COSI FAN TUTAJ

One grows weary of duck in apples and smalec. When one longs for an alternative to kuchnia staropolska, we have found that Italian restaurants are where the classy cooking is in Poland these days. We’re not talking pizza here, but good, modern Mediterranean cooking. Italian restaurants tend to have the cool minimalist décor and the correct lighting, the best service and the most attractively presented dishes. (And the best-looking waiters). And of course I’m a sucker for a nice gooey pudding. Luckily Harold does not own a pinstriped suit, otherwise he’d be stuffing his cheeks with cotton wool and drawing odd looks from the comparatively low-key and well-dressed real mafia. Dressed as a gondolier, however, he blends in perfectly and keeps the diners and staff entertained with “Just One Cornetto” and bits of Gilbert & Sullivan. The wrong bits, but let’s not be churlish, he made an effort.

My all-time favourite Italian restaurant in Warsaw has to be Ristorante Balgera at Sandomierska 13 (Tel: 849 5674) (not to be confused with Café Balgera just round the corner from the Embassy, which is also quite pleasant but not in the same league). Now this is real class. A large room cleverly lit with concealed halogen spotlights, some carefully selected pieces of old furniture but not enough to cause a cluttered look. The dishes are light, fresh and attractive, with lots of fresh spinach, rocket and mozzarella, and the service very professional. Bacio at Wilcza 43 is cosier and more flowery, and always bustling with customers: their private room is ideal for a raucous girls’ night out. I am sure this has got your imagination going, but I’m afraid I’m sworn to secrecy as to what goes on at the coven AGM. I have already written about the elegant San Lorenzo at Jana Pawła II no.36, which has an interior straight out of a Visconti film.

The Hyatt Regency’s Venti Tre is rather expensive but a very elegant place to eat, with the top level of service one would expect. Capriccio at Koszykowa 54 (near the corner of Piękna and Poznańska) is a very posh place too. The décor is slightly fussier but tastefully designed in peachy tones cleverly matched with the waiters’ waistcoats. I was rather disappointed with the zabaglione – it was nothing more than meringue in cold custard. Corazzi at Corazziego 4 (Tel: 826 1890) is very unprepossessing from the outside but very cosy inside and the food is scrumptioso, as they say in Milan. Delicious pasta, soups and desserts, and sumptuous meat and fish courses, not to mention cocktails to make you sleep with the fishes and prices that even Harold can’t complain about.

Kraków too has its fair share of excellent Italian eateries. Padva in ul. Jagiełłowska (Tel: 012 292 0272), right opposite the old university building, is tucked away underground, in a cool white cellar adorned with murals of rustic Chiantishire. The food is far removed from the heaviness of bigos, golonka and Lithuanian potato dumplings. Come along now, you Polish chefs – since the advent of central heating, no-one needs THAT many carbohydrates. On a recent visit to Kraków Vi and I treated ourselves to a blow-out at Da Pietro (Tel: 012 422 3279), another great Italian restaurant in a 14th century cellar on the Rynek (no.17, next door to Wierzynek). . Vi Hornblower can eat more, more often, and faster, than anyone else I know. For starter we each sampled a different variety of carpaccio – Vi had fillet beef, I had the one with salmon – mine was delicious, and Vi said hers was too, although she scoffed it so fast I’d be surprised if it ever came into contact with her taste buds. I had sole florentine for main course, ordered in the safe knowledge that Harold was not around to serenade us with “O Sole Mio”. It was quite succulent. Vi inhaled her salmon lasagne in seconds and pronounced herself stuffed, which didn’t stop her polishing off the largest ice cream either of us had ever seen. My tiramisu was smaller, elegant and very, very wicked. With a nice bottle of Orvieto white, the bill was around 200 zlotys, which is molto reasonable.

Vi and I made our latest assault on Kraków while Harold was away being revolting with the peasants. Kraków certainly beats the Russian Market for virtually everything except CD’s and dodgy 10-zloty notes. All the little backstreets which lead into the main square are studded with divine little shops crammed with the most gorgeous coats, shoes, furs and jewellery. Vi, who is a sort of cross between Zelda Fitzgerald and Bet Lynch, found some divine leopardskin shoes, just like the ones Theresa May wore at the Tory Party conference. Vi had to go one further and bought matching underwear! I think it was out of solidarity with the World Wildlife Fund, although the thought of her in a leopardskin thong brings the other WWF (the World Wrestling Federation) to mind. She bought Desmond a pair of tight leather trousers – poor man! He’ll never stay awake long enough to get both legs in. I’m sure they’ll be much too small for him anyway, she told the assistant they were for someone with “snake hips”, for heaven’s sake! Snakebite, more like. After our blow-out at Da Pietro we waddled off down towards Kazimierz, which is where the action is in Kraków these days. The bars are so trendy that some of them don’t even have signs outside. Habana is, as you might expect, a Cuban-style bar at the end of Miodowa by the New Synagogue, where we happily sat for a couple of hours sampling cuba libres and mojitos. Harold would have enjoyed it there in his “Che” period, it had a huge poster of the esteemed Dr Guevara on the back of the toilet door and the soundtrack from Buena Vista Social Club was playing in the background. And of course no-one would have had the cheek to waft his cigar smoke away.

I have just finished reading Harold’s Christmas present, “The Great British Battleaxe” by Christine Hamilton. The Major and I have been compared on occasion with Mrs H and her hapless husband, but frankly I can’t see the resemblance – she’s so frightfully pushy. I see myself more in the mould of the Divine Margaret: emanating terror by the merest glint of those steely eyes. The stiletto between the ribs rather than the sledgehammer over the cranium. An offer nobody, especially Harold, can refuse.

GLOBAL WARNING

Harold’s favourite barmaid at the Heineken pub on Puławska 111a (the one with the tattoo) has left, and he’s been looking downhearted ever since, his only opportunity to engage in some light-hearted banter with the opposite sex being his twice-nightly encounter with the ancient crone who sits knitting outside the loo. Imagine his delight, then, when a new barmaid appeared recently, one with a cleavage so vertiginous that it should only be approached with crampons on. Harold had a clear view down the piste, so to speak, from his place on the hatstand, and refused to move to the cosy corner table which had just become free, his gaze riveted to the bar and his mouth hanging open in a rictus grin. Unfortunately she did not come near the tables (or the hatstand) being purely for promotional purposes. Harold did not dare approach the bar, for fear of falling in, I presume.

We have recently had occasion to sample a few of the more with-it eating places in Warsaw, which we were surprised to find very busy both midweek and weekends. The Warsaw Tortilla Factory (Wilcza 46) on a Thursday night was absolutely heaving with “spotty yoof”, as Harold refers to the younger generation (the male element of course). The food was not quite to our high standards, consisting as it does of tasteless dry pancakes with a nondescript filling and chips, but we were invited by our young friend Scrumpy and his latest Polish girlfriend (of which there have been several since he arrived in Warsaw ten days ago). Scrumpy is over here on a work exchange – he has exchanged work for a life of leisure - and had had a good day banging on his bongos outside the metro at Centrum so offered to treat us to his idea of a slap up meal. One can’t expect young people to have a clue when it comes to food, raging hormones have far more sway than taste buds. Unfortunately, when it came to paying, the pocketful of change he dumped on the table was a mixture of Deutschmarks, French francs, Spanish pesetas, Italian lira, Dutch florins and a couple of tokens for the New York subway, so uncle Harold kindly stepped in with the plastic.

Our curiosity about the new fashion for “fusion” cooking led us to visit the ultra-trendy “Sense” at Nowy Swiat 19 (Tel: 826 6570) http://www.sensecafe.com/home.html. The tables are a little cramped but this obviously wasn’t going to deter the large crowd of Warsaw’s bright young things who packed the place out one Saturday night in early November. I must say these were the more stylish (i.e. rich) kind of youngsters – not a dreadlock in sight. The restaurant furniture is a strange combination of orange comfy chairs and carefully thought-out and expensively-made table-tops in zebra-striped wood veneer which managed to replicate Formica quite convincingly. The eating area sits in sharp contrast to the adjacent drinking area, where patrons sip their Red Bull at a futuristic comptoir of high-tech shattered glass under icy blue lighting. The music is a hypnotic blend of jazz and techno, and if you like it you can buy a CD at the reception area. I of course fitted in like a dream with all the supermodels in black polo necks, but Harold looked like a fish out of water until his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and he noticed the large number of young leggy blondes, whereupon he started to cheer up.

The waiter brought us the menu, which I nearly sent back, thinking he’d given us a brochure for a sex shop by mistake. The various categories were listed in English as “Foreplay” (starters), “Wet” (soup), “Wild” (salads), “Hot” (spicy), and “Hardcore” (main meat and fish dishes). I turned to the desserts, expecting “Orgasm”, or at the very least “Oops, honestly that’s never happened before”, but they were incongruously entitled “Happy Endings”. Something of an anticlimax. The food is modern-oriental, and served on square plates. Very River Café Cookbook. My starter was composed of crispy duck slices served with hoisin sauce, noodles and a salad of cucumber and spring onions – a variation on my favourite crispy duck pancakes. Harold was tempted by the wonton soup (that should have been “wanton soup” in keeping with the nudge-wink tone of the menu) but in the end couldn’t resist ordering the “Pillows of Joy”, delicious prawn, crab and pork dim sum (steamed dumplings to you) - I could tell he was still thinking of that barmaid’s cleavage. The food was delicious and the portions rather nouvelle, although the duck starter would have been better served warm than stone cold. For main course I ordered “Wok ‘n Roll noodles with stir fry chicken” and Harold went for Surf & Turf, which consisted of slices of lamb served with scallops and pak choi. My chicken noodles were slightly spicy and excellent, although simple and nothing more than a bowl of noodles; Harold enjoyed the scallops, although lamb was an odd choice of “turf”.

We had a bottle of Merlot at a most reasonable 59 zlotys to wash it down. The service was good, and the staff are well trained and all speak excellent English. The bar has a vast selection of vodkas which are kept in a chilled cabinet, and Harold couldn’t resist a couple of Chopins to round off his meal. A visit to the loos was rather disorienting – from the ice-blue lighting on the grey concrete stairs to the frosted glass doors, they’re not designed to keep you hanging about. Our feeling was that “Sense” is trying just a little too hard to be different and trendy, and would do well to use a bit more sense with its flavour combinations. One or two of the dishes on the menu defied the imagination – wild boar in red wine and chocolate sauce, indeed! Whatever next. The cuisine struck us as more Confusion than Fusion, but it certainly made a change from duck with apples. The bill was a most reasonable 235 zlotys, including two G & T’s, a bottle of wine and two snifters. But next time I’ll make sure Harold wears his Paul Smith.

To round off the evening we walked up to Plac Trzech Krzyży (it’s always a good test of how drunk you are to see whether you can still say that) and stood outside the trio of bars Szpilka, Szpulka and Szparka trying to decide which one to favour for a last snort. Through the plate-glass windows we observed the throng of beautiful peroxide-blonde solarium-tanned stick insects (and that was just the barmen). Our dilemma was resolved deftly by the Phil Mitchell lookalike doorman, who said “Isn’t it time you old dears went home to bed? It’s ten o’clock.” “Come along, Harold,” I said, steering him towards a taxi. Sometimes one should just give in gracefully.

HOW TO SPEND IT

The festive period approaches when we old-fashioned gels are stirring our Christmas puddings and leaving copies of Tatler lying around, artfully left open, comme par hasard, at the Cartier adverts. You party animals in the office will certainly be planning your departmental Christmas lunches, so here are a few suggestions of eminently suitable (or perhaps not) venues for your festive get-together.

Dom PolskiThis is the perfect place for a departmental Christmas lunch, and comes highly recommended by the head of Management Section. It is situated in Saska Kępa, across the river, thereby making going back to the office quite out of the question, a capital excuse for stretching the meal out all afternoon. The golonkas are very hearty, and the Hennessy VSOP after-dinner snifter is not to be missed, a snip at around 70 zlotys a mouthful. And a mouthful is what you’ll get from the boss when he sees the bill.
Malinowa
The restaurant of the Bristol Hotel is a particularly appropriate place for a British Embassy knees-up, being re-opened as it was by Mrs Thatcher. Your boss will be delighted to treat you to a small pre-prandial Zywiec or two at a mere 25 zlotys a throw, before moving into the main dining room for a feast of kings. After your meal, don’t miss the 50-year-old vodka at 109 zlotys, it tastes horrible but will clear your catarrh in a trice and take the enamel off your teeth in the process. The boss won’t like it much either.

Fukier
This restaurant owned by the increasingly OTT Magda Gessler is a feast for the eyes, candlelight reflected in polished wood and shiny silver, fruit and flowers cascading over antique furniture …. and that’s just the cloakroom. The waiters are extremely professional but a tad on the stuffy side, so if you must sing rugby songs after your lunch, try and bleep out the rude words. The rolled beef with Lithuanian blue potato dumplings is excellent, although the dumplings are disappointingly potato-coloured. If you want to be treated like a baby, order the beef tenderloin which comes on a little tray, and the waiter will tie a large bib around your neck. (For an extra 10 zlotys he’ll spoon-feed you at the table and burp you afterwards). “Fukier” sounds a bit like what your boss will say when he/she gets the bill.

Belweder
This, heads of section, is how to show your staff you really appreciate them. Situated in Łazienki Park, the old orangerie is a masterpiece of Victorian elegance, with its huge glass canopy and profusion of potted palms. All that’s missing is the string quartet. To say the service is attentive is an understatement: the ratio is roughly three and a half waiters to each guest. To enter into the spirit of the place you should all go dressed as characters from an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Your head of section will want to murder all of you anyway when the bill arrives.


Casa Valdemar
Another establishment of La Gessler, who is turning into the Starbucks of Warsaw high-end eateries. If you like the idea of a Mediterranean Christmas, the cooking here is Spanish – and I don’t mean Benidorm. A slice of Spanish cured ham is reputed to cost 35 zlotys, which will rattle your boss’s castanets! If you want to see him/her dance the flamenco, order a la carte and have a couple of cognacs to wash it down.

Rodizio El Toro
If you have a majority of vegetarians in your section, count this one out. It’s on a vaguely Brazilian theme, although the swarthy waiters don’t appear to speak a word of Portuguese. The set menu costs 90 zlotys, and you’ll get an endless stream of meat served off swords and other dangerous weapons by waiters in very silly hats, all very festive. The wine is good value and comes by the bucketload, so if you want to soften up the boss for a pay rise, this could be the place. Take photographs to help him/her remember promises made over dinner.

London Steak House
I have yet to meet a British person (or other nationality for that matter) who has dared to set foot in this dreary-looking establishment. However, I’m sure that on request they would be happy to provide a typical menu from 1970’s Britain (when steak houses were last popular in London): prawn cocktail or fruit juice to start, followed by either rump steak (well done) or mixed grill, served with chips, frozen peas, grilled mushrooms and grilled tomatoes; and for dessert black forest gateau washed down by Cona coffee and an After Eight mint. You should be driven there in a Ford Capri with furry seat covers. But be warned: after a sambucca or two, the boss might suggest a return to 1970’s salary levels. If this happens, call a wildcat strike.

Tandoor Pałac
For a truly British experience, the Tandoor Palace takes some beating. Mr Singh, the jolly host with the huge turban, will be happy to serve you traditional English Christmas fare such as naan bread, vegetable biryani or chicken vindaloo. Sing along to your favourite Christmas carols such as “Apuni alu ding dong” and hits from Bollywood musicals, and after a few pints of Shepherd Neame’s excellent Kingfisher Indian lager (brewed in Shropshire) you can conga back to the office singing Hare Krishna all the way. But hey, it’s cheap.

And, wherever you go, do have a super Wigilia and New Year and don’t go anywhere without the Rennies.

THEY THINK IT'S ALL OVER

November looms, and the weather has already given us an inkling of what’s in store. Not much złote polskie jesień this October, sadly. But we mustn’t grumble after the superb summer we’ve enjoyed, and there’s always the new extension at Galeria Mokotów to cheer us up, girls! Peek & Cloppenburg AND Marks & Spencer AND the bagel shop all under one roof – it’s almost more than a girl can take in at one go. There’s even a posh cigar shop – don’t tell Harold, I’ll be buying his Christmas present in there (and another nice beige cardi from Marks, you can’t go wrong with beige, it goes with everything).

Back to the weather. In the heatwave which enveloped us earlier in the year, Harold dug out his Nelson Mandela shirt and his Ecco sandals and we headed out into the fresh air to enjoy a bit of the old al fresco. One delightful place we found is down in the heart of Lazienki Park, close to the Palace on the Water: it’s called “Le Trou Madame”, which can only be translated as “Madam’s Hole”. A rather unfortunate choice of name, but try to contain yourselves. They serve light meals, beverages and a wide range of ice-cream sundaes with Versailles-inspired names such as “Fanfan Tulipan”, and “Pompadour”. Imagine my delight when I spotted one called “Dafne” ! I was immensely flattered to have an ice-cream named after me, which proves my fame has now spread the length and breadth of Ujazdowskie Avenue. The tables are set out under the shade of the great chestnut trees, and it is a delightful place for a light lunch or afternoon refreshment after the Sunday Chopin concert. “Dafne” was delicious - of course! Harold passed on the ices and went for his usual “Duze Zywiec”.

Now the autumn has set in, it’s time to look for warm cosy nooks not too far from base camp, to load up on carbohydrates. Lokanta, the Turkish restaurant at Nowogrodzka 47a, will no doubt be well-known to our friends at the WCC (or the “Dubya” as Harold now refers to it), but was new to us, and we were pleasantly surprised. The restaurant is quite modern, none of the phony oriental decor one might expect, and you would be hard-pressed to guess what kind of cuisine was on offer if you judged by the interior. The background music is a sort of Turkish pop, but fairly unobtrusive, and there are NO belly dancers, much to my relief, as Harold wouldn’t be tempted to try and stuff 10-zloty notes into their orifices. The menu is quite varied, with plenty of choice for vegetarians, although meat eaters will be amply served by the variety of meat kebabs cooked on the wood-fired stove. As we hadn’t a clue what to order, we shared a selection of cold “meze”, or mixed cold starters, followed by a plate of hot “meze” (or mixed hot starters). The cold meze consisted of stuffed vine leaves, hummus, and cold fried aubergines served with a basket of pita bread. The small plate at 17 zloties, which is recommended for one person, was plenty for two if ordered as a starter, and the same goes for the hot meze, which consisted of two kinds of “kofta”, or meatballs, a yogurt sauce, and a sort of rolled pancake stuffed with spinach and nuts. The wine list was rather pricy, apart from a Turkish red at 60 zlotys, which was surprisingly drinkable, and somewhat akin to an Italian Bardolino or Valpolicella. Before departing, I had to check out one thing … and to my immense relief (in more ways than one) I can report that the toilets are definitely not Turkish.

Jazz Bistro, on Piekna, seems to be the canteen of the so-called English-speaking embassies. But if you get there early enough you can grab a table before the colonials arrive. The atmosphere is young, modern and trendy (so moi!) and the menu is extensive. I’ve never braved their main courses, which look huge, but the salads are delicious, fresh and beautifully presented, and the toasted sandwiches are scrummy. It’s the sort of place where one should be seen drinking Perrier with a twist (rather than a pint of lager, Harold). Singing the Lumberjack Song is not recommended, as a number of our colleagues from the Canadian Embassy eat in there on a regular basis. And some of them are quite large ice-hockey players.

There is a vast choice of good, inexpensive restaurants within walking distance of HQ. Radio Café, almost next door to the Dubya at Nowogrodzka 56, is yet another pleasant lunchtime retreat. Their spinach quiche is delicious and the portions very generous. Compagnia del Sole at Żurawia 6/12, is an upmarket Italian variation on a milk bar: you collect your food and drink from various counters – pizzeria, salad bar, hot kitchen – collecting squiggles on your card in the process, then carry your tray to your table. At the end of the meal you take your card to the cashier and pay. It saves all the worry about how much to tip, but you end up spending more time walking about with your tray than sitting down. Which is fine if you’re with somebody you don’t like much.

The Bavarian restaurant Adler is a funny little round building at Mokotowska 69 which had a very pleasant enclosed terrace throughout the summer. Inside it’s very cosy and warm with a chimney, and the portions are quite massive. Good old German bellyfillers such as Wienerschnitzel and sauerkraut will keep the cold out. Our next door neighbour Dr Klampwangler swears by the Gefluegelbeinbratl – and believe me, her swear words are even longer than that. She took Harold to the October Beer Festival and they returned quite the worse for wear, singing Bavarian drinking songs and slapping each other’s behinds quite unnecessarily. They sat up late into the night listening to James Last records and drinking Jagermeister slammers, but come the dawn the Anglo-German Friendship Pact had collapsed, largely due to Harold’s chanting of “Ingerland, Ingerland, Ingerland”. Dr Klampwangler saluted stiffly and marched out of the house, insisting she needed some lebensraum. I called downstairs to ask if everything was all right. “It is now”, sighed Harold, as she roared off down the drive on her Norton 750.

LAND AND FREEDOM

by Harold Wayne-Bough

(“An English farmer is ruined when he’s down to his last Range Rover” – anon.)

Popped back to Blighty for a bit of grouse-shooting with Fatty Fortescue last month. Grouse are a bit thin on the ground around Guildford, but it gave us a chance to check out the new barmaid in the Fox & Hounds. Might have been the name of the pub or something, or maybe the Memsahib’s influence after her flag-waving in Paris, but Fatty and I decided (after a few pints of Old Bishop’s Toenails) to participate in the Countryside March on 22^nd September (or the “Peasants’ Revolt” as Fatty called it). It seemed on the face of it a capital idea: bit of exercise, a day out in the big city, and the chance to shout our heads off in the street without being escorted back to the psychiatric ward.

We met up on the morning of the march with statutory green wellies, Barbour jackets, tweed caps and shotguns and parked Fatty’s Range Rover at Guildford station. Fatty had managed to borrow a pair of pedigree spaniels to lend us some gravitas for the occasion, although their yapping got on our nerves after a while and we left them with some new age travellers at Waterloo who promised to look after them until we got back. Our shotguns were confiscated by the police so we armed ourselves with rolled up copies of “Hare and Hound” and “Country Life” to brandish in the direction of parliament.

We met some interesting coves on the march. A middle-aged lady with a hatchet face and very tight jodhpurs marshalled us for a bit, frightfully bossy woman, had to take a comfort break at one point to get away from her. An ageing rock star with a stately pile and trout farm in the home counties, and two boys at Marlborough, offered us a swig of organic vodka from his Garrard solid silver hipflask. A gorgeous creature swathed in furs swept past, propelled by a pair of identical Afghans (dogs, that is, not asylum seekers). Some rustic types from Lincolnshire were handing out brochures advertising electric fences and teaching home-counties landowners how to say “Get orf moy laaaand” with the correct degree of menace. A large bearded Scotsman in a kilt barged past us with his sporran a-swinging, muttering “Frightfully sorry, old chaps, let’s have lunch sometime,” in an accent which had never been north of the M25, let alone the border. He turned out to be The MacHaggis of MacHaggis, the Laird of Loch Aargh (currently resident in the British Virgin Islands). There were sheep, dogs, sheepdogs, Morris dancers, pitchforks, cider and tortured vowels. “Air Hair Lair” bellowed our jodhpur’ed friend to a young chap with floppy hair who was a junior member of the Royal Family. A great cheer went up when David Gower flew his Piper over the crowd, and we all yelled “Howzat!!” in unison.

When we arrived at Whitehall, the third Earl of Duffington gave a stirring speech in which he challenged the head of DEFRA to come and help muck out his pigs for a day, inviting the Minister to reply to him by e-mail at “duffers@tropicana-beach-resort.com”.

A large number of protestors had been allowed to stand at a safe distance and hurl abuse and GM vegetables. Fatty and I deplored their tactics, such as bringing innocent children and pets to such a turbulent event: one group of scruffy oiks even had a pair of pedigree spaniels with them who yapped constantly with fear. The Afghan hounds were savaged by a pitbull terrier whose owner had dirty dreadlocks and his nom-de-guerre – SCRUMPY – tattooed across his forehead. We maintained our dignity throughout, and gave them the benefit of our breeding with advice such as: “Get a bally job!” and “A spell in the army would do you good!”. They returned fire with rare eloquence: “Sod off back to Kensington you posh gits!”.

Despite a few altercations with the great unwashed, the march went off peacefully, and the police were ever so helpful, getting the latest score from Lord’s on their radios and giving directions to Harvey Nichols for those in need of a loo. At the end we were entertained by a fat woman dressed as Boadicea who sang “Land of Hope and Glory” and then joined the Worzels for a rousing chorus of “I’ve got a brand-new combine harvester”.

It was a cracking day, and we horny-handed sons of the soil really showed those city slickers what’s what. Perhaps now they’ll leave us alone to husband the land in the time-honoured fashion, using traditional methods and following the natural rhythms of mother earth; without interference from central government or big business, sheep may safely graze and farmers may earn a living wage and produce healthy food that tastes good and is grown the way nature intended. Oh yes, forgot to tell you – we met that chap Scrumpy at the station, he was waiting to give us back the spaniels. Had to buy the chap a pint of cider for being so honest, even though he wasn’t frightfully fragrant, and ended up listening to all he had to say about globalisation, GM foods, real ale, recycling, crop circles, healing crystals and legalizing cannabis. After a couple of pints, thought the blighter talked a lot of sense. Could do with a wash, mind, but essentially not a bad bloke. Father’s a brigadier. We’re all meeting up at Glastonbury next year, when I’m going to show him some of my survival techniques and maybe introduce him to Bodger. We might make a man of Scrumpy yet.

DON'T CRY FOR ME, CASABLANCA

Back to reality, after an idyllic holiday spent soaking up the sun in glorious Surrey. I must say it was good to be home. We didn’t hear a tyre squeal once, nor the Sunday morning cacophony of all the dogs in our street barking along to the sound of the church bells. Sunday mornings in Surrey are quite peaceful – just the distant hum of lawnmowers and a barely-audible groan as Harold returns from the newsagent with the Sunday Times (total weight 3 kilos). We had a couple of day trips out in the jalopy, stopping at picturesque village hostelries to sample some typical British pub grub. Harold was happy to pop down to the local to sample the latest guest ale on offer. He did find it a bit weak, though, and found walking home in a straight line a novel experience.

We were still in holiday mood on our return, so went to the beach on Bank Holiday Monday. Warsaw Beach. For the uninitiated, this is at a place called Nieporęt on the banks of the Wisła, about 40 minutes drive from downtown Warsaw. Cross the Wisła on the Grota-Roweckiego Bridge (the northernmost one) and turn left onto Modlinska (dual carriageway). At the first major junction turn right towards Nieporęt on route 633, which you will reach after about 15 minutes. Go through the village and turn left at the T-junction, and a few hundred yards further on the right is a car park. At this place the river bends in a deep V, making a sort of lake. There is a real beach, with sand and beach volleyball, and a moored barge serving excellent freshwater fish and chips. You can bathe, sail, windsurf and even hire a jetski (a Polish invention, surely?). It’s very simple and unspoilt – no funfair, no loud music, and no litter. It’s a great place for a picnic if you don’t fancy fish and chips, you’ll need to take a blanket and/or deckchairs, and don’t forget your Fortnums wicker picnic hamper! The young blades might find it a bit dull (although I could tell Harold was enjoying the scenery when he broke into a chorus of “With a thong in my heart”) but it’s a perfect spot to enjoy the last of the summer wine.

Harold read a book during the holidays Yes! The good news is, it kept him so quiet he didn’t hum the theme from Match of the Day once in a fortnight. The bad news is, it was the new 800-page biography of the South American revolutionary Che Guevara, who has become fashionable again, I believe. Needless to say, he’s now marching round the house sporting a beret and a Kalashnikov, shouting “Venceremos!” and other things in very bad Spanish. I have to keep my bourgeois activities (leg-waxing, toenail-cutting) very secret now, and preparing dinner is a nightmare. I don’t know the difference between a burrito, a tortilla, a fajita or an enchilada – they seem to be the same thing, only folded differently. I did suggest that smoking cigars was a bit on the bourgeois side, but he just said I was a running dog (or was it a paper tiger?) and cigars were fine as long as you stubbed them out on the petty-bourgeois furniture. That was enough to get him banished to the back garden. He dug out his old combat uniform from the attic – in fact they were regular old green overalls he wore when he was painting the fence, but he got so much creosote on them they look like jungle fatigues now – and won’t sleep in the same bed two nights in a row. This means that he is in the spare room every other night, after spending the evening in the back garden by the campfire stubbing his cigars out on my lovingly manicured lawn and listening to “Buena Vista Social Club” on his walkman. I have refused to have anything to do with this belated discovery of the joys of marxist-leninism and have announced that henceforth I will be known as Evita, and hoist him with his own petard when I asked who was he going to be supporting at the next World Cup? He’s gone off into the jungle, or maybe it’s the shed, to ponder this metaphysical problem. If he doesn’t hurry up his burritos will be cold. Or are they fajitas?

Of course, Harold hasn’t a clue that I used to be something of a Pasionaria myself. Vi Hornblower and I went on a demo in Paris once. (Actually it was last year.) Not on purpose, you understand. We had been shopping at Galeries Lafayette and wandered into it by accident. As we arrived at the station, we walked into a great hullabaloo, people waving flags and shouting through megaphones. With the benefit of hindsight, this was possibly not the best moment to get out the Instamatic, and before I knew it I was surrounded by burly chaps with berets and moustaches and T-shirts proclaiming “CGT” (Che Guevara’s T-shirt, perhaps?), breathing garlic in my face and asking me if I was an “agent provocateur”. Obviously an hommage to my penchant for French lingerie. In a show of solidarity with the workers, I handed the camera to a large policeman who took a snap of me arm-in-arm with the sans-culottes; he then pointed to a nearby building,, where a video camera was pointing down in my direction. I waved enthusiastically for my French fans, so intent on my appearance on the nine-o-clock news that I didn’t notice how my new friends had dispersed rather quickly, and when I looked round, Vi was being hauled into a police van by some large gendarmes shouting “Non, je ne regrette rien!” “Allez les bleus!” I responded gamely, which did not best please Vi, being manhandled as she was by the boys in blue. Vi used to be quite a star on the hockey field for Cheltenham Ladies, and her tackling skills have not diminished, as anyone who has been in front of her in the queue on the first day of the Harrods sale will attest to. I threw my carrier bags wide and challenged the moustachio’d policeman to arrest me – “Arretez-moi!” I cried - by now I was ready to throw myself under a racehorse to defend a girl’s right to shop, had there been a racehorse handy. There was a large dog, but I was not prepared to throw myself under that, especially while it was using the lamppost. The gendarmes - or salauds, as I was now referring to them - pulled my shopping bags from me and threw them into the van before hurling me in too. Vi and I linked arms and sang the rude version of the Cheltenham Ladies hockey song all the way to the Bastille - or, as it turned out, the departure gate for Eurostar, where we were unceremoniously decanted onto the platform. I asked if we were being deported. “Non, Madame,” said the Capitaine, who was rather dashing in an Inspector Clouseau sort of way. “Eet eez for your own safety. Zis is a manifestation of ze revolting worqueurs. Zis eez no place for two charmeeng Eengleesh miladies.” With that, he clicked his heels, kissed our hands and marched off through the fog to do battle once more with the red hordes on the boulevards. Vi and I stood gazing after him with gratitude as the steam swirled around us. (“I thought this was Eurostar?” - Ed.)

“You know, Vi,” I said dreamily, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

(Fade out to “As Time Goes By”, rear view of two matrons laden with carrier bags walking arm in arm into the distance along a platform …)

Aux armes, citoyens!

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

My dear friend “Shrinking” (Ha ha!) Violet Hornblower wrote to congratulate me on my stunning piece on the lake district last month (it’s rumoured Andrzej Zuławski has already secured the film rights, with Bogusław Linda as Harold and Sophie Marceau as myself!). Vi of course was here in the olden days as a young Embassy flapper, and I thought younger readers (both British and Polish!) might like to know that there was life before MacDonald’s.

Hornblower Heights

69 Acacia Avenue

Surbiton

Surrey

Dear Daphne,

How lovely to hear about your jaunt to the lakes, and I must say it does bring back some very fond memories of my two trips to Mazuria in the 80s. Hotel accommo-dation was a bit thin on the ground in those days, the only option being (at vast expense) the Hotel Mongrovia at Mrągowo.

Being a humble grade 9 at the time (on zero allowances and £28.00 a month DPA, which had doubled from the original £14.00 because of the Embassy renovations), this was beyond my pocket. So in early November, armed with three men, two Ford Escorts and two small tents, we set off for the Lakes. I seem to remember that the purpose for this visit was to avoid the DHM’s party, and more particularly the brown corduroy suit he insisted on wearing to any informal event (and which the doctor’s dog finished off at a later date).

I digress. North east Poland, November. Cold wasn’t the word. An inadequate nylon sleeping bag, several layers of Damart and a large Geordie did nothing to keep it out. Vast quantities of beer meant going outside for a pee in the night – not a good idea, and besides, there were lots of strange animal noises (Wolves? Bears? Or just snoring from the other tent? Never did find out). We pitched our tent a few yards from a “No Entry” sign near a town called Granica Panstwowy or something like that). By about 7.00 a.m. it became clear that none of us were going to get much more sleep, due to both the cold and the strange noises, so we decided to decamp to the Hotel Mongrovia, use their loo and have a coffee. We got rather lost getting there and arrived at 11.00 just as the restaurant was opening for lunch. It was lovely to be warm again, and we celebrated the fact with Beef Wellington (never seen before in Poland), chips and some sparkling Bulgarian red wine before hitting the Pewex and stocking up on such essentials as perfume, earrings and soft toys (there wasn’t a lot to spend your money on in Poland in the 1980s). We then decided to go to Rastenburg to see the Wolf’s Lair, and like you and Harold, got horribly lost. We finally found it (I thought it was at Kętrzyn, rather than Gierłoż, but that may have been why we got lost) and had a poke round. A guide would have been nice but we could only have had a German speaking one. Strange, as in those days there wasn’t a German in sight.

My second trip took place when the weather was a little more clement, with only two men (one of whom was the aforementioned Large Geordie) and one Ford Escort. We had decided not to camp this time and were given the address of one Frau Bauerfeind of Mikołajki (alas, no phone so we couldn’t book ahead), who sometimes took people in for B & B. We took a chance that she wasn’t inundated with German tourists. She wasn’t. Frau Bauerfeind, who somehow seemed to have got left behind after the war when the rest of the German population decamped from Ostpreussen to Westphalia, must have been 90 if she was a day. To say she lived in Mikołajki was stretching it a bit – like about five kilometers. Nevertheless, she provided clean sheets (we had to make our own beds), a communist duvet (brown acrylic blanket stuffed inside a white sheet with a large hole in the middle) and two bedrooms, plus strong black coffee and sausage with tubes in it for breakfast, out of her meat ration (which she made a point of telling us). The second man (who was on TDY in Warsaw and therefore a little more fastidious than the Large Geordie and I) made loud gagging noises while the LG and I tucked in.

We spent a pleasant day pootling around the lakes, at one point venturing out on one of them in our blow-up dinghy which we had brought with us. TDY man was very nervous about capsizing (not sure if it was the combined weight of me and LG which worried him, or the fact that the stopper kept popping out of the dinghy and we had to keep pausing to puff it up). Anyway, he declined to come further than six feet from the shore, so we left him there while LG and I ventured sedately across the lake and back. Lunch was a slurry tube (optimistically called a hot dog) wrapped in cellophane and propped up in a slice of stale grey bread garnished gaily with ketchup and mustard so bright that the seeds must have been affected by the fall-out from Chernobyl. More gagging noises from TDY man who opted for Zapiekanki from the next caravan.

In the evening we ate at the restaurant in the only hotel in Mikołajki. The menu was full of “nie ma” in those days and we settled on Zurek (more sausage with tubes in, more noises from TDY man), Kotlety z frytkami (which were cold and greasy) and the ubiquitous spoon-bendingly hard lody to follow. Not from choice, you understand, but because there was nothing else on offer. I seem to remember that it was accompanied by the cucumber salad called “mizeria”, which rather aptly summed up the whole meal. The bar offered only vodka and grapefruit juice (an interesting combination, but not one that I have tried since), not a Zywiec in sight, so tails between our legs, we returned to Frau Bauerfeind’s and were tucked up in bed by 10.00.

How things have changed! But do tell me – does the Pink still serve “Gordon Steak”? And Goulash Soup on a Friday? A little consistency would be nice in this changing world…

Love, Vi