beards, bellies and ale

this week we tootled along to the Battersea Beer Festival for a celebration of real ale. For those of you unfamiliar with ale it is defined as… ”beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide”.

It is the kind of stuff that most australians would think of when they imagine being served warm beer and I have had the odd visitor turn their nose up at it but really, it is delicious. Apart from the many and varied flavours that you don’t get drinking cold lager, it is produced all over the place in small breweries which means it always has a story. So, the stories from Wednesday night included:

• Old Bushy Tail – a reddish malty beer from Bushy’s brewery on the Isle of Man
• Quadhop – fruity hoppy golden ale from Downton brewery in Wiltshire
• Hophead – an old favourite hoppy bitter from Dark Star in West Sussex
• Dogwatch Stout – chocolate aftertaste from Nelson in Chatham
• Beijing Black – lovely stout from Potbelly in Kettering

and last but not least, Madog’s Ale which according to the notes had a ‘malty nose’ which in reality translates to smelling of farts from Purple Moose in Porthmadog in Wales. 

the market at borough

borough market on a saturday is definitely one of the highlights of the week – bacon bap with brown sauce from roast, monmouth flat white and if you wander for more than half an hour, a cheeky half in the Market Porter. This morning we were joined by the lovely April who is visiting and we wandered home with a bag full of Flour Power Banana Cake, ingredients for potato and leek soup and some Cotherstone cheese from Neal’s Yard.

sunday night in bethnal green

Justin works with lots of cool people and one of the coolest is Andy Liu. He has been giving us the inside vibe on chinese food in london and tonight he took us to gourmet san in bethnal green. We had some rather tasty treats, lots of garlic, lots of chilli and the odd bit of offal. I wish I could tell you what we had properly but basically it was a cold beef and tripe salad with coriander and sesame, fish cooked in a broth and loaded with chillies and the most delicious garlic lamb skewers…

and then we caught the tube back and walking home it started to snow. Proper snow. Sometimes london is really quite rockin.

le grande depart…

last weekend the tour de france was in London…and it so totally rocked! We watched the first time trial of the tour from outside the queen’s digs and then wandered up the road to Blackfriars Bridge to say goodbye as they pushed off toward Canterbury for stage 1. check out some pics on flickr including one of Cadel Evans- 41 – cycling towards St Pauls.

rainy bank holidays

we are enjoying the second saturday of our long weekend at the moment. The bank holiday naming is a bit bizarre but I suppose it is quite accurate. It has been raining quite heavily all morning but hopefully we are going to venture out soon to see a photography exhibition at the Tate Britain and enjoy some time under our umbrellas. This is perhaps the only place I have lived that buying a nice brolly doesn’t seem like an indulgence but a necessity!

london in the spring

one of the best things about where we live in london is that i get to walk to and from work. This means two things, one i don’t have to puke in bins outside the station on my arrival and two I get to enjoy time seeing the sights which in my case aren’t the inside of a tunnel. At the moment however, walking around london is a bit of a health hazard as the air is thick with pollen. After a couple of days you get used to seeing people walking past you choking on the stuff or trying to get things out of their eyes, but it does feel a little like nature is striking back. Hopefully it will all be over by the weekend, but until then i am very tempted to wear a japanese style face mask and goggles for protection…

it snowed!

we woke up this morning to a very rare london treat – snow! I took these on my way to work and was a little embarrassed at being such a tourist until I noticed that lots of people were doing the same thing apparently it hardly ever snows heavily enough to reach the ground like this. Of course it was all melted by day end but I am watching the clouds hopefully for more winter wonderland in the morning.

crazy weather

you may have seen on the news that we have been having nuts weather the last couple of days in London. Last thursday was probably the worst with gale force winds causing all hell to break loose on public transport (average journey home 3 hours! lucky my legs can get me home in 40 mins), London Bridge Station to loose its roof and the Tate Modern loosing a bit of its famous stack light. But we did get great armageddon skies to go with it so the photographers amongst us can’t really complain. Below is a pic I took from Blackfriars Bridge looking west last week.