Torch Relay 2012 at Fulham Broadway

Popped up to Fulham Broadway earlier with the hubby and puppy to watch Lawrence Dallaglio take the torch past. Was a great atmosphere and a really nice spectacle (although a little too much sponsor-advertising).

Here's a few shots from our little trip:
All dolled up for the occasion...

Lots of sponsor trucks preceded the torch itself.

 

New Cocker Spaniel Puppy

I've been meaning to publish a blog on my recent trip to Antwerp (to visit the BierPassie beer festival) and also to write a bit about a recent evening at the White Horse pub in Parsons Green - "Pork Life", another food-pairing event held as part of the annual American Beer Festival.

But I've been a bit waylaid. This is the reason why: I have a new puppy! 

I spent the week before little Henry arrived turning the flat upside down, taking 10-15 years' worth of unworn clothes and other bits and bobs to the local Save the Children shop, vacuuming everywhere (not fun under the bed) and generally giving the place a good going over to prepare it for the new arrival. And since he's been here, well, it's a bit like having a new baby, I think - they require a lot of attention, and the moments when they're catching up on sleep are the moments when you, too, want to get a little nap. Or do other things, like cook, shower, clean, check up on the news, etc..

So here are a few photos of the new little man in my life. It is very difficult not to take dozens of photos every day! Sometimes he is very lovely indeed. Especially when he's sleeping.

He likes to sleep on his back; I think he looks like a little chicken.

Sometimes he is a right little monster, snapping away with those razor-sharp puppy teeth like a deranged lunatic, barking at me with puppy excitement.

 The rest of the time I spend taking him down and up the stairs to the area outside to try to toilet train him - an endless task, I think! Yesterday I taught him to sit. When he's not awake I've become a bit obsessed with taking macro photos of his nose - I just find its patterns absolutely fascinating! It's a bit dry here, as it usually is when he's asleep.

He also has amazingly long eyelashes.

I take him out and about in Parsons Green in my arms or in a bag (with his head peeking out the front) and get stopped every few minutes by people admiring him. He's already been to the White Horse for a pint (he slept through the whole thing)! Most people ask "what's her name?" - must be the eyelashes; he doesn't look very macho, that's for sure. He has very soft ears and the typical beautiful soulful spaniel eye.

He'll be out and about in a week's time, as he's having his jabs this afternoon. You then have to wait a week for them to take effect and then it's OUT time! I can't wait to parade him on his little blue lead through the streets of Parsons Green and let him meet some other dogs on ground level. There's a few I'll steer clear of, but very much looking forward to having a good play.

Beer for Punks: The BrewDog Phenomenon

I am lucky. The White Horse in Parsons Green is my local pub. For anyone with an interest in decent beer, it is an amazing place. Sometimes it can be overrun with pushy, entitled Sloaney types, which earned it the nickname the "Sloaney Pony" many years ago. But it has a nice garden out the front, does great barbeques in the summer, has a lovely quiet bar upstairs, a restaurant at the back, and an amazing selection of international craft beers. And most of the people are just fine.

The pub hosts a few events during the year. For the past five years they've held an American Beer Festival over the July 4th weekend, at the end of August they have a celebration of Belgian Beers, and then there's a British Ale event in late November. Occasionally they host one-off events, and so the hubby and I excitedly booked tickets for a BrewDog beer dinner.
We'd just visited the wonderful BrewDog pub in Camden, and had previously tried the rather extreme Tactical Nuclear Penguin, via a mail-order purchase.
I'm not an expert on beer, and I'm not giving a detailed review of the beers, but just a bit of a flavour of the evening. We were greeted with a small glass of Dead Pony Club, the first of many delicious and interesting beers, the antithesis of the tasteless stuff that had led the creators to start the company in the first place. It was full of flavour and depth. We sat down at communal tables and made new friends. It promised to be a very good evening.

James Watt, an ex-fisherman from Fraserburgh in north-east Scotland,  started off by telling us the story behind BrewDog.

He and a friend were fed up with rubbish beer that had nothing going for it other than the fact that it got you drunk and was relatively cheap. They longed for something with some real flavour and so decided to try to brew their own. To cut a long story short, their passion, determination, good taste, hard work - and a few early white lies to unsupportive bank managers - have brought them to where they are today: a world-renowned brewer of incredibly diverse, and incredibly delicious, craft beers. James' story was an incredibly inspiring one. Some of the beers are very drinkable, every-day IPAs and lagers. Some of them are so strong and distinct in both flavour and alcohol content that they can only be enjoyed in small doses! Their notoriety has been part of their success, and is the reason my husband found out about them in the first place - no publicity is bad publicity, after all. Tokyo*, at 18.2% had problems after its label was banned in Scotland as it was seen as encouraging excessive drinking. They followed this up with a statement beer called "Nanny State" at a mere 0.5%, before heading back on track to produce Tactical Nuclear Penguin at 32%; this had the accolade of being the world's strongest beer. Some Germans were determined to recapture this record, producing a beer of 40%, encouraging BrewDog to go one further: the final creation was Sink the Bismarck, at 41%. It is now out of stock; I'm not sure if there's any more on the horizon.
James talked us through each of the eight or nine beers, before we were allowed to try them. He told us that we had to get to know our beer, to commune with it, to say hello to it.

With the first few beers we were given delicious amuse-bouches, the taste of the beer complementing the taste of  mouthful, and vice versa. Over the first smaller few courses we were given samples of Punk IPA, Barrel Aged 7.7 Lager, before being supplied with blindfolds, for a blind tasting of AB:08, possibly my favourite of the evening. I took a few snaps around the table while wearing my own blindfold - amazing what you can achieve with good autofocus.

The beer tasted very dark-coloured to me, perhaps even black, but it was a rich amber-colour; we were all quite surprised when we removed the blindfolds. Next was the main course - a scrumptious pork belly, accompanied with a glass of "I Hardcore You" - a blend of BrewDog beer with a brew from Mikkeller, a Danish craft beer company with whom they have had a few collaborations.

Stilton was helped along with the intense, almost chocolate-like Tokyo*,  chocolate parfait was paired with the 15% Paradox Jura, a stunning stout aged in old oak whisky casks (you could taste the peaty Jura influence), and finally we got to taste the infamous Tactical Nuclear Penguin, accompanying a Scottish Coffee (the cream was infused with the Penguin for double impact). We toasted "To Evil" and said hello to our beer before hitting our mouths with each wonderful mouthful.

At the end of the tasting some people left, but living a stone's throw away we could linger a little and not worry about catching the last tube home. We hung around, met some more fascinating people, drank a bit more beer and went home thoroughly satisfied.

If you want to try some amazing beer, please head along to the BrewDog pub in Camden, or any other of their bars near you - they're popping up everywhere. I highly recommend the 5am Saint - a lovely rich "iconoclastic amber ale." Beware, though, it may become addictive...

London Festival of Photography Flash Mob

I've never been involved in, or seen, a flash mob event before. A post on Facebook changed that, and on Tuesday afternoon I headed off to a "secret location" (London's Russell Square) to join in the festivities, part of the London Festival of Photography.

I took a copy of the evening standard, hid my camera away in a handbag and sat on a bench, waiting for the other "togs" to appear. By 6.30pm there were about 30 or 40 obvious photographers congregating. I took out my camera and placed the strap around my neck. A man walking past asked me what was going on, a bemused look on his face (this was part of the point, I guess). I shrugged and said that I didn't know, before laughing and adding "it's a secret!" He hung around long enough to find out what it was all about and joined in with some of the snapping. At 6.40pm a whistle was blown and the assembled togs pressed play on their iPods, on which we'd all uploaded audio instructions.

The next 25 minutes involved a series of exercises, each lasting 4 minutes, with instructions spoken to start, and soft music (Morcheeba, perhaps) playing in the background while we carried out the exercises. The first task was to take a Facebook-style self-portrait. There were probably about 60 or 70 of us by now, and we all started turning our cameras on ourselves, trying to take a corny selfie. I think the result is pretty corny, especially with my extreme black and white, over-contrasty, vignetted post-processing treatment.

People took photos of other people taking photos of themselves. Unfortunately the screenshot of this Nikon guy taking his own photo disappeared a split-second before I took this shot - grrrr.

Everyone was smiling and snapping away. The atmosphere was really good - a bunch of strangers quietly going about their task. I should have taken off my headphones for a bit to see what it sounded like. Next time.

After the first task we all headed back to the circle in the centre of the park and awaited the next mission. The second task was to take photos of wildlife. There wasn't much animal life to see - I could only see feral pigeons. We snapped away at flowers, grass, leaves, and then a couple of guys dressed in crocodile (or perhaps dinosaur) suits appeared, drinking cans of beer, one of them clapping away at cymbals. All quite surreal.

Third up was to take a cheesy close-up shot. People headed off and photographed pretty pink pansies, leaves, other people, bits of detail from the bins and anything else of interest that they could find. I found a discarded, damaged tennis ball lying in a flower bed.

For the next exercise we were told to turn around so that we were facing out towards the park, then walk forward for as far as we could until something blocked our way, then stop and photograph anything we saw from there. Unfortunately I'd picked a spot where my route was blocked by a flower bed, so my walk consisted of about two metres. There were a couple of pretty topiaryed shrubs, and a guy squatting down to take photos nearby.

The fifth task was to photograph another photographer taking photos of another photographer. This was the best bit. Everyone was smiling, having such fun from something as simple as taking photos of other people taking photos of other people.

There was a fair amount of direct photographing; I shot a guy shooting me on an iPhone. He was squatting right down below me. He had a lavender stem in his ear.

The last task was the silliest. We had to put our left hands on the shoulder of the person in front and do the congo, moving around the circle.

The croc/dinos joined in, as did a woman dressed in a leopard outfit. There wasn't a great deal of moving around the circle, other than a small break-away group including the leopard and friends.

Once that was complete we were told to put our cameras away, turn off our iPods and head off home (or to the pub) as if nothing had happened. Which is exactly what I did. I looked at the photos on the tube on the way home, laughing at the simplicity of the event, how much fun it had been, how funny the look on onlookers' faces had been and how much I couldn't wait to get involved in another event like this. Well worth joining one if you get the chance.

One interesting observation I made was that some of the other togs really didn't feel comfortable having the camera turned on them. Some loved it (like Matt Taylor below), but with others you could tell that they were really uneasy and shied away from the glassy end of the lens. I guess some people just feel more secure hiding behind their little black machines.

For more photos, please have a look at my Facebook Page.