La Vie Boheme

Tags

Angelina's, beau monde, Bradley Wiggins, Brigitte Bardot, Cafe de Flore, Cocteau, Da Vinci Code, Gorden Kaye, Irma Kurtz, Jeanette Winterson, John Humphrys, La Boheme, La Vie Bohème, Les Deux Magots, madeleine, Mallarme, Manon, Maxim's, Mimi, Muriel Belcher, Musetta, Novello, Oscar Wilde, Perrault, Pippa Middleton, Proust, Rimbaud, Rodolfo, Rose Line, Rousseau, Shakespeare& Co, Something Understood, St Germain des Pres, St Sulpice, The Colony, Verlaine, Woody Allen

(Muriel Belcher by Francis Bacon)

Hi!  It’s Candia again.  I’ve been festively overwrought and last night I fell asleep listening to Irma Kurtz on Radio 4’s ‘Something Understood.’  She had constructed a compilation on La Vie Boheme, mentioning La Rive Gauche, Greenwich Village and The Colony in Soho, owned by Muriel Belcher, where Francis Bacon was paid to bring along interesting guests who were on an ‘odyssey of creativity’.

As a student, I had worn a cape and affected a feathered hat until my dad told me to tie my hair back and remove the offending headgear.

 Then I woke upto someone singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Xmas with a voiceover chiding John Humphrys with a reminder that there were more things on Heaven and Earth than had been permitted in his philosophy. Rather surreal to have the announcement of Bradley Wiggins as Sports Personality of the Year juxtaposed with cosmology and moral philosophy at 8am.

I had a somewhat unusual request yesterday, Dear Reader.  A visitor asked if he could have a guest appearance in my blog.  And who is this budding self-publicist? I hear you wonder aloud.  Eh bien, he was a rather elegant Frenchman that I introduced to Costamuchamoulah’s café society via une promenade round the aspirational, but pas trop authentique Francophile Sunday morning market in our beloved ville.  This event of global significance was ‘appening on the High Street.  (Why do I always think in terms of Gorden Kaye’s Franglais when I am narrating anything of Gallic content?)  Anyhow, it was with un soupcon of Rousseau’s irony that I directed said gentilhomme’s footsteps down the less than sunny side of the street to Suttonford’s burgeoning version of Maxim’s.

We did not recognise anything remotely familiar to this European voyageur in le marche and so I headed him off past the bookshop-alas, not Shakespeare & Co, with a resident Jeanette Winterson, but to the cosmopolitan hub of Suttonford’s Café Society.  On the way across the street my boulevardier remarked approvingly on various expensive vehicles, parked in bays, which screamed mid-life crisis.

He seemed more interested in the clientele, though the owners of Costamuchamoulah have not yet cottoned on to the device employed by Cornuche, the proprietor of Maxim’s, who remarked:

An empty room!  Never!  I always have a beauty sitting in the window, in view from the [pavement]

Here it is more like Novello’s version of the experience: And Her Mother Came Too!

(There are one or two widows, but not necessarily of the ‘merry’ variety.)  Woody Allen was distinctly absent, but there were no Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds,(sic) at least.

Ensconced in a corner, at an unwiped table and on hard chairs- not the sumptuous banquettes which might reveal hidden treasures lost down the cushions- we ordered our upwardly mobile beverages, while he showed me photographs of his international girlfriends on his Blackberry – ( is that Murier, I me demande?)  Monsieur was keen to exhibit pictures of himself in Les Deux Magots. Was this a kind of Parisian, urban, if not urbane, Crocodile Dundee equivalent of showing me that THAT was a café, in the same way as Paul Hogan had demonstrated the superiority of his jungle knife?  Whatever.  I was miffed that he had assumed that I would not have heard of such an establishment, so beloved by les philosophes, let alone having patronised it with my custom.

Les Deux Magots has thankfully nothing to do with maggots.  Un magoh was the slang term for a miser.  I don’t think misers would search out the pitchers of decadent hot chocolate found therein, nor would they pay their prices to see Oscar Wilde, Mallarme, Rimbaud etc.  In Costamuchamoulah, we pay the prices, but don’t see Apollinaire, Verlaine or Hemingway.  Apparently, Pippa Middleton might have breezed through, though I don’t know whether it was to check the sales of her book which is displayed beside the edible ladybirds and so froth.  Pun.  Formidable rear isn’t la meme chose as formidable intellect, in my book at any rate.

But to my tale- pas Perrault, but tant pis!  Ah yes, I remember it well.  The Husband and I slipped on the glacial trottoirs of St Germain- des- Pres, in the days when he went out, seeking the church of St Sulpice with its Rose Line and gnomen, but thankfully with no resident albino monk assassins.  The fountain was frozen and great slabs of sheet ice almost prevented us from venturing to the Café de Flore or Deux Magots, for it was the Advent season, as it is now.  Ah, those were the days and nights of Angelina’s and other beau monde haunts, where we expected to encounter  Mimi, Manon, Musetta and Rodolfo and perhaps, if we were very blessed, Proust himself.  Mimi had wanted to lose her senses and Musetta had forgotten the regulation of their economies and had asked the boys to order champagne.  We were a little less extravagant.

For that is the problem with such cafes of Enlightenment. Before you know it you are emptying your bank balance, merely to see and be seen.

My current companion looked around the room, panning the four corners for a barefoot Brigitte Bardot perhaps, but his eye fell upon a smart blonde woman in her fifties.  Quel surpris!  He confessed that young girls were not for him.  Like Cocteau, he was well aware that:

..to undress one of those women [would be] like an outing that calls for 3 weeks’ advance notice…it [would be] like moving house.

So, it was on my first sip of Mocha that I had the flashback, the Epiphany-and it came without the madeleine.   I will enlighten you further.

A demain..!

Come Dine With Me

Tags

Andrew Fairlie, Appellation Controlee, Come Dine with Me, Dexters, Gleneagles, Jamie Oliver, La Boheme, Lidl, Mr Bean, Nigella, Rachel Khoo, spatchcock, Swarovski

Another blast from past Suttonford Chronicles since I hadn’t many readers in 2012 when I first started writing as Candia…

Tristram spotted the advert in a shop window in Suttonford’s High Street.  It invited amateur chefs to apply to take part in the Channel 4 programme Come Dine With Me.

Tristram adored cooking, which was just as well, as his wife rarely participated in the activity.  However, he did not dare to contemplate reproducing any of his signature curries as, Clammie, his spouse, had been furious that the proprietor of Benares Balti had gazumped them in the bidding for their forever home.  A mere whiff of garam masala would send her into a vindaloo of a spleen-venting frenzy and so he would have to rely on his milder fusion cuisine.

He was apprehensive, but secretly delighted when his application was successful.  It wasn’t so much the winning of £1,000 that was important; it was national affirmation of his skills.  And it gave him the opportunity to re-visit his beloved Rachel Khoo programmes. (Why wouldn’t Clammie wear scarlet lipstick and fifties skirts?)

But who were the other contestants?

He discovered the answer soon enough, and, as usual, there was a potentially explosive mix:  Nigel Milford-Haven, an effete form teacher from St Birinus’ Middle School, who was an acolyte of Andrew Fairlie of Gleneagles fame; Gisela Boothroyd-Smythe, a parent of the legendary Suttonford delinquents, Juniper and John, and Melinda D’Oyly-Carter, an aromatherapist and masseuse who was committed to all things pink and fluffy.  She was very tactile, but tactless and preferred to be addressed as Mimi.

Tristram was of the Jamie Oliver Whack It In! school; Nigel, surprisingly, given his vocation, was not.  He favoured sourcing everything locally and his partner had a field of Dexters and a dubious connection to a pig farmer, who smoked his bacon regularly.  Gisela loved bondage cookery.

What is that? I hear you ask, Dear Reader.

It meant that since she could neither control her husband, nor her offspring, she trussed fowl, spatch-cocked chicken and game and tied up joints ruthlessly. All her wine choices were Appellation Controlee.

Melinda, or Mimi, on the other hand, used vats of lubricious olive oil- extra vergine– ; oysters in season and thick-lipped moules in summer.  She over-used Coquilles St Jacques and sighed pneumatically, a la Nigella, as she lingeringly licked the backs of spoons.

Clammie wasn’t keen on having these strange self-publicists in Nutwood Cottage, but Tristram re-assured her that they would be confined to the kitchen and dining room.  With the cameras, it was a bit of a crush, however.  Mimi didn’t mind getting up close and personal with the cameraman, though, and wobbled nearly as much as the champagne jellies she had served to the others the previous evening.  She had deliberately placed her rhinestone-encrusted spectacles in his camera bag as an excuse to keep in contact.

Gisela was angry because her son had told his form teacher, the very one who was appearing on the programme, that his mother had cheated by tarting up a dessert from Lidl.

Nigel went on to stuff a goose with a Cox’s Pippin in the manner of Mr Bean’s preparation of his Christmas turkey.  He took exception to Mimi leaning over him, looking straight into the camera lens and pronouncing:  Ooh, Mr Milford-Haven: is that a tanker in your estuary or are you just pleased to see me? He insisted that this should be cut as viewing was before the watershed and half of his form would be watching.  He was right.  They were.  However, they were hoping that he would well and truly have his goose cooked.  So much for house loyalty.

When the cameraman came indoors from filming the frosty garden, Mimi took his hand and commented that it was frozen.  Cue for a snatch of La Boheme as background muzak, which was mainly lost on the great viewing public. Those that did recognise it, cringed at the cliché.

Oddly, Mimi won first prize.  As entertainment she had given her guests a pre-prandial massage – all except Gisela, who had been feeling unwell because of the overwhelmingly pink décor of the love-booth of a living room.  (What a contrast to the evening she had hosted, when everyone had been bowled over by gun dogs and had been told where to sit in ramrod chairs whilst being presented with offal, which was promptly fed to the canines under the table, as soon as her back was turned.)

Tristram’s meal was received with polite gratitude, but the others felt that his food technology was a little twee, like the choice of his children’s names.  The pugs snapped at the guests’ ankles at the start of the evening and Gisela was not impressed by their toy-like dimensions.  She liked a real dog that could work.

Nigel had worn a co -ordinating waistcoat and tie which matched the hues of his starter.  His food was deemed too fussy and poncey-a word which Tristram had not heard for a very long time.  He tried to encourage the teacher by joking that his main course had been ambi-Dextrous, but that the steak had been a little too pink for his taste.  He scored him an 8, to be kind.

It was a relief when it was all over and Clammie could access her drive again, without having to squeeze past Gisela’s Volvo.  She and Tristram and Gisela sent commiseration cards to Nigel.  After all, he would be writing their children’s end-of term reports in the very near future.

Melinda, aka Mimi, spent her £1,000 on a new pair of Swarovski-encrusted spectacles and a designer clutch purse, as the cameraman never did return the pair she had placed so carefully in his camera bag.