I like my life

[liv]

Last week I moved house, and it was a bit stressful, as these things are, but honestly a lot less stressful than I expected, because I'm rich in both money and friends. And I'd saved up a treat for the weekend, which was to have a ridiculous mini-break in London with jack, celebrating the fact that we've been married for two years. And just this evening I was the Jewish speaker for an inter-faith panel discussion run by the Islamic society about religion and law. And now I'm at home in my new tiny flat with tea, so I shall talk about what a week I've had since I last posted.

I've already mentioned that doseybat and pplfichi were heroes of the revolution and spent the weekend before the move helping me get the house sorted out. I actually didn't have that much left to on Monday and Tuesday, though I didn't work quite as efficiently as I'd hoped. Several people sent me encouraging messages via comments here or Twitter or Facebook, and rysmiel and angelofthenorth and hatam_soferet held my hand virtually by IM, and you really did make the whole process a lot less horrible, so thank you all. I kind of gave up at about midnight on Tuesday night, with a few tasks still outstanding but I hoped I'd get away with it.

I ended up using Roman Removals, on the grounds that when I filled in a form on a website asking for quotes, they phoned me and had a helpful conversation where they made it clear they'd actually read all my information. In fact when they turned up they were surprised at how well prepared I was, so my worry that I hadn't got enough done was unfounded. They showed up just before 9 am and drove away from the flat at about 1:30. And then I had a bit of an emotional crisis because I wasn't sure if I'd made the right decision to change my life around like this, and the flat is really small and rather badly laid out, and I couldn't see my way to sorting out the pile of boxes.

I am absolutely sure that the right thing was to go away and have a really fun relaxing weekend, rather than trying to spend the weekend unpacking and sorting. I'd booked a slightly random package deal of show + hotel online; it wasn't as cheap as I'd hoped, but I ended up getting a really nice hotel and really good seats for about the same price as a budget chain hotel and bad seats. So I turned up in London and discovered that when they said the hotel was right by the Tower they weren't exaggerating. I met up with jack and we admired the amazing view and put on shiny clothes and wandered out into the cold clear day and sometimes I just really like London.

We had a pleasant light lunch at Kazan, which just happened to be near the theatre. They did some bits of the usual veggie meze really well, good hummus and olives, but kind of indifferent felafel and disappointingly, normal English bread rather than pita. Pricey, but given the location that's hardly surprising. jack had an excellently tasty cocktail, a pomegranate mojito; I was feeling a bit queasy from the stress so I ordered mint tea rather than alcohol, and I was pleased that it was actual spearmint, not peppermint.

We had wanted to see a musical, but didn't really know much about the genre, so I plumped for Wicked since I liked what I'd heard about it. It turned out that I really like the writing and the way it's midrash on The Wizard of Oz, but I found the music pretty uninspiring and I can't really remember any of the songs a few days later. I also loved the staging and the costumes, and the acting was great, particularly Verkaik's Elphaba. So it was about what we wanted, a really fun and dramatic and absorbing experience. (The disability stuff around the Wicked Witch of the East is more than a bit cringey, mind you, but I wasn't really watching in a critical frame of mind.)

And then. We went to dinner at Vanilla Black, the fancy fancy veggie restaurant several people recommended when I talked about getting into fancy dining. It wasn't in any way intimidating or over-formal, just very good and unobtrusive service. The decor was fairly plain, almost hinting at rustic without being too kitschy about it. I really appreciated how spacious the restaurant is, there is really plenty of room between tables. I also enjoyed the fact that they don't absolutely insist you have to drink fancy wine with your meal; they had some local craft beers as well, including a very nice wheat beer called Camden Gentleman's Wit which we opted for.

I should of course talk about the food. It was really hard to choose, since everything on the menu was unfamiliar if not downright weird, and obviously everything was edible. I enjoyed all the dishes we chose, but in a lot of ways it was so unlike the sorts of food I'm used to that it felt more like an experience than a meal. Starters were brie icecream with various sour-ish, purple coloured relishes; and savoury carrot cake with yoghurt and sushi ginger. I enjoyed the combinations of flavours and textures, and each individual mouthful tasted really nice too. For the main course we had a cheese pudding again with various relishes, and my favourite dish of the evening, Jerusalem artichoke pieces with salsify sauce. It had various bites of interesting things dotted about on the plate, toasted crumbs and lumps of flavoured ice and some really delicious lemon cream. Dessert was almost too weird; the options had a lot of what I'd think of as savoury ingredients, and we ended up choosing the most dessert-like things we could find. A treacle sponge with fruit which was nice but not exceptional, and a thing with "builder's tea" flavoured icecream, malt loaf and smoked paprika fudge, which again was a really interesting combination of individually good flavours and textures. I am not sure I would go back there; I definitely preferred Restaurant 22, which is perhaps more my level of fancy.

Then we walked back along the river and it was a lovely clear night, and we sort of vaguely considered going out for a drink but decided to get an early night. Breakfast was disappointing; it was a buffet and badly organized and just not very nice, but hey. We considered actually doing the tourist thing and visiting the Tower while we were right there, but in the end decided we would rather just hang out. So we wandered along and across the river and found a tebbly tebbly hipstery café in a converted warehouse just by London Bridge. Once we'd stretched out our cups of tea for as long as we reasonably could, we followed Kerry's recommendation and had some cocktails in the Great Northern Hotel at King's Cross. I had an Oriental Express with vodka and lychee and a touch of chilli, and jack had a Lady Violet which was a terribly clever thing with a layer of elderflower vodka and a layer of chambord and champagne. Which was a very nice indulgence to round off the weekend, original and very well balanced drinks. We ended up in Diwana for lunch, with the whole meal costing less than the cocktails, but hey. And then we had a half of nice cider for the road in the Cider Tap, since it was right there.

OK, I'm up ridiculously past my bedtime, I will post about the panel discussion another day.

Comments

[liv]

I don't have much of a standard to compare VB to; I've never eaten anywhere else that fancy. I'm not sure I'd have been able to tell if they were over-reaching. My sister-the-chef and lots of my friends who are proper foodies say good things about it, though.