October 26th 2009

            Microsoft Word has been open on my laptop for the last four hours, and for the last two hundred and forty minutes it’s blank screen has been taunting me.  There is nothing more frustrating than having something to write and not knowing how, or where, to start.

 

My thoughts drifted to a quote by the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabakov. “The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”  I dragged my cursor over the screen incase the font colour had been set to white, in the vain hope that, against all the laws of probability, this would apply to the electronic page.  Alas, it did not.

 

You see, the thing is that the weekend just passed has given me new motivation to get on with planning this pudding tour and writing this book.  A protracted and difficult house sale meant a hiatus in preparations, and what was originally planned to be a summer tour had to wait.  The good news is that it is now planned to start in January, as soon as the inevitable New Year’s Eve hangover has shifted.

 

The cause of this fresh burst of impetus was a meeting with an old friend and the keeping of a promise.  I have made a number of promises to people with regards to my pudding tour, these range from dessert at the Uffington White Horse, to a quest to find the best piece of carrot cake in the UK (I’ve been told it’s in Bath) and return with it to Coventry.  This particular promise was to invest in a film that my friend, Ed Dark, is directing.

 

The film is called Chasing Cotards, and is the story of a once successful artist named Hart who has his world torn apart by loss. “He is consumed by a haunting portrait of his deceased wife and spends every moment studying her face, unable to forget. Knowing that she was taken away from him too soon, all he wishes is that she would return to breathe life into his world once more.” – www.chasingcotards.com

 

I wanted to invest and be a part of this incredible project from the second I read the script.  It’s a story that I think everyone will be able to relate to.  Everyone has someone they wish they’d had more time with, and I think there are a great many people that sometimes need a gentle nudge so that they can get on with their lives and start looking positively towards their own future.  For more information on the film I would direct you to the website above.  If you’re a facebook user then search Chasing Cotards and join the group.

 

I look forward to seeing the finished film at its premiere at the Imax in London, and also to the dessert related opportunities that a trip to the capital will provide.  I am also delighted to see an old friend doing so well.  Ed and I worked together many years ago at our local cinema, and I can tell you now that a cinema is a veritable melting pot of creative minds.  At any point on any given day I could point out any number of musicians, artists, photographer’s, writers, etc, etc, among the staff members.  It’s frankly inspiring to see one of those creative minds getting out there and making something wonderful, I hope to follow his lead in the writing of this book.  But even if the book doesn’t get anywhere, I will take pride in knowing that I tried and I’ll have a blast along the way.  Dreams don’t just come true by themself, you have to make them happen.  The idea for this book and tour was the nudge I needed. 

 

Would you look at that, I guess the words were there all the time.  It seems I just had to reveal them by typing.

July 2nd 2009

So, it’s been a week since Michael Jackson died; bare with me this does have a point.  People will always talk about the man and the scandal that surrounded him in his later years, and I don’t want to get involved in speculation; I would prefer to remember the one thing that is proven fact about the man, and that is that he made great music.

I was sat in the smoking area of a bar called Heroes in Worcester, enjoying a cocktail called a chocolate monkey and chatting with a mate.  The news of his death had started to filter through inside, and someone came out to share the news.  This was met first with disbelief and then with the production of more internet-ready phones than I have ever seen in one place, outside of a Carphone Warehouse.

Frantic smokers sobered up enough to let their fingers navigate the impossibly small keyboards of said phones, desperately searching for something to corroborate the rumours and confirm it as fact.  Google provided what they were looking for.  The news was confirmed.

All I could think about was the fact that “Bad” had been the first album I had ever bought.  It got played constantly, getting switched between my twin tape deck cassette player and a red brick of an old school walkman.  It got played so frequently that both tape and walkman met an unfortunate end at the hands of Mr. Hammer after the latter chewed up the former, the tape being destroyed as an innocent victim of my tool based rescue attempt.

There, in the smoking area of a bar in Worcester, for a brief moment I was seven again and jumping off my bedroom furniture as I air-guitared my way through the album.  I was lost in the memory for a while; at least until my friend pointed out that my glass was empty, my alcoholic chocolate milkshake drunk.  That was the end of the first of two events that week that would cast me into a sea of nostalgia.

The second event occurred two days later in Newport.  Having spent the previous three weekends on the lash in Worcester, a friend and I had decided that a road trip to crash at a mate’s house and get wrecked in another city sounded like a good idea. 

We’d come up with a list of “funny” things to say when asked what we did, ranging from training dolphins to being the guy who put the hole in polo’s.  It turned out that simply telling people that I was planning a tour of the UK and Ireland sampling and reviewing puddings, and writing a book of my exploits; was the perfect conversation starter.

It was whilst we were talking to a couple of young ladies outside a pub known as The Riv, that this realisation dawned.  The topic had come up and I asked one of the girls what her favourite pudding was.  I know, I’m smooth.  Her answer sent me diving back into a sea of nostalgia.  Sponge Pudding. 

Again, I felt seven years old again and enjoying the memories of a much simpler time.  A time when all there was to worry about was who would win in a fight between Mum-ra and Skeletor; a time when interaction with the opposite sex seldom amounted to more than pulling pigtails, or chasing them with bugs.  When career aspirations included being a Ghostbuster and letters to Santa frequently asked for an unlicensed nuclear accelerator of your very own, because  if your sister messes with your lego one more time you’ll fry her.

What? Just me….?

I don’t know why, but this reverie didn’t pass as quickly as it had two days earlier. Maybe it was the fact that I had consumed quite a lot of alcohol, or maybe it was the fact that Newport is not that far from a town called Caldicot; a town where I lived for three years as child, and where I would probably have had my first sponge pudding.  Whatever the reasons, I was adrift.

I can remember the sponge puddings my mum used to make.  Soft, yet filling sponge, soaked in golden syrup, best served hot with either custard or ice cream.   I preferred it with ice cream, loving the way it would melt around the sponge and provide each spoonful with the stark contrast of hot and cold.

I found myself thinking of different types of sponge pudding.  The chocolate sponge, the lemon sponge, and before I knew it the girls were gone and I was hungry.  I was aware that I was walking and had been for a while.  I was aware of my mates voices and laughter and was also vaguely, and soon to be painfully, aware of the pavement racing up to greet me.

That brought me off the waves and crashing back to reality.  I decided there and then that I would be coming back to Newport at some point on the pudding tour, to seek out the best sponge pudding in the area.  I also came to the conclusion that one can only be nostalgic about something once they’ve moved on from it.  Nostalgia, to me, is reminiscing over happy memories, anything else is wallowing in, or clinging on to, the past.

At the moment there are some memories and some people that I can’t yet be nostalgic about, but I’m sure, and hopeful, that there will come a time when I will be able to.

That’s kind of been the point to this, and it’s also the point of the pudding tour.  This tour is meant to be something that will help challenge my boundaries and push the limits of my comfort zone.  It is about new people and new experiences.  About giving me something to be nostalgic about thirty years from now when I sit down one day to tuck into a Sponge Pudding

It’s also about dessert.

How it all began....

January 1^st, resolution time again.  This year I decided I was going to dispense with the usual giving up smoking and cutting down drinking bollocks, and resolve to do something I think I might actually be able to achieve.  So it is that this year I have resolved to write a book.  They say everyone has one in them, so I figured I'd try and get mine out of me and onto the page.  Admittedly, when I first thought about this I saw myself penning a modern fantasy masterpiece, selling the rights to Hollywood, and sitting pretty the rest of my days.  These delusions of grandeur quickly faded after a couple of false starts.  The masterpiece is currently on hold.

My dream, you see, is to make a decent living for myself as a freelance writer.  I have spent the majority of my time at work and at home, looking for information on the subject on the Internet.  It has been most enlightening.  I am going to make a go of it this year, and hopefully I shall find some degree of success.

I digress however.  I should be introducing what I hope will become a book, and not giving you, dear reader, an insight in to the delicate workings of my fragile mind.

This is about puddings.  Yes, you read that right; the opus I hope to write is about dessert.  It is a subject dear to my heart.  You see, five years ago I moved out of home, bought my own place, and started what I affectionately refer to as the Mortgage Diet.  At this point pudding became one of those things deemed as "Not Essential To Survival".  I had to abstain from adding them to my shopping list.  I can tell you, giving up smoking would have been easier.

Every cloud has a silver lining though, and in this case my circumstances meant that when I did get dessert it tasted so much better.  I had achieved a higher level of pudding enjoyment.  But I have not yet reached Nirvana.  My quest, however, has begun.

It started in July 2006.  My girlfriend, at the time, and I went for a drive one evening in search of place to have a quiet, romantic drink.  We ended up in Stratford.  We spent what seemed like an eternity looking for a parking space, before we were finally able to get down to the serious business of finding a place to have a quiet drink.

I was being far too picky about the sort of place we should go, being a bit of a perfectionist I like things to be just right, and we passed by many different places.  As we turned to walk down Sheep Street the heavens opened.  This was no time to be picky and so we jumped in to the first place we could get to.  This place was a nice little café / wine bar named The Vintner, and it was one hell of a chance discovery.  

We were shown to a table for two near the window of the bar area, and we took our seats.  I remember feeling a little under-dressed for the place.  I had just come from work, had lost my tie and was wearing a pair of black converse with white laces.  I was looking borderline respectable, if anything.  

Our waiter came and asked for our drinks orders.  I was feeling in quite a playful mood now that I was sat down and so, on a whim, I asked to see the dessert menu.  The waiter duly obliged and started reading through it and was soon to say the words that would leave me momentarily speechless.  These words were "Our cheesecake of the day is Double Chocolate Brownie and Raspberry".  My ability to speak returned, I had to clarify what I had just heard.  I interrupted as he continued reading the dessert list.  "I'm sorry" I said "Did you say, cheesecake of the day?" He confirmed that he had indeed said such, and then repeated what that day's particular cheesecake was.  "Sold" I said "Don't worry about the rest of the menu, I'll have the cheesecake".  After much persuasion, my girlfriend at the time ordered a crème brulee for herself.  "Cheesecake of the day" I kept repeating, "Honey, we're definitely coming back here."  It was agreed that we would.

It should be pointed out here, that cheesecake is my all time favourite pudding.  They say the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and in my case a sure fire way to get there at double time is to ply me with cheesecake. Take note, all would be suitors.

Anyway, the cheesecake took some time in arriving, and in the time it took to arrive; the seed of this idea had been well and truly planted.  It blossomed through our conversation, and I became convinced that my purpose in life was to travel the country and sample puddings; to later write a review of them and, eventually, publish a book.

I wanted to do something a little different than just write about puddings though.  I wanted to explore the history of this particular course of a meal, to unearth its origins, to celebrate it and promote it. After all, if we're being honest, it's the best part of any meal. Puddings should be, and can be, enjoyed without the fear of gaining weight.  Clearly, if you eat multiple puddings a day, do chuff all exercise, have an un-balanced dietary regime, and spend most of your time on the couch; then you're going to put on some weight.  However, if you approach puddings with a sensible attitude of everything in moderation, lead a healthy life-style and get exercise; then the occasional dessert is not going to do you any harm.  So go on, next time you're out for a meal don't go straight for the coffee course once the main meal has been cleared away.  Take a moment, peruse the delicacies on offer on the sweet menu / trolley / board, and think "Maybe this time I will have dessert"

Anyway, back to the cheesecake.  It was the second most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.  The first most beautiful, of course, was sat opposite me and smiling as I salivated over the dessert set in front of me.  I had to take a picture of it with my new phone, this picture is available on my myspace page; it is simply called The Cheesecake!!  

It wasn't so much a cheesecake, it was more a slice of chocolaty heaven on a plate.  The flavour was fantastic, something that repeated visits to The Vintner would confirm as standard; and the sharp taste of the raspberries came through and complimented the flavour of the double chocolate brownie; a flavour as thick and textured, if such attributes can be assigned, as the dessert itself.

If I had any complaints at all, and I suppose for a balanced account I should, it would be that it didn't feel like a cheesecake.  There was no crumbly base, the traditional "cheese" aspect was replaced with what I can only describe as a brick of double chocolate brownie; and the entire thing was rather heavy, not light and fluffy like I like my cheesecakes.  These few drawbacks aside, it was a most enjoyable pudding.  Maybe not one for the cheesecake purists out there, but definitely a must for all chocoholics out there.  If it happened to be the Cheesecake of the Day on one of my future visits then I'd definitely have it again.

And that is how this Pudding Book idea got started.