070705

What can anyone say after a day like today?

I'm glad to report that both of my brothers who were on duty in London today are well. One of them was very close to the scene and heard some pretty grim things from colleagues who had been down in the tunnel.

I hope everyone you know in London was safe.

yum

why are all my friends veggie when i start discovering amazing dishes with meat in and i can't share them?!

chorizo soup with chick peas and spinach, garlic, tomatoes, onions etc. spicy and tasty. three cheers for jamie oliver and tupperware boxes.

humph

feeling grouchy that i can't make saturday 16th festivities with mates in london because of running the next day but it's all for a good cause and i'd only be drinking, laughing, flirting and having an absolute blast if i was out in the capital for the night. who would choose london night life when you can stay in the provinces and torture yourself by running with several thousand other people in front of half the town who'll be out to point and laugh. just at me.

lbs

2 weeks til my 'race for life', i keep running and yet....i weigh more than i did when i started. no-one gimme that stuff about muscle weighing more. yadda yadda yadda. it's marks and sparks cheese scones but i can't live without them.

999

Am having quite a week with the emergency services.

On Sunday I had a phone conversation with my son that went something like this.

'Hi Mum, can you come and pick me up?'
'Well no, you're on your bike. You can cycle home.'
'Well, you're going to have to really.'
'Why?'
'I have to go down to the police station to make a statement.'

Of course it was a conversation milked for it's last drop of drama by mini-me, so full points there. Actually some brattish thug had pushed him off his bike, ridden off with it, jumped up and down on it for a bit then noticed a police car hurtling across the grass and wondered if there might be a connection. Anyway, he was arrested and we have the bike back. Two buckled wheels and a knackered derailleur.

Tonight, it was hospital for Mr Kumquat. Heavy duty painkillers and a dose of anit-emetics later and he's sleeping off a nightmare migrane. You know the sort where you spend most of the evening making sypathetic noises and emptying buckets of puke.

Don't anyone let me near matches tomorrow.

leaving. again.

another leaving 'do' back with the old branch chums. yes, the leaving do that they had that was a joint one with mine but ... they get another one. hmmm. sounds good to me! lovely chinese meal out and driving home in the incredible thunder and lightning.
coffee back chez nous with all the lights out and the french windows open watching the spectacle.

You've been blogged!

Last night we had a splendid nosh up chez Jamie Oliver's restaurant "15". Fabulous food, very good service and reasonably priced considering it was central London and has a big name attached to the place. Jamie failed to put in an appearance but the wine was so good we might not have noticed if he'd been the girl serving extra bread!

After the meal we staggered out, feeling excessively full, and headed into Islington to add decandence to indulgence. We sat for a long time at the organic bar putting the world to rights.

Heading back down into the underground we watched, with bemused horror, a young man lose his step on the escalator, twist 90 degrees, fall down several unforgiving metal steps and grind to a halt, legs showing ten to two. He said 'Ouch' in a overly controlled manner which made the whole episode absolutely hilarious. Gallant Mr Kumquat ran to see if he was ok but once he had dusted himself off and scuttled round the corner to hide his embarrassment, we all fell about.

Got home some time after 2. Great evening out. Must do more of this kind of thing.

visit

a good mate wandered past work today which was a complete surprise now i'm 20 miles away from home. as usual i was standing with a furrowed brow and a piece of paper.

still ploughing through 'the dante club'. the writing is not great and the characters are rather dull and 2d but a couple of people have been murdered so i'll keep reading it just to find out whodunnit.

bought up a stack of penguin 70's yesterday and lined them up on a kitchen shelf so i can read while i cook. i anticipate the quality of our meals plummeting.

and now i'm off for two days in a row (gasp) with exciting plans for tomorrow evening, two friends, a large amount of money and the vain hope of seeing a celebrity with only the hope of copious amounts of alcohol to keep our spirits up.

join us, after the break.

under the stars

So hot last night I camped out under the stars in the back garden in a sleeping bag on a bed chair. Brilliant!

nb

it's hot.
i've discovered t'chai latte.
i have an interview on monday.
it's very hot.
i watched batman begins this evening.
i have a party to go to tomorrow.
que calor!

kumquat's blog

not a great deal to report. working at the new job and liking it enormously.

running whenever i can to train for my 5K. can regularly run about 2/3 of that so shouldn't be tooo much trouble on the day to keep going a bit further.

rip van winkle

last night i slept for 11 1/2 hours, woke up exhausted, dragged myself through the day only to collapse asleep on the sofa for at least an hour this afternoon.

phone call

i have just had the weirdest call ever!

we get inundated with calls from people trying to sell us new kitchens and double glazing but today was a call unlike any other.

the girl said what sounded like 'hello is that miss ***?',
'yes.',
'do you love me? i'd like to let you know that your house has been selected as a possible trial home for a new kitchen. can i ask you how old your kitchen is?'

i thought i MUST have heard wrong so i gave my usual line;

'thank you but i don't want to pursue this.'

to which she replied;

'yes but do you love me?'

i asked who was calling and she said something like never mind and hung up.

has anyone else had this???? does this person know me do you think? she sounded really quiet and upset, not like someone doing it for a dare. weird huh?

this week

new job fab.

hayfever reducing me to a self pitying wreck outside of air-conditioned rooms.

day 5

Visited the Secession building which is about 2 minutes from our apartment. Really beautiful place done in what the non art student would recognise as art nouveau but is in fact, Secession! There was a pile of tat on the first floor that made me feel middle aged and grouchy. Call this art? There was a muddy puddle, for instance. How many puddles do you think they created before the artist cried out with relief 'yes, YES, this is the definitive muddy puddle, my life has been building to this moment of clarity'? There was also a video of a girl riding a bike backwards and a squashed ant on top of a Conan Doyle novel. Thankfully, the Beethoven Frieze was downstairs to make up for the fraudulent trash upstairs. Klimt is my favourite artist and Ive wanted to see his stuff for a long time. I got to see some in Venice last year but Vienna has the bulk of it because he was based here and it was from here that the whole fin de siecle thing began and ended. So I was blown away by the Beethoven Freize and felt awful knowing that as I left I may never get to see it again.
After that we went to the Leopold Museum where we saw lots more Klimt and Scheiler too. Some of the Scheiler was great but generally you could see why the police busted his house and chucked him in prison for having young girls visiting. Who knows the truth.
In the afternoon we wandered round and happened across the Town Hall and got escorted off the premises of the Leichenstein Palace. Long story.
After eating, we went to the cinema at 10:55pm to see The Third Man. It was superb. A first for me and it was so interesting to see Vienna at war and of course anything taken from a Greene novel is a delight.

day 4

another 'what a day' day.

took the 930 train back from budapest and met up with a really interesting retired guy living in lichenstein. talked about a load of cool things hes got up to in the past... herding cattle in wyoming on horseback, skiing marathons in st moritz etc... Got off the train in vienna and had a drink with him for half an hour or so while he waited for a train to switzerland.
in the afternoon we made good from having spent a night without toothbrushes and deodorant!
Shopped again in the afternoon at the huge food market for our dinner.
This evening we went to the Vienna opera to see Verdi`s Don Carlos! Stunning. Of course it was wonderful quality but the coolest thing happened in the middle. We went for the first interval and there was a woman wandering round with a microphone so wherever you were in the building you could hear her. There were cameramen following her and projecting what she was saying onto a huge screen in the foyer. She was announcing the arrival of King Phillip and other members of the cast due to appear in the second half. The camera also scoured the audience having their drinks and watching the screen and chatting among themselves so we looked like extras in the opera waiting for the king to arrive! Then I noticed on the screen that the cast was back on stage so I ran over to look out of one of the boxes (not our seats!!) to see what was going on. Half of the act 2 scene I was taking place on stage and the rest was taking place in different places over the building. Wherever you were you could follow the story. Suddenly a gang of policemen were storming through the bar with a group of prisoners in chains! I was running from the box to the bar and back to try and work it all out!! If you didnt see it first hand it was on the screens. Finally the king and his entourage walked through everybody slowly gathering in the main auditorium surrounded by journalists with flashes going off everwhere. It was a real spectacle.
We came home on a real high, ate my seared tuna steaks in mustard marinade with avocado and lemongrass salad and drank coffee.

day 3 cont'd/...

As you will have gathered, we took a train to Hungary yesterday. Budapest is a really beautiful city. Its made up of two parts. Buda, and yes you guessed it, Pest, with the Danube flowing through the middle. We spent most of our time on the Buda half seeing the Fishermans Bastion, the Church of our Lady (which was like no other church i have ever seen. breathtaking) and the national art gallery.
Dinner was in Pest and I think I would have travelled to Hungary just for this restaurant. We were given free starters of bread with apple pickle, dijon wholegrain mustard and piquant tomato sauce for starters. I had a beef tagine with vegetables in an amazing sauce. The meat was perfectly tender and the sauce was rich with a touch of sweetness. The couscous was amazingly light. Margaret had smoked chicken with honied pineapple and it was really tasty too. I had chocolate soup for dessert which I had never tried before and I could taste cinnamon and cardamon in there. Plus it came with fresh strawberries. Margaret had dark chocolate souffle with candied orange, morello cherry compote and ice cream. The souffle was so light really, you could hardly feel it in your mouth.
As you can see, Budapest is a city to visit!
We missed our return train by ten minutes so had to find accommodation. We stayed in a nice little apartment 15 minutes from the station rented by this older guy who told us about his daughter in Florida and showed us pictures of her winning tennis competitions! Quite an adventure.
Before bed we drank at a jazz bar and decided we were glad to have missed our train back to Western Europe!

day 3

all i am saying at this stage is that i missed the last train back into austria so i am staying overnight in budapest!!

check in tomorrow for further details!!!!!!!!!!!!!

day 2

This morning we went to the Albertina gallery in the hope of catching some Klimt. There were three very simple pieces of his there but a host of other interesting artists including Bonnard, Picasso, Rembrandt, Monet, Mondriaan and Fuselli. My favourite piece was the Fuselli called something like A Shepherds Dream (?). Very much like some of Blakes illustrations. Interestingly there was also a painting by Victor Hugo. It wasnt so great but I never knew he painted.
Schnitzel for dinner set us going for an afternoon of walking around the Hofburg complex. After half an hour of looking at case after case of King someone or others cutlery, I was beginning to wonder why Id paid E9.50 to admire his silverware. Thankfully we moved on and saw some very cool art in the Imperial Apartments next to the Spanish Riding School.
After a foray into the cultural experience that is apfelstrudel, we took the ´scenic route´to the main train station to buy tickets for our trip tomorrow. Youll have to check in tomorrow to see what we have planned!
This evening I made a pretty good salad to go with our pizza and an unidentified baking object is in the oven. It looks like it might have chocolate in the middle but we may yet be eating minced beef patties for pudding.

wien

so my apartment has free internet access. life is sweet.

sat on the tarmac at heathrow for an hour which was a delight as you can imagine. of course, the air con had failed at that point and its been pretty much the hottest spell of the year so far. eventually took off and enjoyed turbulence a lot of the way there, but whats hurtling through the air if you dont notice how close you are to death every few minutes, right?

the apartment looked liked a dive from the outside and as finding accomodation was entirely my remit, i was nervous. inside, the place is lovely. really modern and clean, lots of beech wood and with free internet access!

i should say im here with my travel bud, margaret, that i met about 18 months ago on a trip to the states. off the cuff we thought it might be a crack to travel together so last may we spent a week in venice and now here we are in vienna. so although ive only known her for about 2 weeks in total face to face contact time, we will be travelling like this most years i think.

excuse the lack of punctuation, this keyboard is unfathomable.

ä ö ü § ß

so for the first time in weeks, my blog actually has something to say! watch this space for more kumquat adventures!!!