glug – ah! a very welcome pint of black sheep brewery’s golden sheep pale ale accompanies me as i write this entry. it’s been a long week, and today has been the culmination of the week.

my dad turned up on monday for an extended visit over christmas. i picked him up from a midway point, an old family friend’s place near stonehenge to where my sister had driven.

dad’s a good guy, and it’s been a long time since i’ve had a chance to talk to him without interruption. originally i was expecting him on chritsmas eve / tuesday, but due to logistics with my sister, things got pulled forwards.

so i spent the next three nights entertaining.

since i fancied a non-traditional christmas (turkey? noooooo…) but a traditional theme, i chose to cook a sort of advanced school dinner theme menu, mostly english with a continental twist — for instance:

• monday pm: baked camembert fondue with crusty bread and new potatoes
• tuesday am: full english breakfast (wild boar bacon, black pudding, poached duck eggs)
• tuesday pm: blanched asparagus & lemon, roast venison shoulder and seasonal vegetables
• wednesday 1: pan-fried duck breast with roast pepper, over stilton and apple ploughman’s lunch.
• wednesday 2: stein’s steamed steak and kidney pudding, new potatoes and savoy cabbage
• wednesday 3: rhodes’ bread and butter pudding, port & cheese

…and a cheeseboard of stilton, majon (spanish, from minorca, lovely) and monmouthshire cheddar cheeseboard throughout, plus homemade granary loaves made with crystal-malt barley.

it’s been the most concentrated and best cooking that i have done in the past two years, and i am immensely proud of the results.

i spent most of wednesday cooking / on my feet, and it proved that no dish dropped below my personal three-star standard, and some exceeded it by miles. i am dead chuffed. admittedly i cheated by spreading the cooking over an interval of 8 hours, rather than attempting some big impressive meal, but had i tried the latter, it would not have worked half as well, nor would i have had time to talk to dad.

moreover, it made for a extended conversational dinner.

we talked of many things – science, world politics and political theory, history, battle strategy, his role in WWII, the invasion of italy, and his work in occupied palestine, assassination attempts in nigeria. movies and – a novelty to him – dvds. all manner of stuff.

my dad has had one of the most interesting lives of any person i know, a fragment of which — reader’s political opinion aside — can be expressed by the fact that he was recommended for promotion personally by monty, met and was friends with yasser (sheik) arafat’s father, and was lunch buddy at harvard for eighteen months with a guy named henry kissinger; not to mention how many of his former students whom i met as a child, who wound up in the CIA.

some right-on people i know are probably frothing by this point, but that is their problem. 😎

nowadays dad’s desire to remain a player seems to express itself as a desire to stay connected to world news from 0600h until 2200h, and as such having bbc news 24 on sky satellite was a godsend for those moments when i was in the kitchen. i don’t begrudge him this habit, even if it did mean being forced to listen to radio4 from the spare room in the early hours when i was trying to sleep in.

i dropped him homewards on boxing day (26th) and he snuck me a rusty old cast-iron 7″ skillet from under my mum’s radar, lest she suddenly declare it to be a family heirloom and demand to keep it. wire-brushed and re-seasoned, it is now refurbished and fills an otherwise irritating gap in my cooking implements. dropped in on a friend (jane) en route home, and crashed-out immediately on arrival home.

it’s saturday evening now. friday passed in a blur, stopping into work to clear e-mail and tie-up some loose ends. i’ve just finished the last of the washing-up, having chanced my arm amongst the lunacy and gone shopping in the oracle centre, reading. it would have been dreadful, except that i went on my motorbike thereby obviating any traffic problems, and providing immediate free parking rather than suffering a 40 minute queue in order to park a car.

i had almost forgotten the joy of biking, having not been out on two wheels for over a month; the sheer joy of burning-off traffic, being actively involved in travelling at speeds of up to 70mph, and generally buzzing around and exploring, is something of which i have had too little this past month. that travelling can be as good as arriving is part of the whole ethos of bikes, and where the arrival involves navigating herds of shoppers, the bike is definitely the best part of the day. the last of the season’s presents has been bought, plus some new coffee-making equipment which i look forward to experimenting with.

anyway – i have another week of vacation and work ahead, part-full of home-furnishing (ikea) and shopping, and those gaps which remain, i now intend to fill with biking.

this is the life…