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Thursday April 24, 2008

Wine-tasting: harder than it looks

It happens about halfway through the first glass of wine. The course leader turns to me, breaks out into a faintly amused smile and delivers a horrible truth. “To be honest, some people just have a more developed sense of smell than others.”

It seems this wine-tasting lark will be harder than I thought.

It’s the first wine of the first day of the “introduction to wine tasting course” at the highly recommendable Wine Education Service. It’s been great fun so far: we’ve introduced ourselves to each other, opened our comprehensive course packs, bought our ISO wine-tasting glasses and taken our seats. Now we’ve filled glass number one with wine number one, a New World sauvignon blanc.

It’s a lovely glass of wine. And to me it smells … sort of winey.

But the women in the class are racing ahead. “Gooseberries,” says one. “Definitely,” agrees the class leader. “Tart fruits.”

I thought I was reasonably middle-class and metrosexual to the core, but I just can’t keep up.

At first I wonder if my sense of smell is bad. I can’t smell gooseberries. So I ask the course leader if there is anywhere special I should be putting my nose, eliciting the reply at the top of this post. Which, when you think about it, is one of the kinder available responses.

Then it dawns on me. It’s not that I can’t smell something. It’s that I haven’t the faintest idea what a gooseberry smells like.

The only place I’ve smelt this smell, in fact, is in a glass of wine.

It seems the secret of wine-tasting is not so much being able to sense the wine – it’s about learning a whole new frame of reference.

Who, for example, knows that there is a shade of red between ruby and brick, called garnet? Every woman in the class, apparently, because it seems that garnet is a kind of gemstone. And once again, everyone agrees among themselves that the red wine we see before us (wine number four) is halfway between ruby and garnet, even though I couldn’t really tell you what a ruby looks like apart from the fact that it is red and it appears in murder mysteries, and I have never even heard of garnet until 90 seconds ago.

But the whole thing is fun. Tremendous fun. Especially by the sixth glass of wine. And my ignorance only makes me want to know more.

I just never thought a wine-tasting course would lead me to visit a greengrocer’s and a jeweller’s next day, just so I could work out what everyone else was talking about.

Tuesday April 1, 2008

Portsmouth FC flag

Play up Cyprus

Now, here’s a curious thing. As a Pompey fan with family in Cyprus, I’ve always wondered where Portsmouth FC got its faintly Islamic-looking badge – the yellow star and crescent moon, on a blue background. It struck me as odd that a naval city in England should be sporting anything other than the cross of St George.

It turns out that all this time I have been, unknowingly, wearing on my left breast the Byzantine banner of one Isaac Komnenos of, er … Cyprus.

Apparently (according to Wikipedia) it was Richard I who adopted the flag after capturing the island from Isaac on one of his quasi-Crusades – and then granted it to the city of Portsmouth on his return to Blighty, after selling the island on to the highest bidder.

If you visit the monastery of the hermit Neophytos, near Paphos in Cyprus, you get a sense of what the local Byzantines thought of Richard’s bit of business. Answer: not much. Writing in the 12th century, Neophytos wrote that England is a land “north of Romania” whose nefarious king “sold our country to the Franks” for 100,000 pieces of gold.

Not a Pompey fan, then.

Wednesday March 5, 2008

Beard heaven, beard hell

I love Peter Aspden’s article in FT Weekend on the social struggles of wearing a beard.

Like him, when I was a boy visiting relatives in the southern Mediterranean (in his case Greece, in my case Cyprus) I would be scratched and sandpapered by the chins of older men – though in my case, I was more afraid of the cheek-tweaking inflicted by the women.

Like him, I woke up one morning recently and decided I couldn’t face shaving any more. I believe I might also have used the phrase “quotidian act of emasculation” to describe the deed, though in my case, being freelance, shaving was never particularly quotidian. But emasculating, yes.

Like him, I am a follower of the Orthodox faith and I have always admired the Byzantine look, though I have to say I have never thought it mournful. I think it is bold. Perhaps it is both.

Like him, after my beard grew, I had my bluff called by a fellow journalist. In his case, the FT beauty editor told him he looked like the shoe bomber. In my case, an editor on the Guardian website told me I looked like … the shoe bomber.

The only difference here is a question of degree – it’s a measure of just how far the pendulum has swung against beards that you can be mocked for having one by a Guardianista.

Reading Peter Aspden’s article, it becomes clear that, appropriately enough for the business-minded FT, it was the remarks of his colleagues that swayed him back to the path of smoothness. A dismissive shot from an editor is all it takes for him to fear that bearded men are old, irrelevant, not career-driven – and so he shaves.

This is where our paths diverge.

In my case, being a freelance, it was my nearest and dearest – family, girlfriend, close friends, followers of the Orthodox faith among them – who kept up the campaign of insults. “Haven’t you shaved that effing beard off, yet?” said Dad, every time I met him, conveniently forgetting his own beard experience of the 80s. My girlfriend waged a war against it, threatening me with a complex series of blackmails and underhand bribes. Worst of all, it became a topic of conversation everywhere I went, as if I was making a point. “For heaven’s sake,” I wanted to shout, “it’s only a bloody beard.”

In the end, after about a year, I got drunk and shaved it off on a whim. I walked out of the pub I was in, went down to Boots, bought a razor and some foam, returned to selfsame pub, locked myself in the bathroom, and started hacking away.

There was a slight hitch when I realised there was no hot water, but I am a resourceful soul – and I ordered a cup of coffee to do the job with instead.

Quite what the patrons of the establishment thought seeing a man going into the toilet with a beard and a cup of coffee, and coming out clean-shaven and carrying an empty mug, I hesitate to think.

But you know what? Like Peter Aspden, I did get a few people telling me I looked younger without the beard. But I still looked in the mirror and saw an older man, a man who had had the beard and come out the other side.

And I’ll never say never again. I may have admitted defeat once, but I’d like to think there is a Byzantine in me yet.

Thursday February 21, 2008

The Mount Athos diet

“Moderation in all things,” my grandfather always used to tell my mother, and my mother said it to me. It’s one reason he lived to be over 90; and so may you, if you are able to follow the regimen in the Guardian and Observer’s latest weekend giveaway – the “Mount Athos Diet”.

These two special reports are quite fun, in a pop science kind of way. Their stated aim is to give some insight into the lives of the “world’s healthiest people” – in this case, the monks at Mount Athos, the male-only, semi-autonomous religious community in Greece. Thanks to their diet – regular fasting, home-grown vegetables, simple wine and occasional fish, never any meat – these monks have one of the lowest incidences of cancer in the world. It’s a Mediterranean diet, but without a souvlaki in sight. What could be healthier than that?

I have visited Mount Athos, about eight or nine years ago now, and I can concur about one thing: a trip to the Holy Mountain does help you lose weight. When I was there I lost half a stone or more. But as the Guardian points out, the diet can’t take all the credit. There are lifestyle factors too – and the trouble is, the lifestyle isn’t exactly transferable to life in the Big Smoke.

First, in Mount Athos there is scarcely any infrastructure. This is a Good Thing, on account of all the hermits. There are a small number of forest tracks, just big enough for a pick-up truck to get from one side of the peninsula to the other; there is a boat for getting around the coast; but most of the time, if you want to get anywhere, you’ve got to walk. To get from one monastery to another, you’re going to spend a lot of time lugging your frame up rocky footpaths which zig-zag their way up some of the steepest mountainsides in all of Greece. Monks have to do this dressed in black cloaks, even before they start working the paddy fields they’ve cut into the hills. No wonder they lose weight.

Second, as the booklets say, Athonite monks don’t eat much. Just how little they eat became clear to me in my first day on the peninsula, when, after eight hours’ walking in the hot sun, I turned up at a monastery on the north coast to find that the only food available was a small bowl of thin soup. It was so insubstantial I couldn’t eat it; my body needed carbs, and, apart from a chunk of bread, carbs there were none. Even the next day, at a posher monastery on the south coast (yes, some monasteries are posher than others), I ate a small square of pasta and horta (bitter Greek greens) with a glass of village wine. And that was it. If I hadn’t brought some honey and peanut bars with me I would have expired.

Finally, and not as irrelevantly as it may seem, in Mount Athos there is not a lot of telly. Or rather, there is no telly at all. Even electricity is a fairly recent introduction. Partly because of this, and partly because they are monks and that is what monks do, everybody gets up at five o’clock in the morning and goes to church. And as any Brit who has ever been to a Greek church ceremony will know, the typical Orthodox service may be spiritually uplifting, but it is also a drawn-out affair. For the psaltist and the priests (the ones doing the singing), it is a complex and often repetitive arrangement of New Testament Greek psalms, chants and responses, lasting anything up to four hours. For the congregation, it’s pretty much the same except that you don’t have to turn up right at the start – but you do have to do a lot of standing up and sitting down, at exactly the right times, or everyone stares at you. Yes, it’s a moving experience, listening to the lilting tones of the psaltist in an ancient Byzantine monastery, watching as the incense burner sways, the sun rises and light enters the open door from across the open sea. But the three-hour build-up to these moments is more exhausting than you think. I often wonder how many calories you use up when you are half-asleep on your feet.

So. Would I recommend the “Mount Athos Diet”? Of course I would. If you can get up at 5am, stand in church for three hours in the morning before breakfast, then work in the paddy fields all day growing food for your supper, followed by an hour or two of private contemplation and an early night, all without the company of women – if you can do all that, then following the recipes in these booklets should help you become one of the world’s healthiest people. Only thing is, you’ll be living in a different world.

Tuesday February 19, 2008

All-too-brief encounter

Being of a romantic but cantankerous disposition, I always find Valentine’s Day a bit tricky. Obviously I want to pull out the stops. But I do not want to (1) sit in a posh restaurant amid rows of identical cooing couples, (2) cook, because it will take all night, or worst of all (3) be left alone in a situation where I am forced to present my loved one with champagne, chocolates, roses, greetings cards, or any of the other predictable paraphernalia that turn Valentine’s Day into just another excuse to rush to the bloody shops.

Then the other half came up with a rather good idea. She spotted a preview of the stage version of Brief Encounter, at the Cinema Haymarket. Apparently, she said, these entrepreneurial acting folk have converted the cinema into a 1930s-style theatre, with 1930s-style entertainments – which is doubly cool because of course not only was The Cinema Haymarket once a theatre, but Brief Encounter was once a stage play. So if even it’s rubbish, I thought, it will have a certain authenticity.

I was wrong in both predictions. First, it had very little authenticity. Second, it was brilliant. Five-star brilliant.

There are two parallel shows going on in this Brief Encounter. There is the central plot that everybody knows, in which sensible Laura and romantic Alec meet at a railway station and discover more than they wanted to know about themselves and adultery in the modern world; early on, Laura walks directly through a gap in the screen to appear on a giant projection behind the stage, and at that moment a surge of excitement moves through you, because it’s a riff on the overpowering surreality of love – the way it’s all-too-real and not-real at all, and makes ordinary life pale by comparison. And it works.

But there’s also another story, which is that if you go to a theatre in the 21st century you can still be entertained by a bunch of 1930s-style, big-eared, kooky guitar-strumming usherettes and bit-part players waving balloons and mucking about with the form, and that this is more fun for us jolly postmodern literati than it probably ever was in the 30s.

If you have a fickle heart like mine, and you can switch from teary-eyed drama to rollicking visual jokes at the flick of a directorial switch, you will love this Brief Encounter. I did laugh and I did cry. The Guardian, weirdly, only gave it three stars, on the basis that it doesn’t capture the “quiet integrity” of the original. Actually it does, but only in flashes, and then it sets those moments apart by wheeling on the mechanicals as counterpoint. If you go along, look out for the transforming songs by the surly barmaid behind the counter. “That’s bloody genius,” I found myself saying aloud, to my other half. And she was smiling too. It was that good.

Thursday February 14, 2008

So Greek

Greeks are famous for their incomprehensible proverbs, but here’s one saying I absolutely love.

The phrase is “Kathe persi kai kalutera”. It means, literally, “Every last year and better”.

Or, to put it another way, every year things get worse.

For maximum effect, to be said by old men sitting in coffee-shops whose wives are at home slaving over a hot stove.

Friday February 8, 2008

39 games - one step to oblivion

So. They’ve finally done it. The Premiership chairmen have come up with an idea so mad, so avaricious, so crushingly short-sighted, as to make the comic pronouncements of Fifa president Sepp Blatter seem benign by comparison.

I mean, Blatter drives you mad, but entertainingly so. His idea to have women footballers dress a bit more skimpily to lure the punters in? Funny. His edict saying injured footballers must leave the pitch and come back on again if they get hurt, thus giving the hard cases even more incentive to kick them out of the game? Amusing, if like me you’re more of the hacker persuasion than the silkily skilled. The “Van Nistelrooy rule”, allowing strikers to score goals even when they’re standing two miles offside? Hilarious, especially when you hear the losing manager whinging about it after the game.

But the idea that Premiership teams should play a single extra game in the season, abroad, against randomly selected opposition, with points to be added to those gleaned from the existing 38 games?

Not funny at all. Not close.

It’s the beginning of the end of league football, which is the foundation on which the game’s success has been built.

They used to say “the league table doesn’t lie”. Under this system, it will.

The 39th game kills the point of the Premiership. I for one will not attend any Premiership matches under such a system. What’s the point? The three points you get in the game you’re watching might be wiped out, when you draw Manchester Utd in Rio while your rivals get Crystal Palace.

There are, of course, two possible explanations for this scheme. One is that the Premiership chairmen are trying to shock us with the maddest idea they can come up with, so fans keep their mouths shut when they come up with something only slightly less crazy, like a world super-league that lasts all season long.

The second is that they really mean it.

Either way it’s got to be fought.

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