Rosettes

A tasting menu at a Michelin starred restaurant and a panto horse derby. Standard bank holiday weekend.

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Stuff I've been Reading - August

Unexpected genius of pigs- Matt Whyman
The Holy Vible - Elis James and John Robins
Black Moses - Alain Mabanckou
The Girls - Lori Lansen

The Matt Whyman book was lovely,  but then I am quite a fan of pigs. It didn't make me want one as a pet though. It sounded like they would make a right old mess of the dahlias.

I read the first bit of Holy Vible a while aho and found it funny enough to want to read the rest - it made me do a lol on the train and everything. I didn't enjoy the rest of it anywhere near as much, turns out it was a book of in jokes from a radio show.  Still, it had a chapter on Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Any book with a chapter on Gorky's Zygotic Mynci can't be bad.

I've never been a fan of funny books. I have a lot of time for books that happen to be funny - Colin Bateman, say, or Chris Brookmyre. But books that are primarily "funny" I tend not to get on with. Even the big ones - A Confederacy of Dunces, Diary of a Nobody, Three Men on a Bike. I guess that that's not a bad company for Black Moses...

I've been reading The Girls for ages. After being reliably informed that I would be through it in a couple of days, it has taken most of the year. Still, done now, ultimately I really enjoyed it, even if it did take for ages.

Oranges, the New Black (Part 2)

So take the Jan 16 post as a starting point, then add maybe twenty degrees. Seville cathedral is still massive, Plaza de Espana still looks incredible and there are still an awful lot of oranges.

I climbed Seta this time - that's the big wooden fungus parasol - and ate in the tourist zone to try and get a flamenco fix, turned out to just be men shouting over a guitar, which wasn't really what I was hoping for.

But that's that with our whistlestop tour of Andalucia - four cities in a week. Hot walks, cold beer, squares, helados, churches, Alcazars, tapas and heat. Done.

Mezquita

Cordoba didn't make you work for its delights. Bus station and boom, city centre. I wasn't really expecting a proper city centre. I was sort of expecting a minor settlement next to some old stuffs. But no, proper city.

There was old stuffs though. Cordoba does a good winding medieval street,  even if a lot of them have been somewhat filled with tourism. There's an Alcazar. And a Roman bridge. And a whole heap of other histories.

And then there's the mosque. A building so old it makes the Alhambra seem like a pup. Plenty of people have written about it, so I'll just say it's pretty good and leave you to judge for yourself.

Before we leave Cordoba, it's worth having a quick chat about the food:
Oxtail - delicious, but you have to gnaw it off the bone like a medievaller otherwise you miss the juiciest bits. Messyfacetastic.
Aubergine - deep fried and covered in sugar cane syrup. Turns out these are a thing. Get in my face crispy sweet vegetables.
Flamenquin - wrap Iberian ham in pork, dunk it in batter then deep-fry it? You had me at Iberian.

Andalucia

Malaga made us work for its good bits. It seemed like the city just didn't really want us to visit, with its complete lack of anything resembling information as we left the bus station.

Turns out the centre is pretty nice with its historic buildings and its castles on hills.

Not as nice as Granada though. Now there's a city that can do a hilltop fort. I'd been sceptical about the Alhambra as all the pictures I'd seen had been a bit underwhelming. From the photos it looks like it may have just been made of boxes. Don't get me wrong, it's impressive that the boxes were taken up the hill 700 years ago, but its not exactly pretty.

Turns out the pretty bit is on the inside. The decor in the Nasrid Palace was phenomenal. And the whole complex is enormous, we were there for half a day and didn't see everything.

But we had to leave so we could use the second half of the day to cross the river and climb a hill to look back on the Alhambra whilst eating ice cream. Turns out that's a thing.

And final bit of history: went to the Royal Chapel to get our Ferdinand and Isabella on. Adter that I knew a lot more about Spanish History. But have forgotten it all again because beer and tapas.

Wild Atlantic Way

White cliffs of Dover. Box ticked. Let's double down on famous cliffs.

The Cliffs of Moher are famous and cliffy. None of that chalk nonsense though, or even the emeraldness of their island, these cliffs are dark and craggy and look like dragon homes. We started at Liscannor, which also sounds like a name from Lord of the Rings, and walked north from Hag's Head until the selfie-ing crowds got unmanageable. They are pretty spectacular, I can see why they are a thing.

Did you know that O'Connell Street in Ennis is one of the World's top 60 public spaces? There are a handful of reasons I found this surprising, the biggest being that I didn't know such a list existed. Anyway, Ennis was as pretty and well presented as you would expect from somewhere in the World's top 60 public spaces.

Galway is one of those cities that you have a vision in your mind of what it's going to be like - colourful pubs and the Irish Rover. No No Never and all that. And it was a bit like that, but in the Latin Quarter - a tiny part of a much bigger city. In retrospect it was naive, like expecting all of Marrakech to be a maze of bustling spice market, erm...