Schipol the way
Dec. 18th, 2000 12:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetWe just got back from Amsterdam and are hanging out at the new RedHat
offices in Cambridge, waiting for a ride to the Christmas party, so I
thought I'd use the time usefully. Warning: this is probably going to be
pretty food-heavy.
I'd been really craving red meat, so when we went to Sainsbury's on
Wednesday night, we got a couple of aged sirloins. Jason was working from
home on Thursday and we decided to go for a walk up past Sainsbury's--the
limit of our previous explorations--on Green Lanes, to see what was there.
It turned out that just past the railway overpass, there are several blocks
of all-for-a-pound shops and Turkish restaurants and Greek pastry shops and
pubs and a zillion little grocers and many other useful enterprises. We got
"wetherburgers" at the local manifestation of the J. Wetherspoon's pub
chain. J. worked all afternoon and then I grilled the steaks and served
them with potatoes dauphinois (in cheese sauce) and grilled scallions. I
wanted to use the lovely goat cheese John & Mike had brought, so I grilled
it and served it over mixed greens with a balsamic vinaigrette; that turned
out very well.
On Friday, after coming up with a non-Amsterdam plan for the weekend, Jason
called and it turned out that the Amsterdam trip was on, after all. He had
a late meeting, so he got home quite late and we ordered pizza and packed
and scurried about trying to make sure we'd done everything that just had to
get done before the weekend.
Oh, I think I failed to tell you about my Very Exciting Bath. On Monday
night, I decided to celebrate living with a bathtub again after four years
and take a bubble bath. I thought about doing it by candlelight, but
decided I'd rather lie in the tub and read. So there I was, covered in
bubbles, when I was suddenly plunged into darkness. I yelled for Jason and
he came and brought me a candle and I showered off. Meanwhile, he
discovered the cause of the blackout. It seems that the overflow drain
wasn't connected to anything, so the water was splashing out of the tub onto
the floor and through the ceiling of the entry below to the light fixture
there. Of course, we had no idea where the breakers were, or how to do
anything about it. It turned out that only the overhead lights on the
bottom floor of the flat were affected; all the outlets there and everything
on the upper floor still worked just fine. I put in a call to the manager
of our property the next morning, but never heard back from him. When we
finally called again, he said that Pete, the builder would come round the
next day. He did, took out a remarkably burnt out bulb from the light
fixture below and re-connected the overflow drain to its proper pipe and
told me to let the ceiling dry out a bit before putting a new bulb in
there. So I wasn't electrocuted and I've even taken another bath since, but
it was Very Exciting.
Anyway, on Saturday morning we took the tube out to Heathrow and manuvered
our way through an incredible horde of Christmas travellers and finally got
on our plane, delayed by an hour. While we were waiting I looked into the
Smythson's shop across from the gate. They're a highly renowned fine
stationers. They had one display of all sorts of little books from keeping
notes about wines and foods and weddings. In addition, they also had little
books labelled "Blondes, Brunettes and Redheads," "Friends, Lovers and
Husbands," "Lovers and Losers," and "Seduction Techniques." Our flight to
Amsterdam was smooth and quick, once we atually managed to take off. We
caught a train from Schipol into the Central Station and took a tram from
there to our hotel. Red Hat had decided to put us in the Marriott. It was
nice enough, but there are so many wonderful little places in Amsterdam that
it was a bit disappointing to be in someplace so ordinary.
Once we'd unloaded our belongings, it was already after four and just about
dark. We made a reservation at a place specializing in "New Dutch" cuisine
that was recommended by our guidebook and one of the Internet sites I'd
found the night before. Then we headed out to walk along the canals and
through the Jordaan district. By the time we made it that far, we were
freezing and it was almost time for dinner, so we turned around and headed
back to d'Vliff Vliessen (The Five Flies). And yes, their logo is a small
swarm of, you guessed it, five flies. The restaurant is housed in a string
of five 17th century townhouses, so it is made up of delightful little rooms
and corridors, with exposed beam ceilings and ancient wood panelling. The
food, like California cuisine, focuses on fresh, locally grown ingredients,
harkening back to traditional Dutch cooking, which was enhanced for
centuries by the exotic ingredients brought back by their East India
traders. As soon as we were seated we were presented with a lagniappe of
lamb & chestnut pate with a dab of red pepper coulis. They had several
different prix fixe menus. Jason chose the three course seasonal menu. He
started with deep fried smelts and smoked herring on a bed of frisee in a
lovely light vinaigrette. His main course was roulades of chicken and
mushrooms served with a very creamy bowl of potato puree. For desert he had
a vanilla yogurt with stripes of chocolate in a berry soup. I picked the
five course daily menu. This began with a terrine of rabbit and duck served
with a berry sauce. Then there was a small pile of pieces of sole, braised
in a very light butter sauce, followed by two small bites of rabbit stuffed
with prunes and served on a bed of tiny Brussel sprouts. My main course was
a wonderful pheasant in thyme sauce, served on a bed of the best sauerkraut
I've ever tasted, with a potato croquette on the side. My dessert was a
spice cake filled with chocolate mousse and drizzled with creme anglaise,
with almond flakes and sultanas (white raisins) scattered on the plate. We
washed all of this down with a South African blend of cabernet and merlot
that the winery, Clos Malverne, calls a "Devonet." We both liked it better
at first than we did by the end and it went with various of our curses
better than others. Overall, our meals were both superb...Jason's first
course and my fish course were the standouts, but all the flavors were
subtle and well-matched.
We were both full and sleepy, so rather than crusing the Red Light District
in the cold rain, we headed back to the Marriott and had an early night. In
the morning, we were out of the hotel late enough that we decided to go
straight for early lunch. We tried "broodjes," the traditional Dutch
sandwiches, as Van Dobben's, reputed to be the home of the best broodjes in
the city. These are basically what I think of as standard white dinner
rolls, filled with whatever filling you choose. I had lovely rare roast
beef and Jason had the beef croquette (beef ragout rolled in breadcrumbs). I
could have eaten three or four of these, but Jason was highly motivated.
We continued on to the Amsterdam Historische Museum and spent a couple of
hours absorbing the history of the city since its founding around 1200.
It was very interesting and had a lot of good exhibits and beautiful
artwork, but failed to explain several key points like "why did the Dutch
decide they needed royalty?" and "why/when did they build the Enclosure Dyke
to turn the Zuider Zee from and inland sea to a freshwater lake called the
IJsselmeer?" I've been on a history reading jag lately--working my way
through _A History of Europe_ and I just picked up a history of the Ottoman
Empire--so maybe I'll see what I can find on modern Dutch history at some point.
On the way back through the Spui plaza, we stopped at a collection of
artists' booths that had attracted us on our way to the museum and bought a
gorgeous etching of a view of the roofs of Amsterdam. We watched a street
parade go by, complete with stilt-walkers and women dressed in silver
spandex and a float with Sinter Klaas reclining on it. We stopped at the
hotel briefly, then went on to the Stedelijk, the museum of modern art. We
had only 45 minutes there, so we made a very fast circuit of the
collection. While the titles were translated into English, there were no
curatorial remarks, or any hints as to how the collection is organized. So
it was a very experiential viewing, which is perhaps as modern art should
be. I look forward to going back, with more time, on our next trip to the
city.
From the museum, we headed down to the Singelgracht, the outermost of the
central canals. The guy at the canal boat stand told us he'd just decided
to cancel the five o'clock boat, because there were only two reservations
and he wouldn't go unless there were six passengers. As we stood there, an
Irish couple biked up and we agreed that if they needed six fares to make
the trip happen, we'd split the extra two fares and go. Of course, by the
time they actually left, there were twenty people on the boat. It was a
lovely ride through the canals, with all the bridges lit with strings of
lights. There were none of the monster power boats zooming out from under
the bridges, as I remember from my last trip to Amsterdam with my parents,
but I didn't remember from that trip how very tight some of the turns are.
In addition to the canals, we went out into the harbor and saw the new
interactive museum of technology and the reconstructed 17th century trading
ship at the maritime museum. We cruised back along the Amstel River and saw
the famous "Skinny Bridge."
After our canal tour, having had only broodjes and a hot dog during the day,
we were ready for rijstaffel at Kantjil en de Tijger, reputed to have the
best ristaffel in Amsterdam. It's a custom stemming from the Dutch
occupation of Indonesia and consists of a bowl of rice, surrounded by
various Indonesian dishes. We had thirteen, besides the rice: prawn
crackers, eggplant in a green curry-like sauce, beef and green beans and a
hard boiled egg, each in a re curry-like sauce, mackerel in a spicy paste,
deep fried chicken with a sweet fruit sauce, prawn satay in a soy-based
sauce, chicken satay in a peanut sauce, a salad of cucumber and mango, a
salad of lettuce in peanut sauce, sweet potato chips, and fried coconut to
sprinkle on top of everything. It was all yummy, but the mackerel was
incredibly sweet and we decided it would have to be our favorite.
We had talked about going to a coffeeshop after dinner, but we were both
tired and completely stuffed and, again, it was very cold, so we just went
back to our hotel and slept. We had to be up early this morning, to get to
the British Consulate by nine. After a trip to the hotel's breakfast
buffet, where we got Dutch pancakes with fruit as well as bacon, sausage,
eggs, broiled tomatoes and mushrooms, cold cuts and several kinds of
breakfast fish (herring, haddock and salmon), we jumped in a cab (all the
taxis in Amsterdam seemed to be Mercedes) and joined the line in front of
the door marked "VISAS" around 8:50am. We were very glad we were early, as
we were perhaps fourth in line once the windows opened and out of there by
10:15am. By the time we left there were about a hundred people in the
waiting room and it seemed likely that had we been ten minutes later, it
might have taken another hour. There were lots of interesting people to
watch...another American couple doing exactly the same thing as we were, an
American family with three kids under ten also doing the
dependents-to-a-work-permit process, a Nigerian couple with a very cute
little boy, and a man who reminded Jason of a plausible Dr. Who--he had
shoulder length hair and spectacles and was wearing dark red jeans and Doc
Martens, with a long leather jacket and seemed as if he would be slightly
kooky looking for any time in the last five hundred years or so, but not
completely out of place, either.
When we left the consulate with my new visa (which will allow me multiple
entries to the UK and the ability to work, should I so desire, until
Feb. 2002), we headed to the Van Gogh Museum. We only had about an hour,
but managed to at least see everything, and had a few minutes to actually
appreciate some of our favorites. I found the stuff from St. Remy and
Auvers very familiar (it was the theme of the Van Gogh exhibit while I was
working at the Met in 1986) and I was really taken with some of his copies
of Japanese prints that I hadn't really remembered. We bought a few
postcards and headed back to the hotel. We packed up our things and walked
out just in time to make the noon chekout deadline and took a cab back to
Schipol. We wandered around in the duty free for a while and got a quick
sandwich for lunch and then got on our flight. Everything went smoothly
there until we were approaching London. There was heavy cloud cover and
things were backed up in Heathrow. They held us in the air for a few
minutes and then made us taxi around on the ground for about twenty minutes
before letting us get to the gate. With no bags checked we sailed out
through Immigration and there was actually no one crewing customs, as far as
we could tell. Guess they decided to trust everyone on this flight--rare
for flights from Amsterdam.
The driver Red Hat had arranged for us was waiting in the terminal and we
climbed into another comfortable Mercedes and headed off into the gathering
dark. It really does strange thngs to one's sense of time to have it be
completely dark by four. By five it could have been one o'clock in the
morning, fofr all we could tell. It took about two hours to get up to
Cambridge, where we were dropped at Red Hat's new offices. They are still
somewhat under construction and very much working out of crates. I logged
on for a while and began this message, then changed in the bathroom and got
in the van hired to take us to the hotel where the Christmas party was to
take place.
We hung out in the bar and met people for almost an hour, then moved into
the dining room. They'd gotten silly hats for us and a box full of party
favors including streamers, noisemakers, poppers and rocket balloons. The
gang all dove into those and sent the rocket balloons screaming around the
dining room, nonplussing the few other tables of diners. I was seated
between Jason and a guy named Jorn, who took rather too great a liking to
the noisemakers. We were across from a delightful couple, Robert and his
wife Deb, who were lots of fun to talk to about how children expect their
parents to be grown-ups and don't want to let them keep playing through
adulthood. We'd ordered our dinners a week before and I'd managed to do a
better job of guessing what I might want to eat at such a remove. So I had
a lovely smoked haddock in cream sauce, followed by a minute steak (that
could have been more tender) in a delicious creamy sauce with sun-dried
tomatoes (and potatoes, cauliflower, mangetouts and baby corn, served family
style), with a berry pudding for dessert. Jason started with a plate of
melon and berries, had a venison eggplant casserole as his main dish, and
finished up with a slice of Christmas pudding (oh bring us some figgy
pudding!) in brandy sauce. I was getting fairly tired and we realized that
if we dashed off, the tube might still be open when we got to London, so
we got a taxi to the station, took the train to London and the tube to Manor
House and got home about midnight.
Now I need to throw on clothes and get the flat tidy and the stocks
replenished and a Christmas tree bought, because Anne & George arrive
tomorrow to spend the holidays with us.
offices in Cambridge, waiting for a ride to the Christmas party, so I
thought I'd use the time usefully. Warning: this is probably going to be
pretty food-heavy.
I'd been really craving red meat, so when we went to Sainsbury's on
Wednesday night, we got a couple of aged sirloins. Jason was working from
home on Thursday and we decided to go for a walk up past Sainsbury's--the
limit of our previous explorations--on Green Lanes, to see what was there.
It turned out that just past the railway overpass, there are several blocks
of all-for-a-pound shops and Turkish restaurants and Greek pastry shops and
pubs and a zillion little grocers and many other useful enterprises. We got
"wetherburgers" at the local manifestation of the J. Wetherspoon's pub
chain. J. worked all afternoon and then I grilled the steaks and served
them with potatoes dauphinois (in cheese sauce) and grilled scallions. I
wanted to use the lovely goat cheese John & Mike had brought, so I grilled
it and served it over mixed greens with a balsamic vinaigrette; that turned
out very well.
On Friday, after coming up with a non-Amsterdam plan for the weekend, Jason
called and it turned out that the Amsterdam trip was on, after all. He had
a late meeting, so he got home quite late and we ordered pizza and packed
and scurried about trying to make sure we'd done everything that just had to
get done before the weekend.
Oh, I think I failed to tell you about my Very Exciting Bath. On Monday
night, I decided to celebrate living with a bathtub again after four years
and take a bubble bath. I thought about doing it by candlelight, but
decided I'd rather lie in the tub and read. So there I was, covered in
bubbles, when I was suddenly plunged into darkness. I yelled for Jason and
he came and brought me a candle and I showered off. Meanwhile, he
discovered the cause of the blackout. It seems that the overflow drain
wasn't connected to anything, so the water was splashing out of the tub onto
the floor and through the ceiling of the entry below to the light fixture
there. Of course, we had no idea where the breakers were, or how to do
anything about it. It turned out that only the overhead lights on the
bottom floor of the flat were affected; all the outlets there and everything
on the upper floor still worked just fine. I put in a call to the manager
of our property the next morning, but never heard back from him. When we
finally called again, he said that Pete, the builder would come round the
next day. He did, took out a remarkably burnt out bulb from the light
fixture below and re-connected the overflow drain to its proper pipe and
told me to let the ceiling dry out a bit before putting a new bulb in
there. So I wasn't electrocuted and I've even taken another bath since, but
it was Very Exciting.
Anyway, on Saturday morning we took the tube out to Heathrow and manuvered
our way through an incredible horde of Christmas travellers and finally got
on our plane, delayed by an hour. While we were waiting I looked into the
Smythson's shop across from the gate. They're a highly renowned fine
stationers. They had one display of all sorts of little books from keeping
notes about wines and foods and weddings. In addition, they also had little
books labelled "Blondes, Brunettes and Redheads," "Friends, Lovers and
Husbands," "Lovers and Losers," and "Seduction Techniques." Our flight to
Amsterdam was smooth and quick, once we atually managed to take off. We
caught a train from Schipol into the Central Station and took a tram from
there to our hotel. Red Hat had decided to put us in the Marriott. It was
nice enough, but there are so many wonderful little places in Amsterdam that
it was a bit disappointing to be in someplace so ordinary.
Once we'd unloaded our belongings, it was already after four and just about
dark. We made a reservation at a place specializing in "New Dutch" cuisine
that was recommended by our guidebook and one of the Internet sites I'd
found the night before. Then we headed out to walk along the canals and
through the Jordaan district. By the time we made it that far, we were
freezing and it was almost time for dinner, so we turned around and headed
back to d'Vliff Vliessen (The Five Flies). And yes, their logo is a small
swarm of, you guessed it, five flies. The restaurant is housed in a string
of five 17th century townhouses, so it is made up of delightful little rooms
and corridors, with exposed beam ceilings and ancient wood panelling. The
food, like California cuisine, focuses on fresh, locally grown ingredients,
harkening back to traditional Dutch cooking, which was enhanced for
centuries by the exotic ingredients brought back by their East India
traders. As soon as we were seated we were presented with a lagniappe of
lamb & chestnut pate with a dab of red pepper coulis. They had several
different prix fixe menus. Jason chose the three course seasonal menu. He
started with deep fried smelts and smoked herring on a bed of frisee in a
lovely light vinaigrette. His main course was roulades of chicken and
mushrooms served with a very creamy bowl of potato puree. For desert he had
a vanilla yogurt with stripes of chocolate in a berry soup. I picked the
five course daily menu. This began with a terrine of rabbit and duck served
with a berry sauce. Then there was a small pile of pieces of sole, braised
in a very light butter sauce, followed by two small bites of rabbit stuffed
with prunes and served on a bed of tiny Brussel sprouts. My main course was
a wonderful pheasant in thyme sauce, served on a bed of the best sauerkraut
I've ever tasted, with a potato croquette on the side. My dessert was a
spice cake filled with chocolate mousse and drizzled with creme anglaise,
with almond flakes and sultanas (white raisins) scattered on the plate. We
washed all of this down with a South African blend of cabernet and merlot
that the winery, Clos Malverne, calls a "Devonet." We both liked it better
at first than we did by the end and it went with various of our curses
better than others. Overall, our meals were both superb...Jason's first
course and my fish course were the standouts, but all the flavors were
subtle and well-matched.
We were both full and sleepy, so rather than crusing the Red Light District
in the cold rain, we headed back to the Marriott and had an early night. In
the morning, we were out of the hotel late enough that we decided to go
straight for early lunch. We tried "broodjes," the traditional Dutch
sandwiches, as Van Dobben's, reputed to be the home of the best broodjes in
the city. These are basically what I think of as standard white dinner
rolls, filled with whatever filling you choose. I had lovely rare roast
beef and Jason had the beef croquette (beef ragout rolled in breadcrumbs). I
could have eaten three or four of these, but Jason was highly motivated.
We continued on to the Amsterdam Historische Museum and spent a couple of
hours absorbing the history of the city since its founding around 1200.
It was very interesting and had a lot of good exhibits and beautiful
artwork, but failed to explain several key points like "why did the Dutch
decide they needed royalty?" and "why/when did they build the Enclosure Dyke
to turn the Zuider Zee from and inland sea to a freshwater lake called the
IJsselmeer?" I've been on a history reading jag lately--working my way
through _A History of Europe_ and I just picked up a history of the Ottoman
Empire--so maybe I'll see what I can find on modern Dutch history at some point.
On the way back through the Spui plaza, we stopped at a collection of
artists' booths that had attracted us on our way to the museum and bought a
gorgeous etching of a view of the roofs of Amsterdam. We watched a street
parade go by, complete with stilt-walkers and women dressed in silver
spandex and a float with Sinter Klaas reclining on it. We stopped at the
hotel briefly, then went on to the Stedelijk, the museum of modern art. We
had only 45 minutes there, so we made a very fast circuit of the
collection. While the titles were translated into English, there were no
curatorial remarks, or any hints as to how the collection is organized. So
it was a very experiential viewing, which is perhaps as modern art should
be. I look forward to going back, with more time, on our next trip to the
city.
From the museum, we headed down to the Singelgracht, the outermost of the
central canals. The guy at the canal boat stand told us he'd just decided
to cancel the five o'clock boat, because there were only two reservations
and he wouldn't go unless there were six passengers. As we stood there, an
Irish couple biked up and we agreed that if they needed six fares to make
the trip happen, we'd split the extra two fares and go. Of course, by the
time they actually left, there were twenty people on the boat. It was a
lovely ride through the canals, with all the bridges lit with strings of
lights. There were none of the monster power boats zooming out from under
the bridges, as I remember from my last trip to Amsterdam with my parents,
but I didn't remember from that trip how very tight some of the turns are.
In addition to the canals, we went out into the harbor and saw the new
interactive museum of technology and the reconstructed 17th century trading
ship at the maritime museum. We cruised back along the Amstel River and saw
the famous "Skinny Bridge."
After our canal tour, having had only broodjes and a hot dog during the day,
we were ready for rijstaffel at Kantjil en de Tijger, reputed to have the
best ristaffel in Amsterdam. It's a custom stemming from the Dutch
occupation of Indonesia and consists of a bowl of rice, surrounded by
various Indonesian dishes. We had thirteen, besides the rice: prawn
crackers, eggplant in a green curry-like sauce, beef and green beans and a
hard boiled egg, each in a re curry-like sauce, mackerel in a spicy paste,
deep fried chicken with a sweet fruit sauce, prawn satay in a soy-based
sauce, chicken satay in a peanut sauce, a salad of cucumber and mango, a
salad of lettuce in peanut sauce, sweet potato chips, and fried coconut to
sprinkle on top of everything. It was all yummy, but the mackerel was
incredibly sweet and we decided it would have to be our favorite.
We had talked about going to a coffeeshop after dinner, but we were both
tired and completely stuffed and, again, it was very cold, so we just went
back to our hotel and slept. We had to be up early this morning, to get to
the British Consulate by nine. After a trip to the hotel's breakfast
buffet, where we got Dutch pancakes with fruit as well as bacon, sausage,
eggs, broiled tomatoes and mushrooms, cold cuts and several kinds of
breakfast fish (herring, haddock and salmon), we jumped in a cab (all the
taxis in Amsterdam seemed to be Mercedes) and joined the line in front of
the door marked "VISAS" around 8:50am. We were very glad we were early, as
we were perhaps fourth in line once the windows opened and out of there by
10:15am. By the time we left there were about a hundred people in the
waiting room and it seemed likely that had we been ten minutes later, it
might have taken another hour. There were lots of interesting people to
watch...another American couple doing exactly the same thing as we were, an
American family with three kids under ten also doing the
dependents-to-a-work-permit process, a Nigerian couple with a very cute
little boy, and a man who reminded Jason of a plausible Dr. Who--he had
shoulder length hair and spectacles and was wearing dark red jeans and Doc
Martens, with a long leather jacket and seemed as if he would be slightly
kooky looking for any time in the last five hundred years or so, but not
completely out of place, either.
When we left the consulate with my new visa (which will allow me multiple
entries to the UK and the ability to work, should I so desire, until
Feb. 2002), we headed to the Van Gogh Museum. We only had about an hour,
but managed to at least see everything, and had a few minutes to actually
appreciate some of our favorites. I found the stuff from St. Remy and
Auvers very familiar (it was the theme of the Van Gogh exhibit while I was
working at the Met in 1986) and I was really taken with some of his copies
of Japanese prints that I hadn't really remembered. We bought a few
postcards and headed back to the hotel. We packed up our things and walked
out just in time to make the noon chekout deadline and took a cab back to
Schipol. We wandered around in the duty free for a while and got a quick
sandwich for lunch and then got on our flight. Everything went smoothly
there until we were approaching London. There was heavy cloud cover and
things were backed up in Heathrow. They held us in the air for a few
minutes and then made us taxi around on the ground for about twenty minutes
before letting us get to the gate. With no bags checked we sailed out
through Immigration and there was actually no one crewing customs, as far as
we could tell. Guess they decided to trust everyone on this flight--rare
for flights from Amsterdam.
The driver Red Hat had arranged for us was waiting in the terminal and we
climbed into another comfortable Mercedes and headed off into the gathering
dark. It really does strange thngs to one's sense of time to have it be
completely dark by four. By five it could have been one o'clock in the
morning, fofr all we could tell. It took about two hours to get up to
Cambridge, where we were dropped at Red Hat's new offices. They are still
somewhat under construction and very much working out of crates. I logged
on for a while and began this message, then changed in the bathroom and got
in the van hired to take us to the hotel where the Christmas party was to
take place.
We hung out in the bar and met people for almost an hour, then moved into
the dining room. They'd gotten silly hats for us and a box full of party
favors including streamers, noisemakers, poppers and rocket balloons. The
gang all dove into those and sent the rocket balloons screaming around the
dining room, nonplussing the few other tables of diners. I was seated
between Jason and a guy named Jorn, who took rather too great a liking to
the noisemakers. We were across from a delightful couple, Robert and his
wife Deb, who were lots of fun to talk to about how children expect their
parents to be grown-ups and don't want to let them keep playing through
adulthood. We'd ordered our dinners a week before and I'd managed to do a
better job of guessing what I might want to eat at such a remove. So I had
a lovely smoked haddock in cream sauce, followed by a minute steak (that
could have been more tender) in a delicious creamy sauce with sun-dried
tomatoes (and potatoes, cauliflower, mangetouts and baby corn, served family
style), with a berry pudding for dessert. Jason started with a plate of
melon and berries, had a venison eggplant casserole as his main dish, and
finished up with a slice of Christmas pudding (oh bring us some figgy
pudding!) in brandy sauce. I was getting fairly tired and we realized that
if we dashed off, the tube might still be open when we got to London, so
we got a taxi to the station, took the train to London and the tube to Manor
House and got home about midnight.
Now I need to throw on clothes and get the flat tidy and the stocks
replenished and a Christmas tree bought, because Anne & George arrive
tomorrow to spend the holidays with us.
