A quick Google search assures me that the French use ‘être une bonne pâte’ (to be a good dough, more or less literally) as a vaguely colloquial equivalent of ‘a decent chap’ (or female equivalent, no doubt. But we know that I could spend hours of agonising over register and gender-neutrality, and actually I’m just […]
I suppose it’s partly my own fault: it’s what happens when you spend too long doing pretentiously highbrow things like listening to Radio 4 and taking a vague interest in culture. Such activities are the preserve of those with family trees the length of the average oak, whose university education was cheaper than their primary […]
It was, in the nineties, suggested that Britain was moving towards a classless society. A few years ago I read an article in which the journalist set out to find someone who self-indentified as upper-class (even the landed aristocracy, it turns out, are ‘middle-class’, at least in their eyes). In 2013, the BBC announced that […]
Incidentally, I have an early memory of walking home from the paper shop with my dad, dodging the uneven bits of pavement and singing about ‘4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’. My musical indoctrination clearly started from an early age. But anyway. I am currently in the grips of what I think of as a news […]
I grew up on an island. A reasonably sized island, a country, where we eat fish but don’t necessarily live by the coast. (Indeed, even when I was taken to the ‘seaside’ as a child, it was often the Blackpool-Southport area, where the tide goes out so far that you can’t even catch a glimpse […]
10. The Peace Boat(s). We saw them wandering around Machu Picchu first, hundreds (or at least, it felt like it) of Japanese tourists, all in white gloves, oversized sunglasses and broad brimmed hats, and with a brightly coloured sticker on their chest with a picture of a cruise ship and the words ‘Peace Boat’. Their […]
Huancayo: a town with a population of 400,000, and located at an altitude of 3244m above sea level. A place described by Lonely Planet as giving the traveller “the impression of arriving in some Wild West frontier town. Tumbledown outer suburbs, dusty, chaotic streets, people wandering seemingly at random and all around the mountains rise […]
I know, I know… It’s been a while, so long that I’m now in a different country… But I blame South American internet, and too much time exploring and eating cake to write about it. Anyway, I’m back (at least for now!) and here with yet more observations of the oddities of life. You see, […]
OK, let’s start with a little quiz. Ten famous Gabriels? There’s the angel, known for appearing to a certain woman in Nazareth, and being played by the blonde girl in primary school Nativity plays (I suppose of the predominantly male parts available, an angel is closer to androgynous than a Wise MAN…) Erm… and then… […]
5th March 2014, Sucre, Bolivia I know, I know. I know what you’re thinking. What happened to the cake? What happened to Fridays? Well, I don’t really know. I guess La Paz is a wonderful city for street food (keep your eyes peeled for a future post on the many kinds of pastry you come […]
CakeonFridays 