A Word From My Sainted Sponsor

While my Blog holiday continues unabated.....
My blog sponsor, Nick Crean of Prestat wrote a piece, parts of which appeared in the Spectator.
It's about What Makes Him Tick
Take it away Nick the Tick......
*Lying in bed whilst the rain beats down and the wind whips through the trees is ticking stuff - I'm having a good month. Hearing the distant chime of the grandfather clock striking a dark night hour long before cockcrow; knowing there are a few more hours to zizz.
*Breakfast and the smell of cooking bacon.
*Monday mornings, arriving at our artisan kitchens pausing outside to catch the exotic smell of chocolate on the air; standing amongst the chocolate melting tanks in our hot fridge with my eyes closed just breathing, like a
yogi. Tasting new chocolate ganaches infused with the finest spices: dreaming of souks and demons and Blair behind bars; marveling at the sheen of a perfectly tempered dark chocolate bar. Being hasty with time and scoffing a violet crème in an unnecessary moment of pretend hunger. It still amazes me how so many gentlemen potter out of their clubs to buy their weekend Rose & Violets from our shop. I can tell a man who likes a fondant at a great distance. It's all in the walk sir.
*Punctuality in business: time is so precious, be there or why bother? In my twenties, I worked for Charles and Maurice Saatchi. I was late once."Was I on holiday, ill; in mourning?" Never again. Charles once asked me to delay Concorde. He was late, the time sin. He still thinks I did, just once. Time controller me; good career move.
* Seeing a painting and in that second knowing that you're going to buy it, (or in Charles' case the show) is as exciting as seeing a beautiful girl skimming late and dramatically across a restaurant to sit close (to me.) Girls can make time stretch remarkably attractively.

Catching the afternoon racing just to see the horses' ears twitching with excitement as the crowds roar on the winners: go for it Carruthers.

• Watching the great Time Lord, Dr Who , with my daughter Rosabel is time spent invested in who gets more scared: don't ask.
• Taking our son Alexander shooting accompanied by his small black working cocker, Sooty,and my old chocolate Labrador, Prestat, ( what else was I going to call the dog?). Watching Alexander hit a high Hampshire partridge, knowing this natural ability must be genetic.
* Holding our eldest daughter, Georgia's fragile hand as she boldly takes her first steps at the age of 18 after years of love and therapy, speeds every emotion I know: saying thank you again and again.
*Evening time and the heady memory of Fracas, timeless and possibly Oedipal.
* A chilled Stolichnaya vodka martini, a great Bordeaux, a perfectly timed beetroot soufflé, stirring milk and cream into shaved chocolate flakes, sneaking up to bed, crisp linen, Graham Greene, turning out the lights and finding her there for the final kiss of the day.
Tick on....forever.

Nick Crean Chairman Prestat Finest Chocolates and Truffles.

This Blog is Posted Every Monday... on the whole....

There will not be one on Oct 26th as I will be traveling

Musical Recommendation of the Week:
Who's Going To My Soul? - Gnarls Barkley

Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It's A Rant

On October 13th I was went to The Literary Review lunch in Fitzroy Square for their annual lunch to award for a poem that ‘scans & rhymes & makes sense’.
The Review lunch attracts the literary and the eccentric in equal numbers.
One woman told me how mother’s friend had just introduced her to someone ‘training to be a psychopath’.
A Canadian man wearing a facemask then joined us and got onto the subject of his obsession with of impending Swine flu.
He shed some light when he described how, as a child his mother would wrap his birthday cakes with cling-film so no germ-clogged breath fumes could contaminate the icing as he blew the candles.
I was very amused by this, but he looked as me in dismay and wailed quietly, ‘But it’s a good idea!’

The highlights of Frieze week for me were Museum of Everything [more of which another time] and the Age of Marvelous in Holy Trinity Marylebone, the beautiful neo-classical church designed by John Soane.
Curated by Joe La Placa, the show was a modern day take on the Victorian Cabinet of Curiosities and was showing one of my favorite artists, Alastair Mackie who makes perfect spheres out of mouse skulls. [pictured]
It also featured Polly Morgan who has breathed life back into the defunct art of taxidermy and Kate MacGwire who has managed to create truly strange objects out of bird feathers. Her spooky serpentine knots that fill up antique mahogany cabinets remind us that birds were once reptiles whose scales grew more and more delicate until the could defy gravity.

Particularly arresting was the black Pieta a beautifully executed figure of Christ sitting in an electric chair by Paul Fryer. Fryer [pictured] was wondering around the show, startlingly handsome, in a long coat, wild hair & beard making Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester look like a simpering beta male. He made the point that if Christ had been killed in the States, Christians would be walking round with little electric chair necklaces rather than crucifixes.
The ape nailed to a cross is even bolder. His motivation was to highlight the plight of the Western Lowland gorillas, but with the replacement of man for a monkey, it manages to speak of man’s cruelty to man, that sophistication is wafer thin & inventing ornate ways to kill each other doesn’t put a murder on a higher plane.
[Interestingly, Holy Trinity, built not to commemorate the higher planes of consciousness, but to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon.]

The show triggers my visceral loathing for organised religion. They dress themselves up as spiritual, but are so blatantly about governance and male hierarchy as to make a lady snort.
I can’t understand how any woman could want to be a part of a church – or mosque - that considers female service unworthy of inclusion. I'm all for the sacred and the importance of ceremony, I just can't stand the intimidating sexually-twisted bullies in maxi dresses who claim to be in a conference call with a supreme being.
I love the fact that the current Uncle Fester look-alike Pope has just issued an open invitation to all the misogynist Protestants to swap to Catholicism.

We look across at Iran and see a religious state that reveals it's murky political intent by rigging an election to keep its puppet in power & wields a huge ‘morality’ policeforce that menaces the public for tiny infringements of dress code & displays of ordinary affection.
Now, in the aftermath of the rigged election, we hear there is systematic rape of imprisoned protestors; state sanctioned by the ‘holy’ men who so disapprove of sex.

At the beginning of the month my friend Neil, who goes to about five plays a week, took me to see The Mysteries, an adaptation of the medieval plays of biblical stories performed by a South African troupe at the Garrick Theatre.
[Lucifer pictured. Cast as a woman]
As the interval curtain came down, I headed straight for the nearest exit.
I just can’t buy into those ghastly old chestnuts of all the angels being blokes, of woman being taken from Adam’s rib and Mary’s premarital sex being retrospectively dressed up as a virgin birth; it’s obnoxious sexist bullshit….the etymological root of Papal bull……..

I think I might be all ranted out. Oh, one last postscript rantlet.....

While he was alive there must have been hundreds of yards worth of column inches written about what a freak Michael Jackson was and how his attempts to look white were a neon sign pointing to his rampant madness and self-loathing. Reports on his post-mortem have only bothered to write a couple of words about about the fact that he was suffering from the pigmentation leaching skin disorder that he always claimed he was suffered.

This Blog is Posted Every Monday... on the whole

Musical Recommendation of The Week:
Feel The Music - Guru

Prestat Chocolate Review No.9

Organic Dark Chocolate Mint Wafers.......
Sophistication is drinking espressos rather than lattes, eating one's meat rare, eggs soft boiled, enjoying brandy & prefering dark chocolate to milk.
I like my meat like the bottom of an old shoe, my eggs like bullets & my chocolate pale...so I approach the Dark Chocolate Mint Wafer like a neolithic tribeswoman approaching a Braun juicer....
When I went to visit the gothic mansion that is the Prestat factory, they explained to me that such is the power of mint to permeate other ingredients that it is not only kept in separate boxes & cupboards, but completely segregated store rooms. Powerful, dangerous, mint can escape & invade unless put under draconian controls. It is the Hanibal Lector of the sweet world.
When I took the lid off the the deep pink and green box the smell was overpowering. Luckily the thin wafers didn't look too aggressively dark. It's chocolatey and less minty tasting than initial smells indicate.
Thinking about it's Lector-like powers I was reminded of the time I bit quite a chunk out of Jody Foster's shoulder while helping her adjust a shoulder strap after squeezing through the trapdoor into her Panic Room. [Her girlfriend was at a White Snake concert at the time.]