drive home, and an attempt to go for a run last night, which was, quite frankly, disastrous. Last Wednesday, the Trainer took me on a 6km run through the city of London. It took 45 minutes, I suffered, but it was one of the best experiences ever. Fantastic.

Last night, I crawled home after twenty minutes, with blood streaming from every orifice in my body, and an inability to walk talk or breathe.* (*some of these statements amy be over-exaggerated).

Still, nil desperandum: Tongiht, I’m off out again. I’ll do another twenry minutes, and look to go to twenty-five. I’ll have eaten a banana an hour before the run. I will be one more day away from a night of alcohol excess that left me crawling on all fours to the loo, and I’ll be a step closer to doing a 6k run on my own.

Goals. I’m all about them.

And right now the goals are (aside from the 6k on my own): To stop biting my nails. To start eating more sensibly. To limit my alcohol intake for the next month (basically, none for a week, then no more than 4-6 units a week). To hit the gym/street a minimum of four times a week. To finish the second draft of a book I wrote a long time ago, which has sat unloved in my desk drawer, and to get some new stories started.

I’m tired today, and facing a week of nightmare events to set up training for our Spanish and South African offices on a series of products I barely understand myself, using systems that seem to be controlled by half a dozen people in four countries. AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghghh! That said, i’ve been approached (for the third time in a month) by senior trading staff asking if I’ve ever considered spending a couple of years in Mexico and Brazil. Either there’s a trip in the offing, or they’ve sold me to white slavers on the Rio Grande. Mind you, it’s all the same thing…

Irrelevant, probably, as I speak neither Spanish nor Brazillian, although, thanks to Dancing with the Stars and my incipient (or is that raging) alcoholism, I can do a mean cha-cha-cha and mix a killer caipirinha. So bring it on!!

We hugged for a little longer than we usually do when I got home.

We made poached eggs, and served them on top of thick cut Deli Ham – pink and salty-sweet, with the faintest tracing of fat – which was in turn placed atop rounds of lightly toasted, melted butter smeared white bread, and accompanied by Heinz baked beans, their sweet mushiness complementing the crisp salt-sweet blandness of the poached egg towers.

We talked about Theresa – how we both felt so shocked at how quickly she’d gone; how we both felt guilty that we didn’t get round to see her ‘For a slice of cake and a cup of tea,’ like she’d asked. We wondered whether she’d known she was going, and if that request had been code for ‘Come around so I can say goodbye.’ We fell silent, and ate, savouring each mouthful, newly aware of how vitally important the little things – like slices of cake, or gelatinous yellow yolks, are.

We watched Doctor Who: The Invasion of Time.

“You know,” I said to Him, “When I was a kid I loved Doctor Who. But I don’t remember this story.”

“It’s Tom Baker,” he replied, “Leila’s last story. With the Sontarans.”

Still nothing. We lay on the sofas and watched all six half hour episodes.

Oh. Dear. Lord.

Tom Baker is wonderful – mugging for all he’s worth, and really getting some scary anger on screen for one or two of the scenes. His knowing Naughty Schoolboy routine is proof that Mr Tenants currently acclaimed Doctor has a direct lineage back to Mr Baker, and his wild curly hair is a site to behold.

Some of the script:

Sontaran: “I am commander Stok, of the Sontaran Supreme Space Shock Squad.”

Doctor: “Stock? Of the Sontaran Supr- That’s a lot of alliteration, isn’t it”

Is sharp and funny and clever(ish). The exchanges between the Time Lords – a bunch of bitchy camp old queens in a very fancy version of The Quebec, if their phrasing is anything to go by – are joyously cutting. But the pacing. Dear Lord, the Pacing. At one point the Doc and a secondary support character have the same conversation twice. In immediate succession. With Every Line being repeated by the other. Immediately after it’s spoken. And this happens Twice. In a conversation. Between the Doctor and someone else. Some, I don’t know, secondary character. And you know how annoying that can be. Basically, what could have been a very sharp three (or four, max) parter is stretched out to six episodes for no obvious dramatic reason.

And the design – apart from a bunch of reused costumes – is school production bad. The makeup on the Sontaran Villain makes him look like a bloated bald Amy Winehouse after a night on the gear (not to mention the fact that he  sounds like a bad Bruce Forsythe impersonation), and the three secondary villains turn out to be Shiny paper from the planet Bacofoil, whose humanoid manifestation is a trilogy for whom the phrase the banality of evil might have been created.

A shame it was so ropey, but the two of us, dozing on the sofa, newly aware of the fragility of all that we hold dear, loved every second.