gunpowder, buttery breast milk and tears
This is a Substack that starts with me sounding like a pretentious twat and ends in gasoline and caramel induced happy tears.
I’d been at a thing, and got in round midnight or thereabouts. I’d have liked to think I was keen to get to bed. But there were things to do.
The dogs had created one of their mess en scene, an epic tableaux of a deconstructed sitting room. Toys and sofa cushions tossed across the floor, a lamp broken, dog bowl in middle of the room, paper torn and thrown everywhere. I righted their cheery chaos.
The dogs had to go out. I clipped on their leads, lit a cigarette and went out to be yanked in two directions, I swear one day I’ll just split down the middle. To stop the dogs from harshing my mellow I put on my headphones and listened to some music.
Yes, I’d had a few wines; not a skinful, more, it’d be rude not to multiple small pours of a 1998 Châteauneuf du Pape. Rhône reds sometimes show up with an incredible smoky bacony fatty expression, which I think comes from the syrah grape in them but I don’t know wine is so chemistry. This one from Chateau Beaucastel came on less like Frazzles more like the finest nutty Iberico ham. Ridickalicious.
One of the white wines had that burnt match head smell and glamorous buttery breast milk with a hint of petrol taste of favourite Burgundies from Meursault. This queer explosive mineral note is almost like gunpowder or creosote (a smell I love). I’ve only ever encountered it in expensive Burgundy and Islay whisky. (Indeed, one very collectible whiskey is aged in old Meursault barrels, but let’s not geek out too much. It’s ffffffkin yawn).
This shows up especially in Domaine Coche-Dury’s Meursault, which is one of the most expensive white wines on the block. Bottles are commonly around a grand each. This wine tasted like a £500 chardonnay but was in fact a £68 wine from the Côtes Catalanes in the Languedoc, made with grenache and carignan.
You know a wine is good when you have to break from the chat and go, “Bloody hell, that’s good,” which I did, several times. Props to Bella Babbit at Dynamic Vines who chose the wines with our hosts, and poured them.
It feels ridiculous being all secretive about the location at a huge private dining room on the first floor of a Clerkenwell building that had that expansive anything could happen vibe that all the fun places have.
The table easily sat 20. You know how people say, “It’s really good coke, you can sleep on it.” Well, with sound systems it’s, “It’s a really good sound system, you can hear yourself talk over it.” The place had an incredible sound system. Oh and the food, the food was sick. Not kawasaki bad norovirus sick, but best chef in Britain good sick.
At the back at an open kitchen semi-prepped food was being finished by Merlin and his team. Merlin is from Totnes in Devon, where, as he says, “Being called Merlin is a bit like being called David anywhere else.”
Merlin’s cooking some of the most glorious food in the UK right now. Very light, largely vegetable based with very small exquisite pieces of protein (took a night off carnivore). Lots of valuable use of fermentation, imaginative but not stupidly cheffy. He grows most of his produce that is lustrous with life
In the 36th issue of Noble Rot there’s an interview with Merlin, by me. Noble Rot rarely reproduces their content online so I can’t provide a link to the story. The Osip PRs were pleased about that because I got more more out of him than they were comfortable with and when the editor relayed the content of the piece they asked that the entire issue to be pulped.
Jesus.
It’s only cooking. It’s only a few words about the lost youth of an impressive adult.
Perspective people, please.
Just weigh your press, don’t read it, said Andy Warhol. It’s solid advice, for a pre digtal age.
**
Where I am moving to in Somerset is near Osip, his restaurant. Merlin left London with a Michelin star long before he was 30, and willingly so. I leave half way through my fifties, reluctantly. I still feel like there was work to do here. But I am a romantic, nostalgic, mournful, real silly sausage. Sometimes I find it hard to throw away dead flowers let alone the neighbourhood within which I have spent the vast majority of an entire adult lifetime. It’s a wrench. I keep telling myself I will be back.
We will return to Merlin and Domaine Coche-Dury’s Meursault after the jump. That very wine had quite pivotal position in my evolution as an adult, and in my relationship with wine, with London, with people, with men, with money.
The thing I was at, was a thing that only happens in a city like London, a thing that only happens to you when you’ve been around for a while and a thing that I often don’t even bother to go to. I’ve become so blasé and lazy about all the lovely things. For once I went to the thing instead of sitting up all night typing. I often just don’t go to things but now I am close to leaving London for God knows how long I am starting to realise how lucky I am to be invited and to have done all these things. I’m gonna miss the things and the people who go to them.
But we make our own lives and I am trying not to think about it.
I have less than one calendar month left now in my west London flat behind Latimer Road tube. This time next month I will have already packed up and shipped out. In one month I will spend my last night in my empty flat, probably sleeping in The Cupboard*, as my bed will have already gone to Somerset. The thought causes my gut to clench. Though I have bought a mattress topper so at least my spine will have some relief (why didn’t I do that in September?)
*The Cupboard refers to an extended period of time sleeping in my office after my relationship ended
The rent is paid on my Somerset rental from 5th March. I could leave tomorrow to live there. The landlady wants a tonne of references, paperwork and financial stuff from me. Being a tenant of doubtful means doesn’t exactly lift the spirit. It looks like my ex is going to have to be my guarantor which is a bit grim. “Don’t you have pay slips?” said the landlady. No dearie, I haven’t had a job since 1999.
Let’s go back to the mixed blessing of downfalls.
Merlin and I are not alike especially but as a kid his downfall was a little like my own.
The how, why and where of all this isn’t an above the jump topic. That’s how this Substack works. I don’t mind that its not the most profitable way to run it or not (I’m told it is not by those in power at Substack; I’m told you give your best stuff for free.) So I have had to decide that, for me, it’s less about maximising money and more about trust, intimacy and reader intention. We buy books because we are interested in the subject or respect the author’s ability to spin a yarn or uncover the facts. We buy a magazine because we trust the brand to entertain us. Same here, I aim to give good value for money over a year and cost less than a low drama coffee a month (£35 = £2.90 a month), and over a month (£6.66 = £79.92 a year) to cost about the same as a modestly good glass of OK wine in an ordinary country pub. I am not Porn Hub or Facebook, where ads flashing and the site’s ability to flog subscriber information on to second parties make it more than very viable to give content away for so called free.
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