Eating Out: MacDonald’s Hotel, Cardona, Peebles

A recent winterbreak in Peebles was a happy surprise - dinner, bed and breakfast, complete with friendly, expert service, a nice view, plus gym and swimming facilities for little more than the price of a meal in a good Edinburgh restaurant. 

MacDonald hotels - there are others elsewhere in Scotland - seem to get things right, and this one between Peebles and Innerleithen was a nice place to spend a night. The pleasant restaurant uses good ingredients, including free-range chickens and eggs, and cooks them with some flair.  The menu is short, sensible, modern. For main dish I had two sorts of steak with a mustard and carrot sauce and herby mashed potato, preceded by a ham terrine. My wife began with a salmon and mackerel roulade followed by lamb. Puddings included an exceptionally light, undemonstrative creme brulee. 

Though the wines were not cheap, there were enough good things under £30 as well as a free bottle awaiting us in our room.  Though this was no more than a pink Italian Zinfandel (presumably Primitivo), at least it was dry and a welcome, drinkable  gesture. 

The award-winning breakfast incorporated fresh unsalted butter and the best hotel coffee I have tasted  in a long time. When I asked what it was, the waiter supplied the answer promptly. It was Matthew Algie’s Ethiopian, and thus could hardly have been better chosen. We celebrated with a second cafetiere. 

25 February 2015

   

More photos of the opera house in the Andes

About David

I have been reading Ian Bostridge’s fine new book, Winter Journey, during one of the most wintry months of the year. It is a month during which my dear friend David Shaw has died in Hull, where for many years he assisted Philip Larkin in the university library. His death was on February 10, the day on which another dear friend, Lynne Walker, who was married to yet another dear friend,  the music critic Gerald Larner, died four years ago.  February, more than ever, can seem a heartless time, and reading Bostridge’s book about a composer who died at 31 has intensified my desolation.

I knew David, who had just turned 82, for 75 years, from our earliest Edinburgh schooldays, when we rode our tricycles (mine blue, his black with big wheels) around Davidson’s Mains, where we grew up and played merry Scottish street games, such as kick-the-can, in and around a triangular patch  of grass, laurel bushes, and water, at one corner of which two quiet roads merged.

We enjoyed this more than we enjoyed our school, a turreted place of torment and, at times, humiliation, which we spent the rest of our lives recalling together - cheerfully enough by then and with a wry humour we shared whenever the subject cropped up.

David, in fact, was a gloriously humorous man, who never got married but who would have made a great husband for the wife he never found. Although, for most of our careers, we lived far apart, we conversed frequently by phone and met whenever he was in Edinburgh, which was several times a year, staying with one or other of his sisters, attending the Festival, or seeing plays in Pitlochry, a place he loved to visit.

Though he was a Scot (born in Hamilton) through and through, he stayed on in Hull, where he had many friends, after his retirement. Though Kingsley Amis, Larkin’s best friend, despised it, David thought it not so bad a place in which to live, as indeed did the doleful Larkin himself.

My wife, who has friends of her own there, has visited it periodically, and I have happily gone with her. I liked it, too. On one occasion David joined us for a barbecue and arrived by taxi carrying two bottles of vintage Chateauneuf du Pape. He was generous as well as jolly - the perfect party guest.

The last time we saw him down there we had been holidaying in the Yorkshire Wolds with our daughters  and agreed to meet him in Beverley, a lovely town, for a bar lunch in an attractive hotel on the square. We gathered around one o’clock. We were still there at seven, sitting in the garden, increasingly reluctant to depart.

After Larkin’s death, I tried to persuade David to write a book about his former boss, but he would have none of it. He was not a writer. Many books, he rightly said, would come to be written about Larkin by other people.

Though I once suggested that I write David’s book myself, and though he showed faint interest, the idea never got anywhere.  Whenever he and I met in Edinburgh with friends - usually in the bar of the Sheraton or over a meal at the Braid Hills Hotel - we always talked about other topics. We did not lack things to say.

Last week my wife drove to Hull for the funeral, with one of our daughters. Fearing I might lack the stamina needed for the winter journey, they persuaded me to stay at home.  After the service they met his friends and neighbours in the aptly-named Goodfellowship Inn and told me all about it when they got back. And now I am reading Ian Bostridge’s Winter Journey about a forlorn masterpiece composed almost two centuries ago, which seems the timely thing to do.
23 February 2015

 

Murder on the Orient Express

I have been only once, as a journalist, on the Orient Express, by which time it was in its revamped format aimed at the transportation of honeymooners, people sedately celebrating wedding anniversaries, along with supposedly lucky newspapermen between London and Venice or, in my case, between Verona and London. Invited, with the witty John Amis of the BBC, the well-informed freelance Martin Hoyle, and a prim Belfast journalist who shunned gourmet food, to write about the experience,.

I met my colleagues at Gatwick for our charter flight to Italy. In Verona we lunched in a goodish restaurant full of Roman relics in  glass cases - John, humming Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens, was delighted when I identified  the musical reference - followed by a trip round town with a dapper guide in a linen suit and Panama hat whom I nicknamed Fitzcarraldo in tribute to the Dublin-born adventurer who, in Werner Herzog’s film, wanted to build an opera house in the Andes.

We were then driven to a Valpolicella vineyard for a wine tasting and salami selection. At night came Aida at the Arena, amid flashing Japanese cameras - Martin furiously scolded but failed to deter members of the audience sitting near him - and the distant flash of lightning over the Dolomites. Our hotel was at the northern end of the lake, chosen in preparation for the next day’s perilous mountain hike, which John, wearing one of his gaudy waistcoats, handled with aplomb but which, on a high ledge, brought tears of misery to Martin’s eyes.

The  climax, however,  was still to come.  It was reached with the boarding of the famous train at a wayside station. We had been forewarned, to our horror,  that we would have to share sleeping compartments, but this was a deception on the part of our prankish escorts.  In fact each of us had his own separate, beautifully renovated compartment, complete with a polished-wood art deco  washing cabinet. Later, in the bar, I offered John a drink, and I handed the bartender  the equivalent of a £20 note for our glasses of Campari.  “I’ll need two of these,” he replied. Drinks on the new Orient Express did not come cheaply, but dinner, at least, had already been paid for.

While our colleague from Ulster ate scrambled eggs, the rest of us were given sea bass - the proper Italian fish dish, sliced from something as large as a salmon,  and not just one of the fiddly sprats served in Britain.  At the piano, barely audible as the train swept through Alpine tunnels, was Jan Latham Koenig, a rising young conductor - he had appeared at the Edinburgh Festival - deeply embarrassed to find music critics in his midst. Meanwhile, on a sofa beside  the bar, lay a woman beneath a blanket.  Before falling asleep she had  told us that  her husband had locked her out of their compartment. So much for the Orient Express as a place in which to celebrate your wedding anniversary.

At the Gare de l’Est in Paris next morning, crates of lobsters were loaded on to the train in preparation for lunch en route to Boulogne. The Ulster journalist had more scrambled eggs, but no doubt they were cooked to gourmet standards.  On board the boat the slumbering woman was reunited with her husband and were briefly seen embracing.

Finally, on the British leg of the journey, a dainty afternoon tea was served in antique British coaches. It had been, on its own touristic terms,  a good trip. But would I do it again? Remembering the brutal cost of that Campari, I rather think not.

Here is the opera house in Peru mentioned in the blog. John Duffus sent this to me. He and my friend, Thomson Smillie are in the photo. Thank you, John.


23 February 2015

Incidents in Aberdeen

To share - through reading - a train journey with Paul Theroux is to be reminded that it is the most satisfying form of travel, compared with which a flight is merely transport. The Great Railway Bazaar remains one of my favourite literary journeys.

Yet his essay on the Night Ferry - London to Paris - included in the less famous Sunrise and Sea Monsters makes succinctly clear why that trip used to be considered  so special. Recently I have been re-reading The Kingdom by the Sea, his comprehensive  tour of the British coast by train, bus, boat and on foot, with great delight. It used to be considered an ill-tempered book, not least because it expresses such contempt for Aberdeen, but I would say that it gets most things right.

Instead of describing castles and churches, it concentrates on the people he meets, likes, and sometimes despises. Reading it in conjunction with Notes on a Small Island by his fellow American Bill Bryson has been an education.

Most of Bryson’s British journey is inland, and he spends more time seeing the sights and getting lost but it is a funnier, if less articulate, book.

Moreover, like Theroux, he conspicuously loathes Aberdeen. What is it about the Granite City that puts people off? Partly it seems to be the inhabitants, a view I tend to share. Once, reviewing a concert at the Music Hall, I found myself blocked at the entrance by a bulky loud-mouthed doorkeeper. I was from The Scotsman, I said, and I had come to collect my press ticket at the box-office.

 “I’m a Scotsman myself,” replied the smug official, “but that’s no going to get you in here unless you already have  a ticket to show me.” It was an altercation completely in line with those described by Theroux and Bryson.  In the end I managed to elude him, but the memory, nearly fifty years later, still rankles.

Yet at least once I have found myself on the side of Aberdonians. It was in that grim pile, the famously expensive Station Hotel, where I was breakfasting with Felix Aprahamian, music critic of the Sunday Times, during Scottish Opera’s springtime visit.   Scanning the menu, Felix pointed his finger at the grilled herring and asked “Is that an indigenous dish?”  “Yes,” replied the waitress at the sight of Felix’s raised eyebrows, “I think you’ll find it a very tasty product of Aberdeen.”
21 February 2015

This week's wine: Triade

It is neither Orvieto nor Verdicchio. It is not Soave, and it is certainly not Pinot Grigio. But the British belief that Italy’s whites are all much of a muchness compared with its reds is challenged by this product of Campania, from close to the toe of the peninsula and more like a fine Greco di Tufo  than any of the wines mentioned above.

Waitrose is currently selling it for £6.69 a bottle, which is a very inviting price for a wine normally costing £8.99. Like other wines using the Greco grape, it has body and structure, a hint of lemon and almonds making it a nice aperitif and good accompaniment to fish - particularly, it is said, if the fish is mackerel - and pasta dishes.

The grapes, blending Greco with Fiano and Falanghina,  are grown on volcanic soil on upper slopes, giving this white its  quite distinctive flavour, which escapes the scorched earth taste of some other southern wines.

So, even if its name is unfamiliar, it is well worth sampling as long as the reduction lasts. In other  words, buy now - you’ll be lucky to get it for so low a price another time.
18 February 2015

This week's wine: Muscadet Sevre et Maine

A good Muscadet is hard to come by. Not even when the name is extended geographically with the words ”Sevre et Maine,” which used to be a guarantee of quality, especially when the words “sur lie” extend it farther, can we be assured of something special. “Sur lie” means that the wine has been rested for a period on its lees, which supposedly brings a slight prickle to its flavour. All too often, however, it merely brings a bland fizziness, which does not make it desirable at all.

Most supermarkets today are content to stock a single basic Muscadet which rises, though sometimes only just, above the ordinaire. Yet traditionally this north-western French wine is good with food.   Waitrose sells a reliable one called Fief Guerin, attractively priced at £7.99.  The other day on a visit to the long-established wine shop, Villeneuve, on the High Street of  Peebles, I found another, a 2013 chateau-bottled Muscadet Sevre et Maine sur lie called Chateau Poyet, costing a tenner but worth its elevated price.

A classic Muscadet, clean and piquant but not lacking fruitiness, it was said by the  jaunty young shop assistant to be good with fish - or, indeed, with fish suppers. But it would be good with much else, and can be recommended.

Villeneuve is worth visiting. It carries an interesting stock, is neatly laid out, has won a Which? award, maintains its own website, and supplies many local hotels and restaurants. Moreover it has an Edinburgh branch in Broughton Street.
15 February 2015

The editors in my life (28) American tour

After its first major European tour in 1967, the Scottish National Orchestra made a brief but unremarkable trip to Norway before scoring the international coup that really mattered - its first American tour, ending with concerts in New York and Washington. By then, in 1976, David Richardson, formerly of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, had replaced Robert Ponsonby as administrator - vowing that he wanted the orchestra to perform all 104 Haydn symphonies in the course of his stay in Scotland. Though he failed in this admirable endeavour, he enabled the conductor Alexander Gibson to expand the orchestra’s repertoire in other directions. As for me, I had a new editor,  the quietly austere but excellent Eric Mackay,  who continued to allow me the freedom to do my job which I had enjoyed as staff music critic under Alastair Dunnett. By this time, Dunnett had been elevated at the age of 65  to the chairmanship of Thomson Scottish Petroleum, an offshoot of the Thomson Organisation which ran The Scotsman, The Times, and the Sunday Times (before Rupert Murdoch got his hands on the London-based papers) as well as many outfits in Canada.

But Eric Mackay’s reign at The Scotsman proved just as beneficial as Dunnett’s, and when David Richardson invited me to join the Scottish National Orchestra for the climax of its American tour, Mackay immediately gave it his blessing, not least because Richardson offered infinitely better financial terms than Robert Ponsonby had previously done. The SNO would pay my air fares, hotel bills, and travel inside America in return for articles and reviews -  an arrangement that thereafter became standard when a critic was invited to tour with a Scottish orchestra. If I did not enjoy myself, he said, he would accept what I wrote in criticism.  Malcolm Rayment of The Herald was likewise invited, along with a feature writer from The Guardian, and Malcolm’s editor this time gave him permission to go.

 Arriving in New York a day ahead of the orchestra, I had some precious hours of sight-seeing, walking the length of an autumnally sparkling Fifth Avenue from Central Park to Washington Square, pausing en route to look round Tiffany’s, watch the outdoor skaters on their rink, and browse in Barnes and Noble’s bookshop. Later I  had time to circulate the Guggenheim Museum, be overwhelmed by Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art, visit the Frick collection, and lunch in the Russian Tea Room where, in 1976, Woody Allen was still a regular  presence. It was my first time in New York. Manhattan was magic.

Malcolm arrived next day. He had the good luck to know the purser on his flight, and was instantly upgraded to first-class, where he was plied with so much food and drink that when he disembarked he thought he had gone blind - in fact an eclipse of the sun had coincided precisely with his arrival. Then, in the evening, the orchestra strode triumphantly into the hotel on the edge of Central Park  after what had clearly been a successful tour of regional America. Carnegie Hall lay ahead, with the prospect of the premiere of an atmospheric new tone poem entitled Aurora by Iain Hamilton, starting in darkness and ending in a blaze of light  - just the sort of thing that had been missing from the earlier European tour. Alexander Gibson conducted a poetic account of Elgar’s Enigma Variations in the splendid hall’s warm acoustics. The concerto was Beethoven’s Emperor, expertly and robustly played by John Lill, replacing Iain Hamilton’s Violin Concerto which had been successfully presented earlier in the tour.

Next day came Washington, with a concert in the National Arts Centre, a pretentious edifice with a look about it of the architecture of Albert Speer. Compared with New York. Washington seemed  dull yet menacing. For supper in Georgetown we were advised to travel by taxi. Three buses - for which critics were not billed, as had happened after the European tour  - transported us back to Kennedy Airport in New York. Before leaving, I bought 1776, a complex American bicentenary board-game and challenging souvenir of the trip.  Gibson and his players would be back in New York a few years later, with a tired Claudio Arrau as soloist, and some sterling Sibelius to end the programme. But the first trip was the one I shall remember.
13 February 2015

This week's wine: Primitivo

The mistake most people make about Primitivo lies in assuming it to be an undrinkably rough,  tough, rustic Italian red, poured from a wicker-covered bottle on  the terrace of a primitive bar on some remote village piazza, In fact fact it is a sophisticated, juicy, greatly desirable but admittedly robust  southern  red  with an inviting aroma, produced in the Puglia region and imported by Valvona & Crolla, as well as  an increasing number of supermarkets which can rightly take pride in it.

Neither primitive nor particularly cheap, it is a thoroughly reliable wine which, made with increasing finesse, seldom disappoints. The fact that the primitivo grape is reputedly the same as America’s zindanfel would only be a  handicap if it did not measure up to its famous Californian cousin, but measure up it undoubtedly does.

If you have not already tried it, then buy a bottle of Marks & Spencer’s 2012 Notte Rossa Primitivo di Manduria to find out.  The label shows a stepladder with someone at the top reaching for the moon and stars - an apt symbol for a wine which, costing £10 a bottle, is worth anybody’s effort. It is a big wine (14 per cent alcohol) from a big grape, and its aroma, popularly described as tar and roses, certainly precedes it.The taste is rich and fruity, with a touch of dark Italian chocolate.

 Although many good Italian reds have an edge of bitterness, this one has the allure of being  impressively  smooth. For a good Primitivo with a bit more bottle age, expect to pay from £15 upwards at Valvona & Crolla.
8 February 2015

Blockbusters and Package deals?

Blockbusters and Package Deals?

Containing only the most meagre of operatic details, the Edinburgh Festival’s initial schedule for 2015 looks a bit like Hamlet without the prince.  At one time the operatic announcement was what mattered - what companies were coming and what they would be presenting on up to eighteen of the festival’s 21 nights - just as was the case in Salzburg, Munich, Holland and other great festivals of the world.

Opera was Edinburgh’s lynchpin. Will it be as important this year with a new director at the helm? It certainly wasn’t during his predecessor’s reign.  So we must wait and see. Even if it seems unlikely - and since many new productions turn out to be merely irritating -  opera does need to be more prominently featured than it has been in recent years.

Rumours that Ivan Fischer and his exhilarating Budapest Festival Orchestra will be  in residence at the Festival Theatre, staging Mozart in their own inimitable and   audience-involving manner, have not yet been denied, so let us hope for the best. The fact that these audacious Hungarians will be performing Mozart’s Requiem at the Usher Hall - something they have memorably done before - at least confirms their presence in Edinburgh.

The  concert schedule, announced in detail, looks at first glance like the now established mixture of blockbusters (The Rite of Spring, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Berlioz’s Requiem) and package deals (the complete Beethoven piano sonatas).

But although it offers nothing very startling, it contains quite a few good things. Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique has not been heard in combination with its vocal sequel Lelio since the early 1960s, and John Eliot Gardiner, as conductor of his own romantic and revolutionary orchestra will bring special authority to this arresting double-bill.

The 50th anniversary of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus is being thoroughly celebrated, with a performance of Sibelius’s vast Kullervo Symphony by the  RSNO under Edward Gardner and with  Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis as the festival’s climax.. Carlo Maria Giulini, who once conducted it here, had held back from this mountain range of a work until he felt “mature” enough to perform it, but young Robin Ticciati, undaunted by its challenges, is surely the right sort of novice to explore its subtleties.

A concert performance of The Pirates of Penzance by Scottish Opera, conducted by that master of Bachian baroquerie Richard Egarr, looks like being the joker in the pack, but the Royal Scottish Conservatoire’s concert performance of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress will surely run it a close second.

The opening concert, by the BBC SSO and Donald Runnicles, prefaces Strauss’sEin Heldenleben with rare nuggets of Brahms. nuggets of Brahms with Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.
6 February 2015

This week's wine: Pecorino

Though not quite a novelty in Britain, Pecorino is enough of a rarity to seem a startling addition to a supermarket wine list. It  is, not unpredictably, Waitrose which is promoting it by offering this delectable white from the Abruzzi at the bargain price of £5.99 a bottle - a February reduction on what will be its  standard price of £7.99.

Most of us know Pecorino as  a cheese with bite,  made from sheep’s milk somewhat in the hard Parmesan style. Pecorino, the wine from between Rome and the Adriatic, where Berlioz found his inspiration for Harold in Italy, is a white wine with flavour from a land where red wines are what matter. The Waitrose offer is a 2013 Terre di Chiete, giving a good impression of what can be done with the Pecorino grape.

This week I bought two bottles and have not been  disappointed. Drink it with seafood or veal, or as a very nice aperitif.

4 February 2015

Remembering Geraldine

The death of Geraldine McEwan the other day brought back memories of the first time I saw her on stage. I was still a teenager, making my first trip to London on my own and seeing as many plays and operas as I could within the space of a week and eating in as many interesting restaurants as I could afford. 

The Stage Door Grill, a Turkish establishment  in Wardour Street, off Leicester Square, quickly  became my favourite. From there it was an easy walk to the Comedy Theatre, where Geraldine McEwan, still a novice,  was appearing in Arthur Watkyn’s  For Better For Worse with Leslie Phillips. I had never heard of her and I cannot remember why this play attracted my attention but, on my second-last night, along I went. 

Not only was the play, about a pair of newly-weds, extremely funny, but McEwan, with her grainy voice, was so enchanting that I returned the following night to see her again, giving up an opportunity for something more elevating at Covent Garden. 

Though I cannot say I saw her in many other stage plays, apart from The Entertainer with Olivier,  I began to look out for her on television, where she frequently appeared, not only as Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie (a role in which I thought her superior to Maggie Smith) but as a quirky exponent of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. No less memorable in recent years was her portrayal of Jeanette Winterson’s mother in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.  Sadly, I never saw her in Shakespeare, in which she was said to have excelled.

2 February 2015