Jenny from the (concrete) block

I have a long running love affair with the Elephant and Castle stretching back to my late teens/early twenties, when I remember being in a friend's car, driving around the iconic roundabout late on a Friday night. The lights, the chaos, the concrete. A few years later Stealth moved in to a flat just off the Walworth Road and it quickly became one of my very favourite places. Anywhere.

The shopping centre, particularly, is an area that's often been maligned. I would say unfairly, but, as much as I adore coming out of the Bakerloo line tube station on a Friday night, and seeing the majesty of the Faraday memorial in front of me, looking to the left at the rain-streaked adverts for the bingo and the bowling pasted to the blue plastic cladding panels, I'm not sure that even I really think that's true.

Which is why I'm conflicted that the green light has finally been given to bulldoze the shopping centre to the ground. While proposals from Delancy building nearly a thousand new homes and creating a new university campus, there is an uneasiness that lack of affordable housing and the removal of many independent businesses will help hasten the social cleansing that has all ready irrecoverably changed the character of the area. With many people who have lived and worked in E&C pushed further into London's peripheries and much of the areas unique character lost.

Due to a very complicated arrangement that only could have been contrived by Stealth, on our last visit we had to be out of the flat at 9.30 on a Sunday morning. For two hours. As she had roused me early from my bed on Christmas Eve eve, I decided to extract my sweet revenge by insisting we all went for breakfast. In the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. 

Jenny's Burgers, tucked away in a corner on the first floor, remains curiously untouched by the 21st century speeding past just outside it's door. A relic from a time past there's a pane of glass in the window held together with hazard tape, a fruit machine, peppered with cigarette burns, by the counter and the interior decorated with Day-Glo pictures of the menu that have been printed out and carefully backed on sugar paper. There was also a little sprinkling of tinsel around the mirrors on our visit, to really ramp up the festive cheer.

Jenny's offers the JJ Burger, which appears very similar to Wimpy's - another iconic piece of British life that is slowly disappearing - bender in a bun. With it's curled frankfurter sitting atop a beefburger, I can't say I wasn't tempted, especially at £3.40 including chips, but it was even harder to pass up a fry up. And with the two guys behind the counter exuding a wealth of warmth and experience to all comers, I felt we were going to be in good hands.

You couldn't have a fry up with out a good cup of splosh, creosote-coloured and so strong the spoon stands up in it. As the Ewing and Stealth are fancy, they had a giant cappuccino and a gallon of black coffee, respectively. Alas, being extra caffeinated didn't help with the quality of the conversation much (although I must be fair and note the Stealth didn't try to read the Sunday Times on her iPad once).

I had chips almost solely to annoy Stealth, because of her mistaken belief they don't belong with breakfast. Although they were cut thin enough to be verging on fries, and a little wan, they tasted pretty good, and even better with a good squirt of abrasively vinegary ketchup. The sausage was comfortingly cheap and paste-like, just as it should be. 

Toast was white sliced (the Ewing, as she always does, ignored the sanctity of the completely refined fry up and went brown), with butter already melted. I added my beans, and a few errant chips, to mine for DIY triple carbs on toast.

While I'm reluctant to think good things about the changes that are going to befall this vibrant patch of South London in the coming months, I'm hoping provisions will be made for those who chose to make this their home and the unique character is (mostly) preserved. But for now, I was more than happy to see the annual outing of the Christmas lights around the iconic elephant that stands proudly outside the centre. Let's hope it's not the last time.

Take me to church

As a Brit, I obviously have a Brit level obsession with talking about the weather (what else would we discuss with our colleagues as we stare forlornly out the office window). I sometimes think that descent into middle age is directly proportional to the number of times you check the weather forecast. Despite the fact you can’t change things, and what’s going on outside often seems hopelessly at odds with the prediction anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, however, I didn’t have to check the Met Office website to know what would be going on in the skies up above. The fact that it was August Bank holiday weekend, coupled with our last camping trip of the year, made it a nailed on certainty that it would rain. Lots and lots of rain.

Clearly, as a Brit, I have also grown impervious to a bit of drizzle and so there was no chance that our trip - to Stoke Golding in Leicestershire, the village where Henry VII was crowned, heralding the start of the Tudor Dynasty - was going to be called off.

Yes, the Battle of Bosworth may only have taken place because Henry’s initial attempt at the throne had been scuppered by bad weather, but I felt far better prepared – having made detailed notes of the opening hours of all the pubs near the campsite, and remembered to pack a book, a waterproof jacket and a healthy dose of optimism….

Being prepared also meant thinking about what we were going to drink if we were tent-bound, and fortunately I found that Church End Brewery was only a few miles away from the campsite. 

Walking inside there's the welcoming and slightly nostalgic feeling of an old social club; hardly surprising, as that's what it originally started life as. With the freshly whitewashed walls and the smell of antiseptic soap, the loos reminded both me and the Ewing of primary school. This time without the Izal loo roll and with the addition of some racy advertising posters on the wall.

The brewery, you can see the workings through the glass window in the tap room, is clearly proud, and rightly so, of Goats Milk being named Supreme Champion Beer of Britain  2017 by CAMRA - I particularly like the 'Gloats Milk' poster by the bar - so obviously I had to have a pint. Say what you like about CAMRA, but they clearly know about ale, and this was a very good pint; dry and biscuity with a hint of lemon. Controversially I think I preferred the Folk a Cola, a refreshing golden bitter brewed for the Warwickshire Folk Festival. 

They were out of home made sausage rolls (boo) but they did have a range of pies and pasties from the nearby Rowley's butchers (yay). As well as being the spiritual home of the pork pie, the Midlands also produces the king of cheeses: Stilton.  So what could be better than a pork pie topped with the blue cheese. We also had a, very good, hot steak pasty; and possibly another pork pie.... 

Although it was still early on Saturday lunchtime I was already on my two pint limit (the Ewing was driving, plus knew we had to put a tent up...) so we got a 4 pint takeaway of the Irish Coffee Stout to take to the campsite. A beer the Ewing had been rhapsodising over at the brewery. A coffee and Jameson whiskey infused beer, this was as delicious as it sounded, although drinking it did hinder my attempts at helping sustain an erection. I think my wife was happy I kept my distance.

With the weather set to be biblical floods and plagues of locusts on Sunday, the one thing in our favour appeared to be that the George and Dragon, the Church End owned pub in the village, was offering a roast. Hot meat and potatoes, lashings of gravy, pints of well-cellared ale and shelter from the elements. Suddenly the rain didn’t seem so bad. That was until the Ewing phoned up to book and found it had been cancelled.

Initially this was fairly devastating news – a day trapped under soggy canvas, surviving on rations of cereal bars and and Pringles (although the second bit didn’t actually sound too bad) – but it quickly improved when she discovered the reason for the cancellation was because it clashed with Stoke Fest, the annual village beer/music/dog festival the lady on the phone excitedly recommended instead. Which is where – after several faintly hysterical, but strangely enjoyable, hours waiting for the rain to stop - we found ourselves.

Like all good village get-togethers there were hot dogs and burgers, and an ice cream van and a tombola and several, damp, dogs, dressed in their Sunday best from the dog show earlier. There was also some pretty decent live music, including young local lads playing ‘classics’ like Nirvana and Oasis, which they probably qualify as, which made me feel even more decrepit than I had waking up that morning, after a night on the camp bed.

Of course there was cask beer from Church End available in the beer tent, and of course that’s what we chose to drink, blasting through a couple of pints each of the excellent Gravedigger’s dark ale and the punningly named but less successful, What The Fox's Hat golden ale.

As well as a trio of pubs, Stoke Golding also has an Indian restaurant, so that's where we headed for some warming food (and it certainly helped warm the tent later that evening). They didn't serve Church End ale, but I did have a nice cold pint of Cobra lager, which was the perfect match with our chicken tikka-stuffed naan bread. My new favourite naan bread.

Monday dawned bright and sunny, which meant a happy morning drying out socks, a chance to read our books and drink copious amounts of campfire tea in the late summer sunshine. And, even better, the George and Dragon, normally shut at the start of the week, was open for the bank holiday for lunch and drinks.

After the Ewing spied and nabbed a homemade sausage roll and a gargantuan scotch egg to take home for later, I dove straight into a pint of the Old Englishman's Summer ale. Quickly chased with a pint of Gravedigger's ale, the wonderful roasty mild I had first sampled the day before, and my favourite of all their beers I tried over the weekend.

I was also overjoyed to see that they had faggots on the menu; one of my absolute faves and a must order whenever I see them, especially when served with the most glorious fresh cut chips, lurid mushy peas and  beefy gravy. Served piping hot, anointed with lashings of salt and gravy, there was no better plate of food to warm my, slightly damp and soggy, cockles. The Ewing also readily inhaled her fish and chips, hence the lack of photographic evidence.

Puds were of the resolutely old school variety which, again, filled me with little frisson of joy. Who could fail to be excited by a great wodge, of raisin-flecked, bread and butter pudding sitting in a lake of vanilla custard, or a paving slab of molten sticky toffee pudding in a lake of cold double cream. Both little moments of rib-sticking pleasure. 

On our way out the village we found this blue plaque which, in a wonderfully banal way had been attached to someone's modern brick gatepost. I don't remember much from my history A Level, but I do remember reading that the Winter King passed a law that stated 'that no Gascony or Guienne wines should be imported into any part of his dominions.' He must have sampled a pint of the Goats Milk.

Pork life (under canvas)

I’m rather fond of camping, in fact a few nights under canvas was the very first trip the Ewing and I went on together. We went about ten miles up the road, it rained pretty much constantly and our air bed had a slow puncture, but that just seemed to make it all the more exciting and romantic. Well, until we came to our final morning and the rabbit with mixamatosis turned up. My wife may laugh thinking back, but I still have nightmares.

As sure as a circle keeps going round, our most recent trip together was also camping, this time to the Pig Place, an hour up the M40, on the Oxon/Northants border, following a lovely visit a few years back. And yes, it rained, and our mattress developed a puncture. Although now, after a decade together, the drizzle and lying on the lumpy ground had lost its allure somewhat. We have upgraded to a better tent at least, so on this trip we were happy sitting in the porch, waiting for the black clouds to pass so we could light the stove and have a cuppa.

It did start out bright though, so we made the most of the new Trotters Bar, a trailer with glorious views over the Oxford Canal and Cherwell Valley. With Thatcher’s on draft or local cider available by the pint, as well as a large range of gins and other spirits. We enjoyed a cider with blackcurrant (very 90s uni days) and a strong scrumpy, while sinking into a couple of the sofas that are positioned in a great spot on the slope leading down to the water.

The whole place is pretty idyllic. Set on a smallholding – featuring the eponymous pigs, chickens and runner ducks, the best kind of duck – it’s a beautiful, but back to basics spot.  While there are no showers and the only water is from their own borehole, there is a well-stocked farm shop on site, as well as a trailer kitchen serving freshly prepared food that is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Dinner options included sweet and sour pork or a pork balti (plus a couple of veggie choices) served with chips, rice or a jacket spud. I had the sweet and sour with chips, which was everything I hoped it would be. Lean chunks of loin, from the farm, in a tangy sauce with mixed pepper and pineapple sitting on top of a bed of excellent chips; hot and crispy and fluffy and all tasting even better after a couple of pints of cider. If your're lucky, you might even get a visit from Sid, although there was no way I was sharing.

We may have been going back to basics, but we hadn't abandoned civilisation completely. So, of course, a bottle of organic port was an essential nightcap. it may have gone some way to insulating against the cold, but it certainly didn't help with four o'clock moonlit stumbles to the Portaloo, or my head the next morning. I did get to see the sun rising over the canal though, so not all terrible.

If dinner was good, the brekkie was superb, as good as I remembered, maybe even better. And, even better than that, if you get up early enough (everyone gets up far too early when they're camping) you get to see the farm animals being fed. The sight of the pig losing his shit over a loaf of bread was quite something to behold. I think I've finally found my spirit animal.

Happily for my wife, I enjoyed my first meal of the day in a more relaxed manner, all while admiring the glorious view across the Oxfordshire countryside.  We both chose the full english and, although I’m not such a committed ouef-avoider now days, I haven’t moved much beyond omelettes and scrambled egg, so the Ewing had my brace. They offer hen or duck eggs (both from the farm) so she had two of each, although I only seemed to get half a slice of toast and a small chunk of sausage in return…

There were also fantastic bacon and sausages (relatives of our new friends) as well as mushrooms, properly hot baked beans (something of a skill in itself) and toast buttered right to the edges. As well as the most gorgeous view through the mini orchard of apple trees and across the canal.

While I hate to shatter the carefully crafted illusion that I'm basically Robinson Crusoe reincarnated - and I could repair the mattress by lashing together a few branches, while simultaneously rubbing a couple of stray twigs to start a fire to cook a spot of lunch I had fished and foraged - I must confess we spent the afternoon at the nearby retail park buying new camp beds, followed by watching the Spurs game at a nearby pub, where I foraged for Scampi Fries and cider instead.

Saturday night at the campsite saw the annual performance by the Mikron Theatre Company - who arrived by narrow boat from Yorkshire – performing Revolting Women, a story commemorating the centenary of the suffragettes. So of course, for the first time all weekend, it hammered down. In honour of their visit there was a barbecue with wild boar hot dogs and pulled pork rolls. Unfortunately I don’t have any evidence, but the Ewing retreated to eat her dinner in the car, which probably tells you all you need to know about the mood in camp….

Thankfully a couple of beers plus a very restful night on our new camp beds meant we could greet the, slightly grey but still dry, morning with renewed vigour. Especially when it involved  a feathered guest who had come to say hello, plus hot sausage sandwiches with lashings of oxford sauce and several mugs of steaming tea. All hail the electric kettle by the bore hole.

After managing to get the tent down and cram everything back into the boot just as the heaven's opened again, we smugly decamped down the road to the Coach and Horses in Adderbury, to a lovely traditional pub which also boasts what must be the best value Sunday lunch in the whole of Oxfordshire.

Despite not having a reservation, the landlord very kindly squeezed us in at the bar thanks to a late cancellation. And when our roasts appeared I could see why. Four quid for pork loin, which of course I had to round the weekend off with, or half a roast chicken and stuffing, served with no less than five roasties (and yes, Amy One Potato ate them all) plus boiled veg that tasted reassuringly like being back at my nan’s house again. Only this time we didn’t have to hear the stories about so-and-so over the road; and I didn’t have to do the washing up.

Even better was the fact that they had a pudding menu (two fifty each) that included jam roly poly and custard. One of my very favourite things in life and the perfect antidote (along with another pint of bitter for the non-designated driver) to the persistent drizzle that had (mercifully) started the moment we stuffed the last bit of camping gear in the car.

While it maybe in turns too hot, too cold, too wet, too windy. camping is still a great chance to relax, get back to nature and, best of all, have a good giggle. In fact, the Ewing loved it so much she's already bought a new super duper sleeping bag and booked our next trip for the August Bank Holiday. I've packed the port, painkillers and a poncho (bank holiday equals guaranteed rain). What else do you need?

Portugal - squid with the squad

While I was very excited to have finally finished writing about my American adventures – well, almost finished, there’s still the story of the day I went to Venice Beach and ate avocado pizza followed by avocado ice cream, but maybe that’s a story best left untold – working through the enormous amounts of food I had consumed meant that in the meantime I had managed to fit in a whole ’nother holiday.

Normally I wouldn’t plan trips so closely together - if only to give my cholesterol levels a chance to stabilise - but my Dad was visiting from Down Under and had suggested meeting for a week in the Algarve, home of many memories from the many great  holidays we spent there when I was growing up. It also meant that I wouldn’t have to properly unpack from my States trip. And, however much I think I hate doing other chores, there is a special circle of hell dedicated to opening your suitcase and actually dealing with the stuff stuffed inside.

While I’ve decided to only write about one restaurant we visited on our trip - no one has time to read about every sardine or Super Bock we ate over the week (spoiler, there were a lot) -  Portuguese food is, on the whole, both excellent and underrated. It may not be fancy, but from cold beers to warm custard tarts, salt cod to cabbage soup, roast suckling pig to piri piri chicken, there are plenty of good ways to get fat.  

And of course you can wash it all down with some serious booze with a range of port wines, madeira, vinho verde, ginja cherry liqueur, and medronho – a potent firewater made from the fruit of the strawberry tree, which confusingly look like lychees, that is a speciality of the Algarve – all cheap, good and available in copious quantities. I also recently discovered they make a rice pudding and cinnamon flavour cream liqueur, the thought of which fills me with a kind of delirious excitement that something so magical exists.

While it might not be the fanciest or the hippest, and it’s certainly not the quietest, Adega da Marina does remain one of the best known restaurants in Lagos. Even the Ewing had heard of it before our visit, although that may have had something to do with the fact that they are known for the football scarves and flags that hang from the rafters all around the cavernous room.

One of my Dad’s friends, who owns the apartment we were staying in, gifted them a promotional Wasps RFC flag, sponsored by a well-known cider maker, but it was put up on the wall with the Magners side facing out. Maybe they are just as upset they moved from Wycombe to Coventry as I was.

All meals in Portugal start with couvert - small plates that typically include breads, pates, olives and cheese - that are bought, unbidden to the table and are charged if you eat them. You can ask the waiter to take them away if you don't want them, but there was precious little chance of us rejecting slices of crusty bread slathered in sardine paste and the round of cheese made of a mix of cows and sheep milk. 

The house salad is also excellent; a simple mix of knobbly tomatoes and cucumbers, sweet white onions and grated carrots, and topped with fresh oregano and a simple oil and vinegar dressing.

The dish they are probably most famous for is the prawns, ordered by weight, either simply boiled in the shell or, as we ordered, fried in plenty of garlic and olive oil. We ordered 400g , above, a giant platter that was nearly too much (there isn't really such a thing when it comes to garlic prawns) that cost the princely sum of 16 euros.

As good as the prawns were, the platter of fried baby squid from the special board were even better. Soft and bouncy, like the lyrics of a Prince song, there wasn’t a hint of grim, fishy rubber band elasticity, just the sweet hint of the sea combined with a slight hint of iodine from their ink and lashings of good olive oil and salt.

Alongside, although barely necessary, was a mountain of chips. While I’m fairly indifferent to a fried potato, or really a potato of any kind (with apologies to my Irish grandmother) there is something about a Portuguese potato that is quite untouchable. Holidays as a kid would see me eat my annual allowance in a fortnight, and I am pleased to say they are still as wonderful (and I have still retained my voracious capacity).

I didn’t get pictures of my Dad and the Ewing’s main meals, (probably just as well, judging the quality of the one’s I did take) but they enjoyed the classic piri-piri chicken and a majestic whole sea bass respectively. So much so that neither of them could manage desert, even between them, something virtually unheard of. Even more so when the Ewing had to walk past the desert cabinet on the way to the loo and was given a recommendation for the syrup-laden orange roll by a very enthusiastic lady.

Obviously she wasn’t going to let that information go to waste, so when my Dad was at the Irish bar by the Marina watching Ireland win their first test Down Under since before I was born (not before my wife and my father though, backing up my assertions during our trip that I wasn’t yet old) we decided to go back for lunch a deux. Partly for the orange cake and the prawns, and partly because we knew they would be showing the Belgium Algeria game from England’s World Cup group and it would be a shady place to watch it away from the heat of the afternoon sun.

As well as the prawns, we also ordered a portion of the clams à bulhão pato, served steamed with white wine, lemon and garlic. Like their mastery with spuds, the Portuguese are pretty good clam-cookers -  in fact so much so that one of their most famous dishes, Porco à Alentejana, combines pork, clams and cubes of fried potatoes (I had a very good version a couple of doors down from Adega on our first day in Lagos, accompanied by a bottle of Matteus rose and the Portugal versus Morocco game) – but I digress.

These were equally wonderful, especially eaten, like the prawns, with a pile of crusty bread to drag through the briny, buttery juices and accompanied by another bottle of cold vinho verde. They also contain a serious amount of garlic, so make sure your significant other tucks in as well, or holiday romance may be off the cards.

The orange roll looks a bit like our swiss roll, but has a close texture and richness which comes from the fact it is made entirely of eggs and sugar, with no flour at all. It's then soaked in a orange syrup, and is sweet and rich and fragrant, like most Portuguese puddings.

I went with the classic pudim flan, which is very similar to a creme caramel. A rich baked custard of milk, cream, egg yolks and sugar, in a smoky puddle of caramel sauce and best served with a strong bica, or espresso coffee, alongside.

After twenty odd holidays to the Algarve over the years, it was great to finally show the Ewing some of my happiest childhood memories - including the beautiful beach that my Dad and I both confessed we never really liked going to. Too hot and too sandy. The apple never falls far from the tree.

Luckily she loved the holiday just as much as we did and there's already talk of returning, to both Lagos and Adega, where I'm looking forward to completing a hat-trick of visits.