 Cocktails and Cadly Conversions
London is a strange place, especially if you didn’t grow up here. But that strangeness is part of what makes her unique. She’s more like New York than the rest of England, an island unto herself filled with people from every corner of the globe. She has secrets and mysteries that will intrigue a man for his entire life and even then he will only just scratch the surface. Like many of my friends, I have a love/hate relationship with the place.
And there’s a lot to love. From the sweeping crescents of Piccadilly and Regent Street to the Deco joys of the Adelphi and even in the modern glass towers of the City, the architecture of this town is astonishing. Walk through the West End and every time you turn a corner your eye is pleasantly surprised with something from the last couple of centuries that you weren’t expecting. Then there’s the food. Anyone who tells you that you can’t get a decent meal in London is a moron who should be slapped with a decent-sized wine list (but I’ll get to booze in a minute). The range on offer now is mind-boggling. Sure you can go to Chinatown and grab some noodles, but there are other places you only find out about from the People Who Know – I had the pleasure of taking our own Jack Newcastle to one during his visit in February and watching him stop dead after his first mouthful, so great was his joy. Indian food? Oh good gods, you bet we’ve got that – curry is damned near our national dish these days and the chefs who’ve chosen to come here from the Subcontinent produce a dining experience you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in the world. But what of ‘British’ food? Well, that’s another matter entirely. I was discussing this with a foodie friend only recently, and we worked out why the world doesn’t think it exists: it’s all about quality.
Bear with me here. If your meat isn’t necessarily up to par, a heavy sauce can disguise a multitude of sins. If it’s somewhat less plentiful than you’d like, it can be padded out with a wide variety of ingredients. If the season for certain ingredients is short, then pickling and preservation are your friends. When you’re stuck in the position where things are actually pretty good, however, both in terms of quality and supply, all you really have to do is cook the ingredients and let their own flavours speak for themselves. So that’s what we’ve traditionally done over here. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong when done by someone who can’t cook, and that’s where the bad rep came from. If you don’t believe me, try this at home: buy the best cut of meat you can get, and roast it. Don’t mess around with sauces, just wrap it tight to let the juices stay in and cook it slowly. Now cook the veg for only as long as it needs to soften a little. Not a lot, just a little – this is where so many attempts go wrong. Finally, par-boil some really good potatoes and pop them in the oven with some fat. Don’t use vegetable oil, use real fat and let them brown on the outside. Congratulations, you’ve just made a traditional roast. As long as you haven’t overcooked anything it’ll taste great, I promise.
So you’ve eaten, now you need something to drink. British wine? Stop laughing at the back, there are vineyards over here winning prizes, especially among the sparkling fraternity. Beer comes in more than three thousand flavours, and many of what are now considered the classic cocktails were invented right here in London. My highlight of the month was cocktail based this time, and I’ll come to that later.
That’s the good. Some of the things I love about this town. Now we have to be honest and look at the bad.
London is dirty. Stain-your-shirtcuffs dirty. There’s an awful lot of crud in the air and it gets into your skin, your hair (those who have it, anyway), your lungs and your wardrobe. White shirts have a punishing time here and my white suits make only the very rarest of appearances in town.
London is full of tourists all year round. Many of them are continually being distracted by the various beauties I spoke of earlier, even more are lost and some of them appear never to have seen a shop before. This makes getting around on foot a mite problematic at times and frequently infuriating. Londoners know where they’re going and want to get there now, so having people walk at a pace that would shame a snail’s grandmother can cause a certain level of irritation. Then you have them getting in your way on the Tube, along with a pretty high percentage of locals who seem to think that they have to check their brains in when they travel. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve seen people board a train and just top dead, blocking the entrance for the people behind them. Move down inside the car? Hell, some of these people barely move inside the car full stop!
London is expensive, and while it’s the best place in the world when you’re on the up it’s the absolute pits when you’re broke. It gets worse when you’ve a limited social circle, too. You can (and I do) pay over three pounds for a pint of beer in the West End, and three-figure bar bills aren’t that difficult to rack up.
Somewhere between love and hate, I find the Tube. You can get almost anywhere in about an hour using public transport in London, which is fantastic in a city so determinedly unfriendly to the automobile, but the moron quotient one finds on the average train can make that journey agony. Add that to the unions’ habit of calling a strike whenever management says ‘No’ to them, and their habit of making them as inconvenient as possible, and it makes car ownership suddenly tempting. Here’s an example: the union calls a 72-hour strike. They start this in the early evening, which means that services start petering out at lunchtime, and end it in the early evening, which means that there is no way in hell of getting enough trains to run anything more than a skeleton service until the next day. Yet they call this a three-day strike. I make that FIVE days of inconvenience caused in the name of yet another pay rise. Then, when those pay rises mean that jobs have to be cut to balance the books, guess what happens again? Yep, out we go again, brothers!
And to think that I actually support the idea of organised labour…
Anyway, after all that ranting I should share the highlight of my month. It’s been a good one, to be honest: a science fiction convention (which is a lot more fun than it sounds, especially if you work in the genre), some great food and several drinking sessions to make a strong man’s liver pale with terror. It was one of those sessions that gave me my greatest joy.
I’d been out for a drink with some fans – a thing I like to do from time to time – and closing time had come before the end of my interest in drinking. I made the traditional call for volunteers to continue the joys, but none were forthcoming bar a young chap by the name of Herc. Herc’s a pleasant individual, but not what I would immediately class as Cad material so we attacked a late bar of my acquaintance that has a reasonable range of beer. Sadly, said bar was chock-a-block and getting served was impossible through the rush, so we went in search of another.
“How do you feel about cocktails?” I asked.
“I’ve never really had any.” came the reply.
Well, that was that. I have no doubt that any reader of this fine journal can guess what happened next, and five minutes later we were in a cocktail bar that is rapidly becoming a favourite of mine. Ten minutes after that (most of it spent watching a bartender really make an effort over the construction of my Old Fashioned) I got to watch Herc drink his first cocktail.
How to describe the effect? His eyes lit up. His expression was one of astonishment. I was watching a whole new world open up in front of him, and it was clear that he was enjoying the view. He started asking questions, about booze, then about The Cad, then about the life. An hour’s drinking later, he insisted on getting the tip before we headed our separate ways.
It’s not often one gets to initiate a new Cad, but I think that young Herc will make a fine member of the fraternity. Let’s hope he spreads the word, gets dressed, and Goes Out.
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