To market, to market

Bridget Jones went to the Borough Market. We did too. On Saturday morning in London we dived out of our cell-like beds, bounded onto a bus, and headed out to Borough, not far from London Bridge. 

And I swear, I will never miss an opportunity to go again. This market, to this point in time, is the best farmer’s market I have been to. Anywhere.

The black truffles (Tuber uncinatum vite) were prepped like manicured petit fours: I have no idea what they were rolled in to enhance their appearance, if anything, but it did nary a thing to detract from their flavour, which was divine. At £58 per 100g they were worth it at double the price!

A rare pecorino from Oristano, West Sardina, was on offer that morning for nearly £60 per 100g: its price reflective of its tiny production. Unbelievably scrumptious. We bought a goodly chunk to go with a fine Aussie wine we were taking to lunch with some newly found relatives we’ve found on Ancestry.

In blinding sun, with the radio promising one of the finest summers England has to offer ahead of us, we took the tube to meet two new faces who are now firmly imprinted on to my family tree.

Cheese, wine, chocolate and gorgeous company: what more can one ask! London is so lovely in the sun.

Tartufata truffles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All that glitters

Puerh tea from Yunnan in China was on sale in Harrod’s this week for a mere £15,000 for a 375g cake. 

This tea was compressed into its dense hard round cake from fresh leaves collected in the wild in Yunnan during the 1950s. Since then the cake has been rested and matured like a very excellent wine; the only tea on the planet that requires maturing! And only now, a half decade later, is the tea considered in prime state for brewing. 

Hence the sale. Rare. On offer for a limited period only. Ruby red in its liquid form. As gold in its cost. 

A good deal if you consider you only need a 5g chunk of it in 200 mls of water to make a cuppa. Being mindful that the chunk is reusable up to 20 times–if you are into recycling. 

At worst you get 75 cups of puerh tea for £15,000. At best 20 times that. And, what’s not to love about that? So, of course, we had to visit and see it for ourselves.  

Then, deep in an Egyptian crypt-like tomb of escalators going down and down in the Fayed-owned Harrod's we came upon Dodi and Diana, smiling widely at each other’s photographs, on into perpetuity. Spinning a shimmery halo around them was the ring Dodi bought Diana. On daddy’s pin. Locked in a Perspex prison. 

A typical medallion man gift: big, glittery, tasteless.  I wonder what Diana actually thought of it.

Dodi's ring to Diana in a perspex prism

£15,000 for 375g of Puerh tea

 

Ahh, London!

Langos (pron: Lan-gosh) is on our pilgrimage hit-list this year. It is a decadent Hungarian treat made of fried yeast bread, slathered with fresh garlic as thick as butter, and topped with sour cream and cheese. It cements cholesterol wasp-tight onto the thinning walls of your arteries. And it is killer delicious. We will likely have to drive to Budapest to find it. But first stop, as is becoming our habit, is London. 

The first time we visited London I was thirty something. I had hankered for England all my life, I think. A yearning that started when I was young, about 14. I leaned against a lion statue in Trafalgar Square, looked down at an old lady sitting on a concrete pillar feeding stale crumbs to a clutch of greedy flapping birds pooping all over the concrete steps. It was a scene straight out of Pygmalion. I realised where I was (finally!) and promptly burst into tears. 

I get that same stab of hot happy tears each and every time we return. London, and parts of England, feel so like home: from aeons ago. Maybe, Virginia, there really are other lives. Our brief London stopover this year tapped into our new genealogy addiction so the ghosts of ages past seemed vividly present in so much of what we did there. 

After dumping our duffle bags off at our tiny convenient Franciscan sister's convent and hostel near Victoria Station we headed straight off to Whitechapel and Spitalfields,  Jack the Ripper territory, because, here, long ago, Pete’s great great great grandparents lived: Joseph and Eliza Cummings. 

Joseph was a tailor. He may well have been commissioned to fashion for Jack a long, dark and unobtrusive cape-with poacher’s pockets, to hide his grim tools of trade. Who knows? Joseph certainly had his tailor’s shoppe close enough to Jack’s territory, on the corner of Sydney Street and Mile End Road, where barely a hundred metres or so away, but a century earlier, a struggling young ship's captain, James Cook occupied, for a few years, a tiny city den fronting frantic Mile End. And a century later, kitty-corner to where Joseph turned the latchkey to enter his tiny sweat shop each morning, the notorious Kray brothers, Ronnie and Reggie, ran their protection racket from the drab Blind Beggar pub, still a hangout today. 

After a hard day’s slog Joseph would hobble home to Eliza, little more than two hundred steps, turning left off Sydney Street into the narrow ramshackle Ladylakes Grove, now Adelina Grove. Ladylakes, then, was a haven for prostitutes, thieves, low life, and a hard place to live. A harder place to bring up children. 

Which is probably why just a few years on, Joseph’s young son and barely adult daughter, Joseph and Elizabeth Sarah Cummings, chose to find themselves a berth on a boat heading for Australia, seeking a new and different life. 

Today, Spitalfields is all curry smells, halal cooking and a colourful ethnic sidewalks. The old front and back green spaces that in Joseph’s time were still laid to pasture are gradually being shaved away now, draped in new, dense, brick-block dwellings. 

Joseph’s shoppe is gone, his home with Eliza and all the other tenements he used to pass on his daily walk to and from work, have also gone. If he returned today, I wonder how Joseph would react. Would he, too, weep? 

Delicious Langos

Franciscan Sisters Convent and Hostel

The convent entrance was sedate and secure

The Blind Beggar, the Kray brothers hangout