Category: Tried and Tested

Occasionally she tries something in the name of blogging, and tells you all about it.

Surviving Cafe de Mort: Clearly Not Quite Deadly Enough

A wise person once said,

If you have to sign a waiver form before eating in a restaurant, you should probably just go to Pizza Express instead.

But then Pizza Express put a flyer on our table last week asking people to Instagram their meals while they ate, which is the sort of thing that makes me want to die anyway.

So last night I went to Cafe de Mort, picked up a pen and did this.

JHC – silliest of billies.

Wise people and me, we’ve never really got along that well.

Cafe de Mort is a two day, pop-up restaurant held at the Crypt at St Andrew, which is across the road from the home of ping pong in Holborn .

Much like Ping Pong, death was a distinct possibility – albeit not at the hands of me wielding a table tennis bat – but unlike Ping Pong, this event was completely free and all in aid of Remember a Charity – an organisation that’s on a mission to get people to include good causes in their wills.

Having acquired a Death Wingman earlier that afternoon on Twitter, myself and Holly walked through the candlelit arches to join a load of other people who clearly needed to be eradicated from the planet toute suite; including but not limited to Christopher Biggins, whose career suicide mission to the “I’m a Celebrity” jungle had evidently been unsuccessful, a couple of the (not-as-hot-as-the-other) girls from Made in Chelsea and Donna Air…from, err, the 90s.

Gregg Wallace off Masterchef was also there hosting, and we were relieved to see a man from St John’s Ambulance standing by – you know, just in case.

Ah, and then there was the food.

We were served five courses and accompanying cocktails all containing poisons and toxins that could potentially kill you if you complained too loudly in front of the chef, starting with Fugu (ref: the Simpsons), middling with False Morels and concluding with a healthy shot of 84.5% ABV rum. The compounds of choice included Cyanide, moonshine, Ghost Chilli, Tetrodoxin, Alfatoxin, Theobromine, and… are you dizzy yet?

I confess, after the first course – I was a little bit.

It wasn’t so much the food that got me, or the blissfully strong Bloody Hell Mary, as the paranoia. Suddenly, we became hyper-aware of the slightest belly tingle mid-scoff, the sudden onset of a cough, even waking up this morning with a slight twinge in my lower back is giving me a healthy dose of Puffa Fish Hypochondria in the cold light of day.

I think I might make that will after all.

The good news, kindly blog readers, is that I did wake up this morning. But the bad news is that means the members of the Made in Chelsea cast did too.

I suppose you can’t have everything.

C’est la vie.

27th February 2013
Review: The XX at Brixton Academy 16.12.2012

The XX were pretty much the soundtrack to some travelling I did back in 2010. Their first album had just been released a few months into my trip, and it accompanied me on a lot of long drives through the mountains of New Zealand.

Two years later, with their follow up Coexist ringing in my ears, an e-newsletter dropped into my inbox with a code for advance tickets to their upcoming series of gigs around the UK.

Their first stop?

One of my favourite music venues in London: Brixton Academy.

It’s difficult to know what a band like the XX will be like live. They’re fairly chilled and it was a Sunday night, too, which is bound to bring the mood down a bit – so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

Still, you know the venue’s going to be good; Brixton’s got that old skool rave vibe about it. The slanted floor gives everyone a shot at seeing the stage and the green neon dome out the front acts like a beacon to some of the biggest names in music who regularly name it as their favourite place to play.

But with The XX’s music lounging just above the chillout mark, I wondered what they’d pull out of the bag to keep everyone interested in songs we’d heard hundreds of times before.

I needn’t have worried. After support acts Mmoths and John Talabot did their thing, The XX performed one of the most visually stunning sets I’ve ever seen.

From the 3D hologram floating out across the sold out crowd at the start, to the curtain falling with the drop of Angels and – of course – that huge X which revealed itself slowly near the end, even before we get to the music they had everyone pretty much entranced with the pretty lights.

Musically, it goes without saying that Romy Madley-Croft is in possession of one of the loveliest speaking and singing voices a girl could have, while Jamie Smith’s remixes make up a chunk of my favourite tunes from this and last year. So, I’m biased. Clearly they could have spent their set blowing raspberries down the mic and I’d still be gushing.

But luckily they didn’t, they played through both albums with the bass rumbling right into my chest everywhere it should (I’m looking at you, Fantasy and Islands) – including an inspired little garage mix of Chained with Movin’ Too Fast, Another Groove and The Streets tinkering away underneath; all of which cemented my view that the members of the XX and I should probably be friends.

So in addition to thanking the XX for an bloody lovely Sunday night, I’d also like to thank:

1. The really, really tall bloke who moved out of everyone’s way half way through (eliciting an audible cheer from at least five people around me)

2. The person who’d already flooded the girl’s toilet with vomit by 8:30pm,

and

3. Brixton Academy for consistently being the venue where the magic happens.

The set list is here.

If you went, let me know what you thought.

17th December 2012
Let’s Play Ping Pong at Bounce in Holborn. Now THAT’S a Nice Idea.

There are all sorts of “nice ideas” floating about in London.

Harrods food hall is a nice idea – but it’s always packed and smells pungently of the wrong sort of cheese. Oxford Street is a nice idea, until you get there and want to leave.

Most of the places you hear about – new restaurants, bars, clubs, pop-ups, fancy attractions- are nice ideas in the same way that stroking a tiger is a nice idea (lovely, cuddly, fluffy thing) but you’re not about to stump up the air fare to the forests of Asia to find out. And besides, you could see one in London Zoo. But you probably won’t, because it’s too expensive.

Nice idea, though.

Which was sort of my reaction when I heard about this newfangled ping pong bar in Holborn, Bounce, which is done by the same people who charge £8.95 per person to roll a ball along the floor in Bloomsbury and Brick Lane. The concept screamed nice idea right up until the bottom of the press release, where it said:

Now, bear in mind that at the time, there were three perfectly functional free ping pong tables scattered around in Embankment Gardens and various other public spaces in London.

This, coupled with a can of Strongbow would, I supposed, produce much the same effect as paying £26 to do it for an hour in a bar in Holborn.

Because just think about that for a second. Twenty-six Great British Pounds for an hour of ping pong. 60 minutes of whiff whaff. 3600 seconds of table tennis.

Not being funny, but that’s a ticket to Alton Towers.

Ok? Ok.

So naturally, I held off on visiting this particular nice idea.

Until it was someone’s birthday… and they paid.

We went after work on a Friday night – which meant most of us in the group were already drunk on relief by the time we got there – and proceeded to consume more wine than you’d generally advise people to drink if you then plan on giving them a bat and bucket of incredibly light, whackable balls.

Because despite my misgivings, Bounce was really good fun.

In fact, you cannot know true joy until you’ve stood in a busy bar and hit a small, white, relatively harmless ball to the other side of the room and watched it ping effortlessly and painlessly off the back of a stranger’s head.

“Sorrrrry!” I’d yell in futile apology, like the owner of a puppy that just started devouring someone’s picnic, “it just got away from me!”, before firing another in the opposite direction.

That’s not to say I wasn’t a serious contender on the table, because we all showed some serious skills in that department, but hitting ping pong balls in a bar turned out to be a nice idea both in theory and practice.

On which note, if anyone wants to pay for me to go again, you’re more than welcome.

7th December 2012