Places I Miss
Friday, 13 March 2009
And probably don’t exist anymore…
A real Kopi Tiam, with lau ah pek’s talking about horse racing at the top of their voices.
A true Hawker Centre, with ka-chuak crunching underfoot, where the food is served on colourful melamine plates that you throw in a big wash basin after you’re finished. Plastic chopsticks in a big ceramic pot on every round table with rigid, backless plastic stools cemented into the ground. And a lot of aunties tut-tutting waiting for your table. Oh sorry, THEIR table cos you shouldn’t take so long, you know… Typified by Newton Circus (probably razed to the ground now) and Lau Pa Sat (before gentrification).
A full-on seafood place on East Coast Parkway. Chilli crabs! I’d have gotten married in Singapore if they would have let me have it at a chilli crab craphouse. Yeah, fat luck.
You can keep your gourmet Michelin-starred gastropubs, fancy French bistros, and your air-conditioned “food courts”. I want the old-school open-air, fan-overhead, noisy, busy, rude, chaotic makan places of my nostalgia.
Time to switch on the Singlish, shock the husband, slap on the sunblock, and swan back into the country that threw me out1 a decade and a half ago.
1 They didn’t technically throw me out, but there was no future for me there.
A dork replies
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
I like Stephen Fry. I don’t know him personally, but I enjoy his writing, his blethering, his somewhat awkward sense of style. Not being a stalker-fan, I wasn’t aware that he was a gadget-freak until his recent outing. Like I said, not a stalker-fan.
That said, I take great umbrage at one sentiment in his latest post about his adoration of all things dorky:
So, believe me, a love of gizmos doesn’t make me averse to paper, leather and wood, old-fashioned Christmases, Preston Sturges films and country walks. Nor does it automatically mean I read Terry Pratchett, breathe only through my mouth and bring my head slightly too close to the bowl when I eat soup.
I was in complete agreement with him apart from that. What exactly is wrong with pTerry’s books? And is his loose sentence construction describing Terry Pratchett readers as being mouth-breathers and head-lowerers? I was appalled. Then chastened. It’s true. Every word.
Incidentally, probably apart from the lack of Discworld book ownership, Stephen Fry has described the majority of computer users. I’m not talking about those who just use Microsoft Office for work, but those of us who use them to organise our photos, music, movies, lives, work, and perhaps even interact with others socially1. Most of us who couldn’t care less which OS you run on what machine built by whom2. And yes, not everyone’s on World of Warcraft (although I would if I had the time).
1 Or anti-socially in the case of trolls.
2 Unless you’re a jealous and spiteful git. What’s with Windows users mocking me on my Mac over here anyway? I was a very early cross-OS user with a MacintoshII in my early childhood (oh SAM…), an IBM running MS-DOS followed by Windows 3.1 in my early teens was the home PC, and I built myself a series of cheap desktops since then running the whole range of Windows OS until XP, when I moved over to experiment with some of the free Linux OS. A power-board death of my last Fedora-running laptop left me stranded in LA without a home computer, hence the purchase of a Powerbook, which incidentally, is very cheap on this side of the pond. I’ve loved and hated aspects of ALL the systems I’ve made and bought in my short lifetime. I just like my Powerbook right now. It does the job quite nicely. Rant? Me? No… I just get constantly ridiculed about my Mac. It seems almost personal. Finally, a “PC” way to stigmatise somebody. They can’t make fun of my Scottish accent on a Chinese face, but they can mock my choice of OS. And my dog. They mock my ownership of a dog too.
3 Fark. That was a rant, wasn’t it? Sorry….
Hey you guys!
Friday, 6 April 2007
P doesn’t remember ever watching The Electric Company, whereas I watched it religiously as a child. It was on par with Sesame Street as far as I was concerned, just sans muppets and not so babyish. I don’t know what made me seek it out tonight. I started singing the “C is for Cookie” song by Cookie Monster on Sesame Street, then HAD to show P the original on youtube. From there, it morphed into a search for The Electric Company sketches. And it finally dawned on me that all those years ago, I watched Morgan Freeman deadpan his way through a kids’ show and never realised it. Sure I recognised Bill Cosby; he had The Cosby Show which we also watched religiously as a family. But Morgan Freeman never twigged my not-very-alert actor-radar. I want to watch them all again, but somehow, I fear I may be disappointed. What strikes one as a child as the very pinnacle of broadcasting output may seem a little condescending and overly simple now. I might purchase an episode or two from iTunes, or a DVD, or just spend the rest of the night on youtube…
Amendement: After dithering about I finally acquired a YouTube account just so I could bring you this:
CDs, tapes, LPs, MP3s; they all have a place in my life
Friday, 20 January 2006
Have today’s teens even touched an LP?
Proof my family is weird #567: My dad threw out all his records when cassette tapes became popular, instantly regreting it years later when the quality started deteriorating. And when CDs first appeared, he immediately jumped on the digital bandwagon, and re-purchased his favourite Gramaphone records.
This meant that from my teens onwards, all I used or bought were CDs, with the exception of lots of mixed tapes my friends would record for me. And when CD burners on computers became widespread (in my early twenties, I’m that old), the only tapes I possessed were specifically for P’s beloved 205, made in the pre-CD era (well, not really… I’ve seen 205s with CD decks; his was just the bottom of the range). They were critical for all long car rides beyond the reach of radio waves. (It was either Travis a million times per trip, or us singing Old Macdonald over and over again.)
And at some point during the dreaded PhD years, I bought a dirt-cheap Aiwa in a clear-out sale, which came with a record player. This resulted in my flatmate of the time buying me a few LPs from a charity shop for Christmas; possibly the first time I ever touched a vinyl record. The opening of an Oxfam music shop in Stockbridge fueled the fire, with good second-hand classical albums going for a quid each. A boxed set of the complete Beethoven symphonies could be obtained for under 10 quid!
Admittedly, a lot of the LPs I bought weren’t in tip-top condition (some even had mold!), but for someone who grew up with pristine, crisp, clean, digital sounds, the crackle of a scratched record playing some old jazz has its charms. Sure, not all of them continue to play accurate recordings, but I like to think of my second-hand LPs as aged wines. Different, with character. Perfect on winter evenings with the fire crackling and a glass of wine, or on cool bright summer evenings, dancing around the flat (again with a glass of alcohol in hand).
Now, of course, most of my CD collection lives as MP3s on the computer and MP3 player, and the hard copies, remnant tapes and vinyls sit in a storage cupboard. We left the cheapo Aiwa hifi out for the tenants to enjoy, but stored the turntable safely for our return. I guess you could say we’re retro-technophiles.
Food nostalgia
Saturday, 2 April 2005
I’ve been reading a few food blogs this evening:
- Cooking with Amy
- I was just really very hungry
- Delicious Days
- Chocolate and Zucchini
- Is my blog burning
And I was thinking of how much I’m going to miss having a decent sized kitchen, not that there’s even enough space in it now. I’m given to understand that apartments in LA are über-expensive to rent, and we’ll probably have to downsize a lot. I’m going to miss my baking tins/trays, my two drawers of kitchen gadgets and utensils that have taken me 10 years to accumulate, my crazy but effective fan oven, our collection of all sorts of different flavoured alcohols (for cooking, not drinking), a pantry of hard-to-find dried and bottled food, and a whole host of other cooking things. The upside is that there will be plenty of ‘ethnic’ food stores in LA. Whether we’ll be able to find them or get to them without sitting in traffic jams, and polluting the air, is another thing.
I’m sure the restaurants there will be good, but will we have any money to eat out? We’ve not eaten out much in Edinburgh recently… Quite a few of our favourite restaurants have closed in the last year. Among the much-missed are:
- Fitzhenry’s – replaced with a Smokestack, of all things (sacrilege),
- JM’s – a honest-to-goodness French bistro run by one man and a rotating waitress, where we spent many a happy evening getting stuffed, and
- a Chinese restaurant on Inverleith Row – never knew its name, but it had good dim sum (for Edinburgh, that is… still can’t compare to Glasgow/London, let alone Singapore/Hong Kong).
There are still plenty of excellent joints in town, but those places held special memories for us. JM’s in particular was a real find. We’ve had a whole host of French bistro-like places that excel in ‘Scottish-French’ cooking (even though the demise of the Pierre Victoire chain cooled the field a little), but none had the true atmosphere of a man/woman in the kitchen, sweating over several hot stoves to feed a small, but crowded room of regular customers. I wonder where he is now…
Was left to my own devices tonight, so I baked a sole (don’t know which type) with some lemon zest and juice squeezed into a little dashi (Japanese fish stock), with a very wee dram of random alcohol (Martini this time), and a knob of butter. How is it that when I cook, the kitchen looks untouched when I’m done, but when a blokey cooks, it looks like a wee tornado passed through the kitchen?
