HOLIDAY TREATS

As a kid I was notoriously picky about breakfast cereals (an odd hang-up I admit) and my Mum despaired of finding one that I liked. Then, on a holiday trip to an aunt and uncle in Somerset, I fell in love with Weetabix (a previously rejected brand) and not only ate what I was given but, Oliver Twist-like, asked for more!

Back home, my delighted mother immediately invested in a bargain-bumper-mega-giant-economy-size box of Weetablix and, as might have been predicted, never touched them again –– at least, not for many years!

I have a theory that there's a whole category of food and drink that we enjoy – indeed, relish – while being on holiday but which has little or no appeal if once transported to, or encountered in, the normal mundane surroundings of our home environment: hence the number of unopened bottles of Ouzo currently stashed under our stairs!

Among such exclusive vacation treats I'd list waffles with maple syrup and crispy bacon in an American diner, soft ice cream with a Cadbury's flake on a British seaside pier –– and a ice-cool, foamy freddo cappuccino in a shady Greek taverna...

Still, like all the very best treats, it was fun while it lasted!

FLUID ARTFORM

Sibley-blog-regular, Roger the Librarian has just pointed me in the direction of a fascinating - though essentially pointless - enterprise.

Yes, it does look like a lot of coffee cups...


But, as Rolf used to say, can you see what it is, yet?


Good heavens! It's dear old Mona in her cups, as it were! Arguably the world's most famous painting recreated with 3,604 cups of coffee - and 564 pints of milk!

Measuring 20 feet x 13 feet, the image took eight people just three hours to complete - which, when you think about it, is not that much longer than the average wait in a boutique coffee shop!

The drinkable version of Da Vinci's masterpiece was created for The Rocks Aroma Festival in Sydney, Australia, where it was seen by 130,000 people attending a one-day coffee-lovers event.


Each cup of black coffee was topped-up with varying amounts of milk - none, a little or a lot - which gave the different sepia shades required to create the 'painting'.

You can read a full account of the story in The Daily Telegraph.


"Beats Jesus in the Marmite lid," says Roger, adding, "Mine's a skinny latte Sistine Chapel, please!"

Thanks Roger, do you happen to know if they make a decaffeinated version?

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

Of course, if you don't like tea...


That's if you'd drink anything offered to you by this party host!

Anyway, today, I'd like to introduce you to a more benign - but no less strange - account of that famous mad tea party from Jonathan Millers' 1966 TV film, Alice in Wonderland...


This avant-garde production was shot in crisp monotone of a nineteenth-century Daguerreotype and was informed by the satirical sensibility of Miller's co-written cult 'sixties revue, Beyond the Fringe. Indeed, the film featured two of Miller's BTF co-stars, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett along with such starry names as Peter Sellers, Michael Redgrave, Finlay Currie, Alison Leggatt and John Gielgud playing Lewis Carroll's Wonderlanders without the aid of fur and whiskers as if they were merely Alice's eccentric Victorian relations.

I still vividly remember the controversy that raged in the press about the production ("Alice strictly for grown-ups...") and the huge excitement that I felt at seeing something that was so radically revisionist.

Wilfred Brambell (the father in Steptoe and Son) was a fiercely intimidating White Rabbit...


Leo McKern (later the eponymous Rumpole of the Bailey) was a boozy Duchess-cum-Nanny...


...and Gielgud as the Mock Turtle, accompanied by an unlikely Gryphon in the person of media pundit, Malcolm Muggeridge, danced a version of 'The Lobster Quadrille' that provided one of the decade's oddest and yet most hauntingly poignant television moments...


Anyway, back to that mad tea-party: here Alice (played by the hitherto unknown Anne-Marie Mallik) spends a bemusing afternoon in the company of the Hatter (Peter Cook), the March Hare (Michael Gough) and the Dormouse (Wilfred Lawson). The music - as is fitting for such a totally 'sixties offering - was by Ravi Shankar...

If you've never seen this extraordinary interpretation of Alice, it's currently available on a DVD issued by the British Film Institute as is Jonathan Miller's other brilliantly directed TV play, Whistle and I'll Come to You, based on the ghost story by M R James and featuring an unforgettable performance by Michael Hordern: two period masterpieces that shouldn't be missed...

COFFEE OR TEA?

While in Brighton on our recent anniversary jaunt, we repeatedly sought refuge from the wind and the rain in our favourite coffee shop, Redroaster, where we consumed probably rather too many cappuccinos than were good for us...

But, look! How could anyone resist?


Of course, most of the time (i.e. when I'm not in Brighton) I'm more a tea than a coffee man, except that I think I'd soon go off my English Breakfast if I had to use this depressing teapot spotted in the Brighton museum...


Tea and sympathy? I don't think so... Just drink up and die!

Images: Brian Sibley © 2008

SMELLOVISION

More or less every day, when we are at home, I make David an early morning cup of coffee. I open the container of ground coffee and am immediately transported back to my childhood: shopping with my Mum in Bromley High Street and lingering outside the bakery and coffee shop (the name of which I have forgotten) caught in a state of olfactory inebriation by the smell of the roasting coffee beans...

I read that "the aroma of roasted coffee contains as many as 1,000 volatile compounds".

Curious!

To my mind, it is without question one of the most potent fragrances in the world and yet, for some reason, coffee never tastes -- to me, at least -- quite a fantastic as something that gloriously perfumed ought to taste!

I've recently (and belatedly) been reading Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and came across a similar thought being expressed by the hero, Adam Fenwick-Symes, triggered by the scent of -- a kipper...

No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings.

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food, of the greasy horror of fried fish and the deeply moving smell that came from it; of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and the dullness of buns...

For some fascinating insights into the aromatic powers of the coffee bean, read 'Simulating the Coffee Drinker’s Nose' on Neuromarketing: Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet.

And after all that talk of coffee, I think it's probably time for an iced frappuccino which, for the uninitiated is a blend of frappé - the Greek term for milkshake - and cappuccino.

And I think I'll drink it on the beach...


For those not able to sample the delights of a Kalymnian frappucino, here's Mr Waugh's book and an appropriate, accompanying coffee mug...