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

MESSING ABOUT IN BOATS

Forgive me, dear readers, for my absence last month – the Major and your travel correspondent were trotting around the Polish lakes enjoying the natural wonders of the countryside. It was quite a feat getting metropolitan Harold to imbibe a little oxygen with his Zywiec, but once he’d realized the piwo was half the price of the Big Pierogi, and the panis just as lissom, only browner, he took to it like a duck to water.

On our first visit to Mazury we stayed in the Gołębiewski Hotel at Mikołajki (Tel: 087-429 0747, Fax: 087-429 0744, e-mail mikolajki@golebiewski.pl) This is perfect for a wet weekend when the kids are playing up. Harold did enjoy playing on the water slides, although his cigar got frightfully soggy. The place is huge, flashy and packed with busloads of old-age pensioners from Germany on package tours. In high summer you could be in Tenerife – no need to go out of the hotel at all, there is tennis, horseriding, the pool, towels on sunbeds. It has an excellent à la carte restaurant, as well as an all-inclusive buffet, and the rooms are spacious with all mod cons. The discotheque downstairs is a 1970’s dream – huge underlit dance floor, glitter ball and a continuous barrage of Abba, the Bee Gees and Sir Mick Jagger. Dancing enthusiastically around my handbag, I imagined I saw John Travolta striding towards me with his index finger pointing to the sky. Sadly, it was only Harold in his cricket whites, ordering another pint from a passing waiter. But for a brief moment, I was young again.

The combination of appalling weather, screaming kids and elderly Hanoverians slurping their zwiebelsuppe became too much for us, and we set off in the jalopy to find the Wolf’s Lair at Gierłoz. This was where the secret bunkers of Hitler and his top brass were hidden, and where the failed assassination attempt on the Fűhrer took place. It certainly was secret – so secret that we got lost three times attempting to find it. Eventually we tagged on behind a German tour bus which took us straight there. It’s a very eery place, hidden away in a dense forest, but hugely interesting. I was filled with trepidation as to whether some phantom from the Reich would find its way into Harold’s subconscious and watched him carefully for anything resembling goose-stepping or a levitating right arm. But luckily he was too engrossed crawling round the bunkers trying to work out the cabling.

Mikołajki is one of the best-known holiday resorts on the lakes, but it is also worth visiting some of the others, such as Giżycko and Ruciane-Nida. All these resorts are popular with the yachting fraternity, but there is a refreshing absence of the type of hooray Henry that one often sees in more chichi yachting centres such as Cannes or St Tropez. Most people charter a small sailboat for a week or two (at affordable prices) and pootle from one end of the lakes to the other, overnighting on the boat at lakeside yacht clubs. If you know the difference between a reef knot and a spinnaker, this is a wonderfully peaceful way to spend a week. However, I don’t think I’d want to be in such a confined space with Harold for seven nights. Not without an oxygen mask. Another way of visiting the area on the water is to hire a kayak and paddle from one lake to another, through the canals. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a kayak with room for the suitcases, so decided to stay in a hotel and tour the region by car.

On our second visit we sought somewhere quieter and more exclusive to stay, and happened upon the Hotel Nidzki at Ruciane-Nida, at the southern end of the lake district (Tel: 087-423 6401, Fax: 087-423 6403). This beautiful manorhouse hotel is situated in splendid isolation at the end of lake Nidzkie, and the lake view is quite spectacular – not another building in sight, simply lake, forest and sky. A double room costs 190 zl per night (quite a bit cheaper than the Gołębiewski), including breakfast.

I have to say the Nidzkie is the cleanest hotel I have come across anywhere, it positively gleams. Ask for a room overlooking the lake, and make sure you confirm your booking by fax – they claimed we had only booked for one night not two, and we almost had to seek alternative accommodation. All very odd, as they obviously weren’t full anyway. Perhaps they mistook us for rock stars and thought we might trash the room ! I told Harold not to wear that Ozzy Eastbourne T-shirt. On arrival, the receptionist proudly handed us a remote control for the non-existent TV, but frankly, with a view like that, who needs TV? This is the perfect spot to chill out after a frantic Jubilee (you never know who might be reading this!), sitting on the terrace with a beer, a pair of swans paddling lazily across the lake, an immobile man fishing in a rowing boat, the sun setting gently over the forest. You could feel all your wrinkles smoothing out. It was a bit like taking your girdle off. Harold’s comment, not mine.

The only thing which lets the Hotel Nidzkie down is the restaurant. The cooking was quite lamentable: I didn’t know it was possible to spoil boiled potatoes, but they found a way to do it. Harold waited 40 minutes for his main course, by which time I had finished mine and polished off a bottle of wine, which in itself had been quite difficult to obtain – the waitress informed us that the wine list “didn’t work” at that time of year. Some guests made the mistake of querying their order. Within seconds the chef had appeared – a large shaven-headed character with no neck who looked like a Millwall fan on community service – and threatened to force-feed them by alternative means. We decided to pay our bill and slip away quietly, thanking them profusely for a lovely dinner.

There are some good, simple restaurants down by the lake, which is a 10 minute walk down an unlit cinder path over an unprotected railway line, unless you drive there. The local speciality is freshwater fish: “okon”, or perch, and “sandacz” or pike-perch, are the best, served decorously with oven chips. The Kormoran restaurant is situated on the lake, luckily just upwind of where the yachties tie up to empty their vessels of smelly socks and a week’s accumulated methane. On the main street in Ruciane are a number of open-air restaurants serving simple fare – grilled fish and meat, chips and salad - and packed with weekenders. We didn’t see another English-speaking person during the whole weekend and only one quiet German couple who ate their soup very nicely.

If you’re a tad nautically challenged you can do what we did and board a rustbucket of a motor launch skippered by an inebriated old sea-dog who managed to reduce the wooden jetty to splinters before chugging out into the lake. Once on lake Nidzkie, however, it was blissful. The lake opens out to a huge expanse of water dotted with tiny wooded islands. All very Swallows and Amazons. The captain dropped anchor at one point and disappeared downstairs (“below” - Harold), leaving us to bask in the sun. Over an hour later he still hadn’t appeared, and Harold was fishing in his safari jacket for his screwdriver, convinced that the engines had failed and we were about to experience Titanic in miniature. However, I had noticed that the ice-cream lady was also missing, which was scandalous, as we were being fried to a crisp with no chance of a cornetto to cool us off. We waited so long that one group of people flagged down a passing launch and hitched a lift back to terra firma. Finally the skipper reappeared, whistling, and revved up the engine. We were all a bit pink from the sun, but the ice-cream lady was positively crimson lake. Puts the phrase Going Down with the Ship into a whole new light.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

I’m in a frightful rush this week so only have time to tell you about a super little place where I had lunch recently, while Harold was having his weekly CAT scan. U Szwejka is a very pleasant (and large) establishment on the corner of Plac Konstitucji (next to the MDM hotel) where the service is extremely attentive, and – this in itself is a reason for going there - they force free alcohol on you! No sooner had I found a cosy little table in a corner where I could look out over the square, than the waiter appeared with a bottle of Bechkerowka, that revolting Czech aperitif, which I politely declined in favour of ordering lunch. He went away and came back with a match to light the candle. He went away again and came back with his notebook. After some perusing of the extensive menu, I ordered the Kotlet De Volaille (Chicken Kiev to you), which seemed like a fairly uncomplicated request. However, there then ensued a question-and-answer session which made The Weakest Link look like a fireside chat, and brought a steely glint to my eye that Ann Robinson would have been proud of. Would Madam like chips or salad with that? Madam chose salad (a girl must watch her figure!). Which sort of salad would Madam care for? My Polish broke down at this point and I had to ask him to explain the different types of salad in English. I chose a “mieszana”, or mixed salad, well there’s bound to be something in that I like. Was this the end of the interrogation? Certainly not. What kind of dressing would Madam like on her mixed salad? I stopped him at “winegret” (the 2^nd on his interminable list of salad dressings). I was starting to perspire gently, wondering what the next question might be, and whether I would answer it correctly or have to do the Walk of Shame. Thankfully, he closed his notebook and went away. Then he came back with a basket of bread. On his next visit he brought a totally unsolicited plate of cottage cheese and sausage meat, which equally went untouched. He came again and took it away. I know I’m a woman who likes attention, but I was starting to feel faintly embarrassed. I looked apologetically at the next table and smiled weakly.

On his next visit, hurrah! He brought my Kotlet, which was of generous proportions and accompanied by a huge plate of chopped crudités, elegantly served with a sauceboat of vinaigrette dressing. “Smacznego,” he wished me, bowed, and went away again. I quite missed him at first; I felt we’d really bonded over the past half hour. But the music at U Szwejka soon had me singing away between mouthfuls (most inelegant I know, but I was facing the street so the other diners were spared the sight of salad dropping out of my mouth). For fans of the early 60’s (yes, all you Dekada barflies, that means you) this is the place to hear those hits that most members of the House of Lords are too young to remember: Chris Farlowe, Del Shannon, Kathy Kirby, and when I heard Freddie and the Dreamers singing “I’m telling you now”, I almost invited the chap at the next table to do the Twist.

When I called for the bill, my waiter brought it with a complimentary glass of wisniówka which he placed before me in a determined manner. I was not going to get out of this one so easily. What the heck, I thought, and swigged it back in one, before paying the bill and leading the bar staff in a conga line out the door to the strains of Herman’s Hermits. U Szwejka also has a large eating/drinking area in the cellar, if you want a discreet place for those secret trysts (but beware the couple at the next table – they could be the Wayne-Boughs!). The staff are young and charming and the service excellent, and if you’re as old as Harold, you’ll enjoy the sort of music on a weekend provided by the 3-piece band. His version of “Jealousy” played on a cucumber is unmatched in the annals of popular music.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

by Major H. Wayne-Bough

What a long tedious winter it’s been. I could tell the memsahib was bored when she started embroidering rude messages into her tapestry, some of them directed at me. Is that what is meant by cross stitch, I asked. She pointed to a cushion cover which depicted a flock of XXXX’s in flight over the word “OFF”. I figured she was suffering from a touch of metal fatigue, and brought her home some reading matter to cheer her up. “Here we go, old girl,” I said, “This’ll put the lead back in your pencil.” She gave me a look which would freeze vodka, and rolled the brand new copy of Soldier of Fortune into the shape of a dangerous weapon. It was high time for some distraction.

The Orient Express ball came along in the nick of time. Milady dug out her cloche hat and lisle stockings from the trunk in the attic and gave my old mess uniform the once-over with a damp cloth. I could hardly keep up as she swept into the Marriott moulting ostrich feathers, me staggering behind buckling under the weight of two Louis Vuitton trunks, a hatbox and a Yorkshire terrier called Tinkerbell. If that wasn’t bad enough, every time I went up to the bar, the head barman kept giving me a tray of drinks to take round. By the time we sat down at the table I was quite worn out. When I woke up after the speeches, Milady was schmoozing up to the French Ambassador, so I sneaked out for a smoke. I wandered down the corridor and happened upon the Servants Hall, where they were all jumping up and down in a demented fashion to their primitive tribal music, calling for someone called Alice. Although they all looked like characters from Breughel, they were good sorts really and let me stay and watch the cock-fighting. They even gave me a plateful of the roast pig that they were turning on a spit. Bawdy wenches were weaving through the throng balancing tankards of mead on their ample bosoms whilst handing out free tickets for the local massage parlour. A toothless crone sat in the corner, dishing out shots of laudanum. A makeshift opium den had been set up in the pantry, and a dusky houri was being auctioned for charity. This was my kind of party. I dragged a fulsome wench onto the dance floor and showed her my cummerbund. She was speechless. The loud music and heady smell of woodsmoke quite went to my head and I danced like John Travolta on Prozac. There was a bit of excitement when a herd of wildebeest stampeded across the room, but I was whisked to safety by a large bearded character daubed in blue woad. She told me her name was Tiffany and offered 10% diplomatic discount between 5.00 and 7.00 p.m.

My pungent pals took quite a shine to me, inviting me to share a serving gel with them. Now Daphne can detect the scent of another woman 100 yards away through three locked doors, and this one had a personal odour that would penetrate a gas mask, so I declined politely, but accepted a game of flaming-axe-hurling, which I won by a head (the Banqueting Manager’s, as it happens). The chaps hoisted me up on their shoulders and carried me around the room, chanting in guttural demotic. Finally, I was one of the lads! I felt I had to stand them a round of drinks, whereupon they elected me their new chieftain and sacrificed a bullock in my honour.

It was a night to remember. I must have danced myself to exhaustion, as I woke up on a bed of straw, where the peasants had kindly laid me. Someone had even been thoughtful enough to take off my uniform and boots and had lent me a smock to sleep in. Unfortunately the kind soul who took care of me didn’t leave a card, but Daphne swears she saw a very similar uniform to mine at the Russian market last week. Anyway, I quite like the smock, it’s very comfortable, and Daphne’s promised to cross-stitch my name and address on it.

FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE

After the gluttony and over-indulgence of the holiday season, a restaurant review would be rather over-egging the pudding, so we’re refraining from eating out until our tummies have all returned to normal size (with a little help from Playtex in some cases). On Christmas Day we had a sumptuous eight-course feast featuring delicacies from as far away as Auchan and Billa, accompanied by a bottle or three of very palatable chateau-bottled ruby nectar; after some perfectly immoral cheeses had been redeemed by a large glass of Harold’s favourite vintage port, we finally prepared to push our gluttony to the limit with one of Imelda’s incendiary Christmas puddings, which had to be ignited first to burn off the fumes. Harold took out his authentic army-surplus Zippo lighter which Bodger had sent him for Christmas, with “Kabul Harriers” engraved on the facing. Unfortunately, the fuel must have been syphoned off from Sellafield, and the pudding did a fair impression of Joan of Arc. We gave our After-Eights to the nice firemen - shame about the curtains - and settled down in front of the telly with a large box of Rennies, where we promptly fell asleep. Christmas viewing is not what it once was. I woke up in the middle of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and tottered off to bed around midnight, leaving Harold snoring away in his chair, still wearing his singed paper hat and dinner jacket (his trousers were still wrapped around the charred remains of the Christmas pud).

On New Year’s Eve we were invited to join a family party at the stud farm of Fergal and Deirdre O’Blarney, the well-known horse trainers. They live for horse racing, as you can tell when Deirdre fires a starting pistol in the kitchen, and Fergus shouts “They’re off!” as the whole family races for the table. Fergal’s Uncle Dermot, a retired jockey, was sitting next to me on two cushions and a copy of the Warsaw Yellow Pages. He cleared his throat noisily and often into a large Irish linen handkerchief with “Hotel Bristol” embroidered in the corner. He suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, that disorder where people keep shouting out odd words at inappropriate moments. It made it quite difficult to keep one’s mind on the oysters, which require great concentration to eat, especially after several pre-prandial Jameson’s. I had just loosened one from its shell and was about to daintily slide it onto my tongue, when Uncle Dermot bellowed “Fork!” and caused me to start violently. The oyster flew off the shell and into Uncle Dermot’s pint of Black Velvet*. I had to distract the old fellow for long enough to switch glasses with him, so turned to the assembled company and announced: “Uncle Dermot wants a fork!” which made them all laugh like drains. While they were all mopping their eyes and picking themselves up off the carpet I managed to snatch Uncle Dermot’s glass and replace it with my own, which left me with the dilemma of how to retrieve the offending mollusc. There was no elegant way of doing it without drawing attention to myself, so, noblesse oblige, I took a deep breath and a big swig of Black Velvet, swallowing the oyster whole. It was not a wholly unpleasant sensation, and I made a mental note to invent a new cocktail for my next drinks evening.

Still wondering how asking for a fork could cause such hilarity, I asked Uncle Dermot if he would like a knife as well, to which he replied that he didn’t need a fork and knife or a fork and fork. (Uncle Dermot also seemed to repeat himself unnecessarily, no doubt one of many after-effects of falling off horses at high speed). We got through the rest of the meal without further incident (if you discount Harold’s table manners), and as Deirdre invited us to trot round the paddock for Irish coffee, I drained my glass of Black Velvet … and found a very forlorn oyster lying sadly at the bottom. Uncle Dermot shouted “Horse!” and reached for his handkerchief once more. I’m afraid I passed on the Irish coffee, being first past the post to the bathroom.

After the hangovers had worn off, we set off for a few days in the mountains, where Harold was determined to conjure up the spirit of Sven, his alter ego from a parallel universe. Sadly, the the snowbound Swede refused to be summoned. Invoke as he might, (Harold standing on the mountain top with arms stretched to the sky chanting in Old Norse brought the black slopes to a standstill) there was no response from his nebulous Nordic nemesis. The vicarious Viking had vanished. Harold was nonplussed. Then, in the middle of the night he sat bolt upright in bed, took off his goggles and announced that Sven had been called up for Salt Lake City but said goodbye and thank you for the music. In that case, I said, you won’t be needing to wear your ski boots in bed any more.

It’s rather sad to see the end of Sven, especially as I hadn’t got round to penning part II of The Sven Files. He’d sort of grown on me. I will never be able to listen to Abba again without thinking of him. This is where the story ends, this is goodbye. However, I’m sure some other exotic spirit seeking a temporary home will be squatting in Harold’s subconscious before very long. Perhaps a Sioux Chief, or a Hell’s Angel … it’s quite exciting, a bit like living with The Village People. In the meantime, readers, if an elderly chap wearing a beige cardigan and a Washington Redskins baseball cap comes up to you and demands imperiously: “Do you know who I am?”, please tell him and point him in the direction of home before his batteries run out. Thank you so much

NO PAIN, NO GAIN

Since our return to Blighty, Harold has been keeping himself amused pottering in the shed, creosoting the fence and reacquainting himself with the local ales, such as ye Olde Speckled Knobwilter. However, I felt the calming effects of domesticity were starting to pall when he turned up at the Wednesday night quiz at the Scud & Sixpence dressed as Madonna and burst, quite uninvited, into a rousing rendition of “Material Girl” (karaoke night was on Tuesday), so I bundled him on the train and off to London for a weekend of retail therapy.

We had a bite to eat in our favourite little Italian deli, the Lucky Spot on North Audley Street, before hitting the shops. My goodness, hasn’t Selfridges changed since 1972? We went in for a box of Harold’s favourite cigars and found ourselves in a high-tech nightmare. Harold is not good in stores at the best of times, but got quite disoriented and started to hyperventilate, so I had to sit him down at the oyster bar and spoon half a dozen fines de claires down his neck before he calmed down. To our relief, we found the cigar counter exactly where it used to be, although the young man serving, who had obviously been drafted in from the food hall, thought a panatella was some kind of Italian bacon.

Our next quest was to find Harold some new kit. After years of pierogis and golonkas the tarpaulin is a little tautly stretched across the midships. Needless to say, when we finally found the menswear department there was nothing to suit him. Where is one to find a nice beige cardigan these days? I knew we should have stocked up in Warsaw. He spent a long time lurking hopefully around the leather trousers, but I caught him in time and dragged him off to Debenham’s.

We were sorely tempted to go to see the new Harry Potter film, especially since the mystic midget’s features were staring down at us from every billboard. I had the strangest feeling I’d seen that child before, and quite recently, but couldn’t quite remember where. The film was fully booked anyway, so we went to see the new production of “The King and I” starring Josie Lawrence - and then went for supper in Chinatown, where Harold had fun folding his crispy pancakes into fans and singing “Getting to Know You” to the inscrutable waitress. When we got the bill, however, Harold said Lee Ho Fook very loudly. “Same to you mate,” snapped the waitress in an accent that put the Ching in Chingford, snatching our fifty quid and marching off smartly.

On Sunday we went for a wander round the British Museum, where we walked for miles through the various halls. The interior courtyard is quite lovely, with the reading room still unchanged (apart from computer terminals at the reading desks) – V.I. Lenin was still sitting there, muttering about upgrading his browser. I left Harold playing Indiana Jones in the Egyptian Rooms while I went to see the free exhibition on the Orient Express, to get myself in the mood for the Pink Ball. There’s a real carriage from the original train, all beautiful marquetry and damask interiors. I sat down on a banquette and closed my eyes … in a trice I was travelling in luxury through central Europe with my faithful old retainer Imelda, blowing Sobranie smoke callously in the face of the suave and besotted millionnaire playboy Count Sven of Svenland, whilst graciously accepting a glass of champagne from the deferential Austrian steward Harald. Chief Inspector Fatty Fortescue was investigating the mysterious disappearance of my priceless diamond ring, and the chief suspect was Myfanwy Llanfairpwllgggggh, a lady druid who was travelling to Budapest for a wizards’ conference. I was the only person who knew that Myfanwy was in fact the mistress of Brigadier Bodger, and they were planning to elope together after Bodger had poisoned his wife Cynthia. However, their plan was foiled by the sudden arrival of Harry Potter who denounced the culprits, swiftly followed by Mrs Akiko with a tray of sushi, and as I bit into a succulent fua-gua I nearly choked on my diamond ring …. I was woken abruptly by the curator who told me that I was snoring like a wildebeest, which was strictly prohibited while the train was standing in the station.

Harold had been gasping for a curry since we left Poland, and so we ventured, on the advice of our friendly neighbourhood chemist Mr Patel, to the Chinatown of balti restaurants in Whitechapel. The restaurant owners are very friendly, practically dragging you in off the street with offers of free bottles of wine, free popadoms, etc. (I gather business hasn’t been too brisk lately for some reason). We chose a restaurant that looked as though it might have decent toilets, and Harold ordered the hottest vindaloo they could concoct. I know my limits when it comes to Indian food, and stuck to the cream of tomato soup and mixed grill. Harold thoroughly enjoyed his balti, scooping it up with naan bread in the time-honoured fashion. I noticed beads of sweat forming across his forehead, and asked if he was all right. He made a noise like someone drowning, but nodded happily. A bit later I was a bit worried by the steam coming out of his ears and the tears streaming down his face, but he assured me in sign language (he couldn’t actually speak by now) that he was enjoying every mouthful. When he finally finished his meal he managed to croak, in the few seconds before he made a dash for the men’s room, that it was the best curry he had tasted since the one in Doolallabad in 1951 which left him with second-degree burns. Frankly, I prefer my dinner to come with a little less … pain. But each to his own, I suppose. For the record, we went to the Sheraz in Brick Lane. Get off at Aldgate East and follow your nose.