'A smiling Japanese person is not necessarily happy'

Much merriment has resulted from Visit Britain's new initiative purportedly designed to prepare the nation's businesses for the expected onslaught of foreign tourists during the 2012 Olympics. The Daily Mash was quickly into the satirical fray with 'Try not to punch tourists, Britain reminded'.

However, the original document is arguably even more hilarious. Highlights from amongst the tips include not telling an Arab what to do, not calling a Canadian an American, being especially careful how to pour wine for those delicate Argies, and not mentioning the 1845-6 war to Mexicans.

On the subject of 'don't mention ze vor' what happened to the Germans?

Food cravings

I had quite a few of these this time in advance of my trip. I blame it in part on the multi-episode sessions of The Big Bang Theory that we treated ourselves to before Christmas. They're always eating some sort of delicious take-away grub, and they always just sit there prodding it with their chopsticks! It was becoming unbearable...

And so it was that I arrived in the UK with a mental check-list of cuisines autocthonous and non-autocthonous for checking out during my stay here.

On Wednesday night we went to The Swan, Pangbourne's historic weir-side inn, where the action of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat winds up and where, this being modern Britain, the bar staff are all Polish and the signature dish on the menu is Fajitas. (Not bad at all, but they're a bit stingey with the guacamole.)

So while everyone around me was filling little flour tortillas, I tucked into my plato tipico: cod with chips. Good, but not quite as good as the haddock served by the Laughing Halibut fish and chip shop in the middle of the village. (And eating cod these days feels like chewing on tortuga in Belize. Yummy, but with an unpleasant ethical aftertaste.) The fajitas can wait until I'm back in Mexico.

The Swan is situated in an old warehouse beside the Thames dating back to 1642. At one stage in its history it was located on the border between Berkshire and Oxfordshire, counties which at one time maintained different licensing laws, and so at a certain hour each night customers would shift around to the other end of the bar so that they could continue drinking.

My Indian food craving had certain particulars: it would have to be assuaged in one of those old-style joints with Raj-kitsch decor and furnishings, music which sounds like a zancudo struggling to escape from your inner ear and smiling, straight-off-the-plane waiters. A little bit off the main drag in Westbourne Grove the other night, Philip and I found just the place: The Star of Bombay.

He had the tandoori mixed grill (which looked great) and I picked the chicken dopiaza — an old favourite — but we weren't long into this meal before I realised that the essence of my craving had been for a plate of papadums and assorted pickles washed down with a bottle of Cobra or Bangla beer. Which is one reason we passed on the Halal-only Khan's just up the road.

When I met up with some former colleagues on Monday we lunched for old time's sake at Busaba Eathai in Wardour Street, owned by Amin Ali and Alan Yau (who incidentally also own around a third of the polo ponies that winter down here on the farm). The lure for me here has always been their 'Thai Calamari', fried squid in batter served with chewy black peppercorns. As you'd expect from the founder of Wagamama there's a range of generic noodle dishes, but also some of the richest Thai curry sauces in the West End. Craving or no craving I'd forgotten that the latter can disagree with me a little at lunchtime! I think it's the garlic.

In order to be able to continue to enjoy The Big Bang Theory without those disconcerting pangs of food envy, I took myself shopping at the New Loon Moon supermarket in Chinatown yesterday and then went on to the new Japan Centre food hall in Lower Regent Street. V likes to throw me a few curve balls during the last few days of my UK visits, especially when it comes to odd requests for items she wants me to pack in my suitcase — and on this occasion the one for sushi rice and sheets of toasted seaweed has come at a time when I'm starting to seriously fret about my baggage allowance.

I still hadn't dealt with my Japanese delicacy craving in situ, and so with that in mind went with Surfer last night to the restaurant floor of the Wholefoods Market in Kensington High Street, where we treated ourselves to this excellent platter of sashimi, served to us by the somewhat world-weary sushi chef in the picture.

It was the first time I'd been into one of these. It struck me as the sort of Fortnum & Mason's that Jane Fonda might shop in, but Surfer reports that prices have come down considerably over the past year as this, and many other purveyors of ethical nosh, have struggled to extract their premium during these straightened times.

So I've knocked most of these cravings on the head by now. And of course I am already suffering from withdrawl symptoms brought on my thoughts of all the Guatemalan goodies I've been missing out on for the past few weeks.

I did however come across a packet of Natura's frijoles in the kitchen cupboard the other day, so I'm planning to cook up a desayuno chapin for my father this weekend. He really enjoyed the turkey with mole verde that I prepared last Saturday with a base sauce acquired in the Yucatán.

The Palace of Bling

"Have you got a few minutes?" cousin Philip asked me. "There's something in Selfridges I'd like you to see."

Much of the century+1 year-old store on Oxford Street has come to resemble one of the brand-saturated departure lounges at Heathrow, and the fish counter in the Food Hall has been "decimated" according to Philip; But there's one high-ceilinged hall on the ground floor which has become what he described to me as "the palace of bling" and "a playground for the offspring of the oligarchs."

In recession-ravaged Britain who but little Russians and Middle-Easterners can afford the objects displayed in little glass boxes organised around the central pair of escalators, sold by shop assistants with the look of trophy girlfriends, and protected by security guards with the look of the Chechen Mafia*?

We paused to gawp at the audaciously oversized U-Boat watches, each with a diameter to make many a man self-conscious about the size of his wrist, and few with a price tag below £3000. But the real jaw-dropper was £69,000 ($111,000) diamond-encrusted Vertu Signature mobile phone. That's a lot of dosh for a piece of kit with a tendency towards technological obsolesence.

The West End is in a state of flux. Most of the grungy Victorian buildings that the Nazis left behind at the intersection of Charing Cross Road with Oxford Street have been demolished in the last six months and my old office on Soho Square now has a clear view of Centrepoint ...though not of that infamous fountain in front of it, which made the area awkward for pedestrians; this is hidden behind a London Underground-branded wooden enclosure.

The plan seems to be to spruce up this last rather grotty crossroads in the area, with the biggest improvement of all below street level: a shiny new tube station for Tottenham Court Road. I couldn't decide whether the feelings of promise or those of loss were uppermost as I surveyed this remodelling of such a familiar patch of my old home town.

* The Chechen Mafia is one of the few global organised crime networks which functions like a franchise business. You don't actually have to BE Chechen to be part of the Chechen mafia, you just have to run your local branch as if you were. Any failure to follow up on your threats will lead to brand damage and a possible visit from head office!

The Real Van Gogh...

...the artist and his letters.

I've been looking forward to this ever since the hype started to trickle over to me a few months ago.

A new, complete, illustrated and annotated edition of the artist's letters was released in 2009 and one of the translators cropped up on an interview on R3 during the autumn.

His message was clear. This art is not the product of a disordered and troubled mind...for during the periods he worked, the man who produced it was generally lucid and the letters he wrote (predominantly to his brother Theo) show him discerningly addressing the issues surrounding his chosen profession and the multifarious difficulties of his situation. They also demonstrate that he had a flair for expressing himself with the pen as well as the brush.

This exhibition of 65 paintings, 30 drawings and a sampling of the letters was first opened to the public in Amsterdam last year. Now it has arrived in London and I attended the final day of previews with Surfer on Friday. Waldemar Januszczak calls it the "most complete Van Gogh exhibition to be held in Britain for half a century."

My own adult relationship with the works of this particular Dutch artist got off to something of a poor start when I was taken (...dragged) around the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam at the age of 17 — it being the third such well stocked gallery I'd been to that same day — and so I guess I was a little less receptive than usual that afternoon to the genius on display there.

Whatever the preconceptions one takes along to this exhibition, I can report that it has the potential to re-organise one's views not only about one suffering Dutch artist, but about the power of painting in general.

There are seven rooms, organised in a partially chronological and partially thematic fashion. My personal favourite was Room 6: 'Cycles of Nature' which covered the period when this former missionary repeatedly turned to the image of a reaper in southern French fields, emblematic of the pantheistic apprehensions which had filled the void left by formal religious dogma.

The RA did me for a catalogue as I left (one can't complain really when one has seen the show free of charge), and as I flicked through it looking for the works which had most impressed me 'in the flesh', it was immediately clear why there can be no substitute for the personal encounter. It's not just that the textural effects are so important; several of the landscapes appear to shimmer with incipient animation. You really have to stand right in front of them to appreciate this.

It's not always so easy though...thanks to the slow moving clusters of (often quite aggressive) little old ladies that appear to be indigenous to exhibitions at the Royal Academy. Then there are the individuals Surfer refers to as "robots", the slow-moving, rather clumsy lumps of flesh whose passage around the exhbits is determined by the voice in their headsets. Fortunately we got in early before the real scrum started, and made the decision to run on ahead of the robots, thereby dispensing with the formal sequence intended by the curators.

The letters, whilst not as central to the experience as I had anticipated, often contain little sketches or "croquis", which in some cases at least as wonderful as the larger works they underpin. (Such as the reed pen version of The Zouave, kept at the New York Guggenheim.)

It's hard to pick one stand-out work from the exhibition. "There isn't a painting here I don't like," Surfer commented, and I had to agree. Maybe Wheat Field With White Cloud, but I couldn't find a decent jpeg of it on Google, so here are The Olive Trees, painted in 1889 at Saint-Rémy, outside the walls of the asylum. It's mesmerising, and you have to see it if you can. (It's usually found at the MOMA in NYC.)

Testing out an exotic product

I met Frode yesterday at his 'office', the swanky new Starbucks in Conduit Street. Inside there were banks of leather bound books (bought by the yard?) and plush, high-concept items of furniture. "It's experimental....unique in the world," he explained.

The big table down below where the laptop addicts are supposed to congregate was fashioned from an enormous slab of rusty iron: 'Belgian Industrial' apparently! I'm not sure how this was supposed to reflect the history of a Regency side street famous in times gone by for its bespoke tailors (my grandfather used to have his suits done at Lord & Stewart at #41), but anyway, the idea behind this explorative decor was explained quite adequately in the Guardian:

"With blond wood, distressed cabinets and second-hand mid-century modern furniture, it is a marked difference, even though the corporate hand behind the shabby chic is still evident. The idea is to individually design each store to fit in with its local area so that no two Starbucks will look exactly alike, a remarkable rethink for a company that has been so closely linked with the idea of the corporate giant leaving its homogenous mark on every high street. Actor Rupert Everett, petitioning against a new Starbucks close to his home, described it as a "cancer" spreading through Britain."

London now boast over fifty ethnic minorities with more than ten thousand members, which certainly makes it the most diverse metropolis in the world and perhaps makes it the ideal place to test out branding reboots prior to expensive global roll-outs. McDonald's did it with their Holborn branch a few years ago, and last year the funky Big Brother-style seats which first appeared there made their way to New York for a second-stage trial.

When I arrived yesterday it seems I'd just missed the CEO of Starbucks Charles Schultz (pictured above), who'd been at the centre of a media gathering in there to crow about the company's Q1 results (a 4% gain in same-store sales and profits of $353m, up 200% ), the first time he's done this outside the USA. He'd obviously formed a similar opinion to my own about the Dyson 'Air Blade' driers, because on exiting the Gents' he was tellingly reluctant to shake anyone's hand, it was reported.

I was quite pleased to discover that all of the UK's Starbuckeses now offer free wi-fi, as long as you get one of their cards and use it to pay for your beverages.

Here's a video presentation of the new cafe and a Flickr set....plus a snap of Frode in situ:

Tcha Limberger at the Crooked Billet (2)

Here's the first of my clips, from early on in the set before he switched to guitar. Check out the bloke with the handlebar moustache in front of the band. He looked like he'd stepped out of one of the old photographs hanging on the wall.

Tcha Limberger at the Crooked Billet (1)

Tcha Limberger is something of a one man Hot Club of Paris, having an extraordinary talent with both the violin and guitar, which are a fair approximation of those of gypsy jazz legends Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt respectively.

My father had signed me up for this musical meal some time before I actually showed up in the UK. The proprietor at the ever-wonderful Crooked Billet had enthused on his latest bulletin that the Limberger Family was quite the most mesmerising act ever to have appeared at his venue.

We had a bit of a wait for the music as my father had allowed himself to be persuaded to turn up at seven to permit the meal to be served before the band appeared, but as he suffers from the 'sickness' of allowing too much spare time for any appointment*, we'd been sitting for some time before Tcha took his opening bow. (By which time I'd almost ruined everyone's evening by tipping over a glass of water which landed very close to the double bass lying on the floor beside my father.)

Blind from birth, this obviously gentle-natured young man explained that the absence of his famed father Vivi through a variety of unpleasant ailments, had precipitated a late change in lead guitarist and some minor alterations in the repertoire as well. I suspect that this involved a shift away from the up tempo numbers we had been expecting towards some rather poignant pieces of Russian and Hungarian folk music, to which Tcha added his own soulful vocals on several occasions. The experience was moving as well as thrilling. I have some HD clips which I will upload to YouTube in due course.

I also had the excellent fortune of picking one of the best fish dishes I have ever eaten as my main; a baked slab of succulent cod topped with a tempura prawm and doused in an oriental broth with pak choi and Chinese mushrooms floating at the side:



* My father's former partner Bob Monkhouse used to drive him nuts by turning up bang on time for trains, planes and automobiles. He never missed one, but he never gave himself a cushion either. As I'd taken the car into Reading on Monday afternoon and we were due to set off at 18:10 for the Crooked Billet, I found my father waiting for me by the doorway rather fretfully when I returned at 17:50. After a few years of hora chapina I'm finding it hard to adjust!

A very English Sunday

I'm glad I caught the end of Europe's recent mini ice-age.

This pic was taken from my bedroom window on Friday afternoon. The next day temperatures 'soared' back up to 8 degrees centrigrade and the snow cover rapidly vanished.

Many of the local animals, specifically the rabbits and the muntjac deer probably hadn't seen grass in about three weeks and so were out in force on Saturday, scoffing.

I'm alone in the house because Maggie, even though much more of a country mouse than I will ever be, finds such a condition quite scary and so tends to spend the winter in the loft room above my father in his little annexe.

Anyway, the solitude is mitigated by the fact that the dog usually sleeps in her basket down by the Aga. She's a bit too old and lazy to come up the stairs to visit me now though. Other than my bedroom that spot in the kitchen is probably the only warm space in the big old property, because it would be prohibitively expensive for Maggie to heat all the rooms and corridors. There aren't too many weird creeky noises, but ice falling off the roof provides the occasional surprise.

Such were the almost spring-like temperatures yesterday that we didn't even have to throw a log on the fire, which was a touch disappointing. Otherwise, we had a rather typical English country Sunday yesterday involving a pint of ale at the Queen's Head in Bradfield, roast beef and Yorkshire puddings for lunch back at home and the ritual viewing of the Antiques Roadshow in the early evening. The rest of the day was interspersed with sessions of snooker from the Masters at Wembley, a sport which is fascinating and yet which, regardless of the time of day and however jet-lagged I may be, still manages to send me off to sleep.

Atlanta, downtown at least, has to be one of the world's most missable destinations. By 6pm all the shops and offices appear to have closed and their occupants have fled to the suburbs. The only lights at ground level belonged to big hotels and the steakhouses which turn up every block or so. All the Starbuckses enforce lights out from around 5. From then on the majority of my fellow pedestrians were those disconcerting shamblers one comes across in so many American cities, some of whom shouted at me, while others shouted at noone in particular.

The subway line, seemingly hewed out of solid rock, gets you there in around twenty minutes from the airport. In some ways the latter was depressingly familiar in its greyness and its generic offering of news stands and t-shirt shops, but in terms of layout, it's as if the architects decided to throw out all the rules and start from scratch, so that in effect you have 5 parallel concourses linked by driverless trains with baggage reclaim finally showing up at the last stop. It is also described in the Delta magazine as the 'world's busiest' which left me wondering if this was world as in 'World Series' or whether through some technicality Atlanta's airport really is busier than the likes of JFK, Heathrow and O'Hare.

The folk on the flight from Cancun had been encouraging, clean-cut and smart, unlike the sort of howdeedoodies you tend to get on the Houston run. But once I was out of the terminal and on my way into town, I was struck by the drabness of the local 'executive' look. Indeed the early evening passengers on the MARTA ('itsmarta') all seemed to got up in the smart, utterly flairless manner of American newsreaders (and Republican commentators on Fox.)

Unless you've been living in a dark, dank hole for the past few weeks you really ought to have come to expect a slightly longer line at security. But around me in the queue as I waited to re-enter the line of concourses were several businessmen appeared to be on the verge of spontaneous combustion.

The one in front of me kept nervously checking his iPhone, shaking his head and trying to make knowing eye contact with fellow sufferers. He was also jiggling up and down on the spot as if he's forgotten to relieve himself. Others, buoyed by a pack mentality decided to force their way through to the front of the line fibbing that some lady had told them it was OK because their flight was about to leave. They soon had a ticking off from some heavy from the TSA who explained that it was their duty to arrive two hours before take-off. Some of them were sent back, but the advance party had already got their shoes off and were sneaking through the metal detector.

I'm glad this wasn't one of those full body scanners. I've worked out that this coming May I'll have to make ten international flights in the space of about four weeks and if those heavy duty zappers are universally in place by then, I'd expect my teeth and hair to start dropping out.

High in Hants

One of the apparent knock-on effects of the 'success' of the war in Afghanistan has been a global shortage of the kind of poppies typically used to make morphine. So — a little on the quiet — the UK government has been encouraging farmers to grow their own. This particular opium poppy field in rural Hampshire has proved handy for my mate 'Dead Man's Hat' who has natural laboratorical tendencies, usually taking upwards of thirty minutes to produce even the most basic cup of home-roasted coffee!

The January Barometer Effect

Friends in London have been sending me pics of the blizzard blowing there today. Conditions such as these haven't been seen since '91, though this time, if anything, it's worse.

Just like the economy really...

(Thanks to Gaylene for the pic!)

Route 666

More on those atheist London buses...

Update: 'You wait ages for a Deity..."

Now stop worrying...

The Guardian's Comment is free section is launching London's first atheist bus advertising campaign. 

Donations will be handled by The British Humanist Association and Richard Dawkins has promised to match all contributions up to a maximum of £5500. The general idea is to counteract the ads from organisations like The Alpha Course on London's transport system. 

(This reminds me of Kermode's law that any movie advertised on buses must be a stinker!) 

The Britishness problem

In case anyone had been unduly cheered up by our recent 'great haul of China' up pops Chancellor Alistair Darling last week (just as the British summer was grinding to an already inauspicious end it might be added) to remind us all that the UK is still basically screwed, as the country now faces what he described as the worst downturn in sixty years.

The irony is that although the mess the world is currently in is - on many different levels - largely the fault of the Yanks, they may already be showing early signs of lifting themselves out of recession. Britain on the other hand has too many of its economic eggs in the financial services sector and its general population are comparatively over-exposed to the housing market.

None of this of course leads me to regret my decision to ex-patriate myself earlier this year.

Last week I watched Panorama's somewhat jocular take on the Labour government's suggestion that the August bank holiday should be upgraded to a regular jamboree when we collectively celebrate our Britishness. The programme included an interview with the BNP's Nick Griffin, a politician who says he would 'restore' Britain to the whites and other 'assimilable' groups.

As a recent immigrant myself in a foreign land I was led to reflect on what I might have to do to assimilate myself more in Guatemala. Ignore more red lights, turn up late for more meetings...eat more Tortrix?

If you are wondering what kind of place a BNP-restored type of GB would be, take a trip to somewhere like Playa las Americas in Tenerife. There the chain-smoking, chip-eating, beer-swilling, Bingo-playing, white working classes - themselves the world's worst migrants - have created a prototype monocultural paradise in their own image. Ask the Canary Islanders how assimilable this lot are! (Or indeed how yummy their food is...)

The members of Scotland's chattering classes interviewed by Panorama of course poured scorn on the idea of a Britishness day. Scottishness is all they really need it seems; the English are the only members of the Union with a void at the heart of their sense of national identity, they cackled. Nobody seemed to ask how many of Scotland's substantial Asian Muslim community are amongst those waving the flags of St Andrew so obsessively at Murrayfield. I'm sure they'd all have been choking on their haggis if they'd seen how the Mexicans referred to Team GB as 'Inglaterra' throughout the Beijing Olympics.

It's hardly clear to me anyway why American-style patriotism is the solution to all our problems - for it makes it all too easy for individual citizens to associate their own interests with those of monolithic military and economic power.

The issue of England-Britain and its team spirit probably needs a more nuanced solution than New Labour are capable of coming up with. The uniqueness of the situation is that of an empire that has collapsed in on itself just as the world has been expanded by the forces of globalisation.

How much of a mess the country seems probably depends on how long a memory you have. I've been concerned of late about how long mine has been growing, and certainly sensed the national entropy for some years before I decided to depart.

Part of the problem is the sheer quantity of migrants of a lower cultural level who are no more interested in participating in so-called British values than the ex-pat residents of the Spanish costas are in attending bull-fights and sitting down to dinner after 10pm. They just want to live in their own little ghettos of bloody-minded crapness.

One also wonders whether the lack of a guiding recipe behind the British melting pot is one of the things that makes all these different ingredients want to jump in. It's going to be hard to re-provincialise a nation that has become one of the most convenient generic access points for the globalised economy.

Anyway, roll-on 2012. Let's see if they can come up with something better than Beckham, buses and umbrellas to represent two millennia of shared cultural history.