Alfie is here

This is a picture of our new baby, Alfie. I was going to write about the birth but I think I will just leave it. If you have been at the birth of a baby you will know why and if you haven't but were planning a family you don't want to know.
Nuff said.

hook line and sinker

Drank this the other night and actually it was ok for a six quid bottle of wine, perhaps a little one dimensional, possibly a little bitter but acceptable......

Then it struck me that maybe I had been seduced by the natty little 'promo scarf' draped seductively around the neck of the otherwise completely ordinary looking bottle.
Could I have just accepted the glaring grammar vacuum 'Ten Years of Medals'.
What does it mean? I can't really work it out. They might as well have written '14 kilos of bunting'.

You live and learn.

This is the first of an occasional series of wine reviews. The main reason for this is that, whilst I am content to drink beer in social circumstances, I firmly believe that the big players in the world of beer are churning out a cheap'n'nasty product.
When I am at home I am much more likely to drink wine. The problem is that when I buy a bottle of wine which I enjoy I invariably forget what it is. This blog will serve the purpose of a living wine reference to jog my booze riddled memory when i find myself staring vacantly at the shelves of my local wine emporium.
In a chilling side note, my wife and I were recently in the maternity ward of a local hospital where I was very impressed by the PCA's efforts at combatting hospital acquired infections with the installation of alcogel hand rub. It turns out that in many hospitals alcoholics add the alchogel to glasses of orange juice! Addiction, it seems is the true mother of invention.
Anyway, tonight tipple is a sparkling French white wine called Charmelieu from the Burgundy region and made exclusively from Chardonnay grapes. This wine was matured for two years before finding itself on the shelves of my local Marks and Spencer. The blurb talks of citrus and a hint of cream, and while it doesn't pack the cutting edge of my favourite champagnes it does have a really clean and zingy taste which makes it extremely quaffable. To be honest a wine of this quality makes it very difficult to justify spending another £20 on a bottle of Champagne. The value for money aspect of this wine makes it an easy 4 out of 5

The calm before the storm.

I have returned from my tour two weeks before the end in order to be at my wife's side for the birth of our third child. Bit of birth advice for first time fathers: being at your partner's side is the best place to be as you avoid amneotic splash-back.

street scene

We are now working in Rotterdam in the sunken empire of Holland.
I described Holland as the last bastion of Euro-liberalism, but my early sojourns into the city have revealed the terrible consequences of this laissez-faire attitude to everyone's needs. There is an insane amount of of dog poo on the streets. Its almost as though someone is being paid to put it everywhere.
Are the people of this country too polite to point out that, although it may be slightly onerous for the owner of a dog to clean up after it, for the rest of us it is an affront to all that is acceptable in civilised society? Judging by the number of poos with footprints in them it seems that there a lot of people who are being caught out by this street-level filth menace. Yikes

Dark underbelly

Since my last post a few things have happened to reshape my opinion of Tallinn.
Yesterday one of my colleagues had their camera stolen from the table beside her. This is perhaps not unusual in a major European city and during previous tours other members of our company have been victims of street crime.
But within 10 minutes of this event another member of our company was threatened in a popular fast food restaurant and on our return to the relative safety of the hotel we witnessed a fight in the bar.
After this high density seam of upset most people decided to go to bed where they could watch violent movies from the safety of bed.
The upshot of all this is that I dare not go and visit what I hoped would be the highlight of my stay in Estonia. Who knows what unspeakable act of criminality might befall me if ventured into the marzipan museum.
We are off to the last bastion of Euro-liberalism that is Holland where, hopefully, things will improve.

as good as it gets

It turns out that the hotel we are staying in has one of the hippest live music venues in the city of Tallin and the hippest band in the whole of Estonia were playing there tonight.
This was of particular interest to me as I spent a long time living in London (arguably the hippest city in the world) trying to make it as the hippest band in town.
Tallin is a city of 400 000 people compared to the ten million who inhabit ldn which goes some way towards explaining the crazy mixture in the band I watched tonight.
First I just have to say a word about listening to pop music in a foreign language. Its very revealing of the musical elements in each song, as you don't have the faintest idea what they are singing about. As a result I spent a large part of the gig trying to work out what chords the guitarists were playing and analysing the the general musical content of the show. The result? The band were super tight, well rehearsed, all playing the hippest instruments; but shackled to very predictable chord sequences and melodies. The overall effect was like an all male version of Roxette; with a rock-lite europop vibe overlayed on a super-incongruous personel selection.
The photos at the top of this post only begin to tell the story. The bass player and drummer looked respectively like the son and grandson of Roy Orbison with identikit sunglasses and an air of studied indifference to the material they were churning out, while the lead singer looked like a slightly younger version of Martin Jarvis and had the infuriating habit of strumming his Telecaster halfway up the neck as if he was trying to shake hands with himself in an orgy of self-congratulation. Oh and there was a keyboard player.
Completing the lineup was a young guitarist who had an almost cliched Nordic death metal get up with a full complement of tattoos, blistering fret-wank technique and eyes so close together it looked like he had spent years focussing on the end of his nose.
Strangely enough the overall effect was ace and I along with the rest of the crowd were transported by the synergy of band and audience to a little pocket of pop nirvana. Most of the fans (they all seemed to know the words) were young women and we danced with abandon untill the end of the when the band abruptly disappeared without staging an encore. Cooooell.