Archive for the 'London' Category

Favorite Museum in London: Sir John Soane’s

Published on September 7, 2008 in London and travel. 0 Comments

skitched-20080907-064047.jpgI went to Sir John Soan’s Museum yesterday with Tim and his dad.

Soane designed this house to live in, but also as a setting for his antiquities and his works of art. After the death of his wife (1815), he lived here alone, constantly adding to and rearranging his collections. Having been deeply disappointed by the conduct of his two sons, one of whom survived him, he determined to establish the house as a museum to which ‘amateurs and students’ should have access.

The description on the website does not do justice to this amazing place, jam-packed with antiques, marble, and weirdly, mirrors. John Soan was an architect, and his eccentric, hodge-podge of a house shows off his obsession with space, light, mirrors and, well, marble.

What MADE the trip was the MP3 audio tour we downloaded before going. Huge props to Tim for hooking us up with this. The museum would have been overwhelming without it (”wow, lots of stuff, and I have no idea what I’m looking at”). The audio tour was ace. And like most museums in London, this one was free. I’ll definitely be going back.

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Seasonal Food: Blackberries

Published on August 28, 2008 in London, food, nutrition, photos and recipes. 0 Comments
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I always thought that the old cemetery across the road was just another neglected London landmark. That it may be, but amongst its overgrown shrubs and creepy crawly vines are blackberry bushes galore. Say what you will about foraging for food in a cemetery, but I feel pretty darn lucky. Their luscious fruits are just beginning to ripen and I suddenly find myself with more blackberries than I know what to do with.

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The skinny on blackberries

  • The blackberry season is from late July to early October
  • Blackberries get kind of gross after a day or two, so eat them straight away or freeze them
  • Blackberries are rich in antioxidants, including vitamin C and ellagic acid, and their seeds contain high levels of omega-3 and -6 fats, protein, and dietary fiber
  • Superstition in the UK holds that blackberries should not be picked after Michaelmas (29 September) as the devil has claimed them, having left a mark on the leaves by urinating on them

I have a few months before season’s end, and I’m all about a.) hoarding blackberries in my freezer and b.) experimenting with as many blackberry recipes as possible while there are still fresh blackberries to be picked. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so I like the idea of a blackberry vinaigrette for salads. Even so, I really want to try my hand at jam, and I can’t resist a good cobbler. Here are some other recipes I look forward to experimenting with:

Blackberry recipes

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Readers, I need your help! Do you have any blackberry recipes you can recommend? Send em’ over! I’m dying to try them!

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

Bank Holiday Weekend: Battersea and a BBQ

Published on August 26, 2008 in London, Personal, photos and travel. 0 Comments
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Last Monday was our Summer Bank Holiday here in London, so we did what we usually do on long weekends: avoid the major tourist attractions at all cost and eat lots of yummy food with loved ones.

Last Saturday, Tim and I took a tour of the now defunct Battersea Power Station. Here are some interesting facts about the power station (thanks, Wikipedia!):

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  • It was the first in a series of large coal-fired electrical generating facilities set up in England as part of the introduction of the National Grid power distribution system.
  • The first part of the structure was built in 1939, and the station ceased electricity generation in 1983
  • The building is the largest brick building in Europe and is notable for its original, lavish Art Deco interior fittings and decor.
  • The station famously appears in The Beatles’ 1965 movie Help! and on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals (shown right).

Saturday was a beautiful, rare sunny day in London and the power station was crawling with camera nerds and their associated tripods, massive telephoto lenses and multiple camera bodies. I felt like such an amateur!

Battersea Photo Set

Bank Holiday Monday was a bbq at Tim’s fam’s place in Aylesbury. BBQ’s have been woefully rare this summer, and I relished this opportunity to get my kebab on (if if I did have to share the grill with a few sausages.

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Bank Holiday BBQ Photo Set

Docklands Treasure Hunt

Published on April 12, 2008 in London, Personal and photos. 0 Comments
Is this really London?

What a way to spend a Saturday. Surreal and strange: the Docklands.

Easter Sunday in Stokey

Published on March 23, 2008 in London, Personal and photos. 0 Comments
Easter Sunday

We even had snow (sort of).

Chai Pani Restaurant Review

Published on March 22, 2008 in Freelance Writing, London and food. 0 Comments

Chai Pani

64 Seymour Street
London, W1H 5BW
020 7258 2000
http://www.chaipani.co.uk/

Category: Indian

Travel: Marble Arch
Open Daily 6pm-10.30pm; Mon-Fri 12pm-2.30pm; Sat-Sun 1pm-10.30pm

Devotees of chicken tikka masala will be disappointed by Chai Pani’s menu, which proves that India brings more to the table than fried samosas and korma curries. Chai Pani is the only restaurant in London to serve the vegetarian cuisine of Marwar, a desert region in west India. With dishes like Bhindi Subzi Vg (okra in “a sauce”) and Ker Saangri (a “concoction of desert berries and desert beans”), the vast menu leaves everything to the imagination.

Times like these, it’s usually best to let the kitchen decide, so I ordered a vegan thaali (another tough choice as Chai Pani offers a staggering 16 thaalis, including wheat-free, low GI and ayurvedic). Everything arrived hot and on time, and the waiter was only too happy to decipher the mysterious array of dishes before me. I now know that “dessert berries” look and taste more like shriveled twigs than actual food, and “sauce” is Chai Pani’s code word for “oil”. Fortunately, other dishes were more inspiring. The veganized raita was good enough to eat with a spoon thanks to a liberal dose of salt and chili. The daal was the best I’ve had in London - simple, fresh and very spicy, just begging to be sopped up with Bajra roti, a traditional Rathasthan millet bread. The chilled Ghugri salad of wheat berries, tomatoes and tangy lemon dressing was a refreshing accompaniment. When it came to endings, however, Chai Pani pushed the envelope of simple cooking a little too far, with bowls of jaggery (sugar) passing for dessert. This was a poor lead-in to the bill, which came to nearly £40 a head (including drinks).

Adventurous diners will go giddy over the eclectic offerings of Chai Pani, and the dietarily-challenged will find comfort in their meatless and wheatless offerings. But others will be confused. Chai Pani means well, but they need to come to terms with the palate (and pocketbook) of its western audience.

Dinner for two with drinks and dessert: £66

“News is something someone wants suppressed”

Published on February 10, 2008 in Freelance Writing, London, Personal, Swimming and fitness. 0 Comments
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My second Freelance Writing assignment was to write a local news story. But what is “news”, anyway? Lord Northcliffe describes it well:

News is something someone wants suppressed. All the rest is advertising.

But there’s more to news than just being, well, new. This is where the “Six W’s” come in. You may have heard of them:

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who
-Rudyard Kipling

All of this should fit into the first sentence of the news story. The rest of the article is just support, and from what I hear, you’re pretty lucky if the reader reads on past the first sentence; might as well give them what they want to know straight away.

What do my readers want to know?

To answer that I needed to pick a publication (a useful requirement for all of our assignments, to get us used to writing for a specific audience). As this was to be a local news story (for local people), I chose the Hackney Gazette.

I decided to answer a question that I hear over and over again in the locker room of the new Clissold Leisure Centre:

“Why is the leisure centre sucking? And what are they going to do about it?”

If news is something someone wants suppressed, then this certainly fits the bill. I considered trying to get this published for real, but in the end ran out of time. In fact, I barely had time to get real quotes and had to rely on the trusty blogosphere for user comments. I did attempt to obtain a quote from the centre’s manager, Paul Whiteman, but was brushed off when I told him that this was for a class assignment and not a real publication (unless this blog counts?).

Maybe I should pursue this for real; there’s an interesting public interest story here. The Clissold Leisure Centre was all over the news when the building, which more than quadrupled in price during construction, shut down after just 2 years due to multiple defects, some causing injury to users. But since it re-opened, no one’s really followed this up. And now here I go giving away an idea, but I’ll take the chance that the commissioning editor of the Guardian isn’t reading this.

I struggled to write this news story because it would work better as a feature, an exposé! But I plowed on, considering a few openers before settling on this one:

Frustrated Hackney residents are not impressed by the £32m Clissold Leisure Centre despite high expectations after it reopened last December.

What do you think? I think it could be better, but will save further effort for the commission.

Read my full article here:
£32m Clissold Leisure Centre falls short of expectations

References:

Other stuff worth noting (for that commission):

London’s £400m cycling transformation

Published on February 9, 2008 in London, cycling, fitness and travel. 0 Comments

Bicycle

We want nothing short of a cycling transformation in London. We are announcing the biggest investment in cycling in London’s history, which will mean that thousands more Londoners can cycle in confidence, on routes that take them quickly and safely to where they want to go.
- Ken Livingston, Mayor of London

Ken Livingston has mapped out a plan that could transform London into a bike commuter’s paradise by 2010. The plan includes

  • 12 bicycle ‘motorways’ that link popular residential areas to the city
  • A free bike hire scheme much like the one already kicking ass in Paris
  • A £25-a-day congestion charge on the highest-polluting vehicles
  • An over three-fold increase in the average number of daily cycling trips (from the current 0.5 million to 1.7 million)

I’ll believe this when I see it. Still, a similar scheme “successfully” executed in Aylesbury offers some hope. But I put that word in quotes because the model seems a little “hard going” according to The Guardian. Although the cycle routes themselves are great, they don’t really link up, so pedlars find themselves at the end of the route and have no idea where to go. Still, that’s what maps are for, eh?

Link to City’s two-wheel transformation in The Guardian
Link to Aylesbury’s cycleways leave room for improvement in The Guardian

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

My year of swimming: gaining the confidence to try something new

Published on December 16, 2007 in London, Personal and fitness. 0 Comments
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One of the hardest things about exercise is gaining the confidence to start in the first place.

The swimming pool is my ocean of insecurity. I remember swimming all the time as a kid, but pretty much stopped after grammar school (possibly because I became more aware of what I looked like in a bathing suit!). The longer I went without getting into a pool, the more I became convinced that I couldn’t swim in the first place.

After years of procrastination, I finally started swimming again last January. Now I wonder how I ever lived without it.

What happened to get me started? A few things…

  • I hurt my ankle - Long story short: I used to run regularly, then I injured my ankle. Yes, it sucks that I had to hurt myself to look for other forms of cardiovascular exercise, but that’s life!
  • I quit the gym - Another long story short: Without running, I turned to the gym for my exercise. But I eventually decided that the gym was an expensive way to not have very much fun.
  • I discovered London Fields Lido - The outdoor heated pool in the middle of rough and tumble Hackney is its own oasis.
  • Tim encouraged me - Support from friends and loved one is probably the best confidence booster their is. Tim suggested I start with the breast stroke, which gave me a bit of direction.
  • I bought a bathing suit and swimming goggles - Well I wasn’t about to swim in my undies.
  • I read about the basic strokes on the BBC website - It’s no substitute for swimming lessons, but it did give me an idea of what to do when I actually got into the pool.
  • I went swimming once - I didn’t commit myself to a long term swimming program. I started with one swim; if I didn’t like it, no one was forcing me to go back. But I did like it, and I did go back.
  • I looked at what other people were doing - When I was finally IN the pool, at the start of my very first lap EVER, I took a moment to survey the situation. The slow lane was a great place to get acquainted; there I found people of all types and abilities making their way across the pool and back again. Lots of people were clearly beginners. Others were hard core. But everyone seemed really happy to be there. So I plunged in and joined them!

This season, we often focus on all the things we want to change in the new year, but let’s not forget the things that went right THIS year. After all, the lessons we learn from success can help us to succeed in other areas.

Swimming is my most rewarding discovery of 2007. Yes, I’m fitter and stronger, but the best part is the fun in finding a new hobby. I’m not only learning how to swim, but also how to be confident and patient. My strategy from here is to use swimming as a template for finding confidence and patience in other areas of my life.

What about you? What’s your biggest success of 2007? How did you do it?

Photo courtesy of onionbagblogger on Flickr.com

Autumn in Clissold Park

Published on November 11, 2007 in London, Personal and photos. 0 Comments
St. Mary's and Pesky School Children