Tag: friends

Categories
cuba salsa

Daiquiri en La Floridita


MG with a classic Daiquiri
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Finally, I get to have my daiquiri en La Floridita*.

In honour of…oh who needs a reason…we went to celebrate, dinner & dancing with friends at London’s La Floridita.

It’s a fancy restaurant/bar/dance club that features the finest examples of Cuban music, and a big variety of rum-based cocktails, including my favourite, the delicious daiquiri. I tried three different ones and they were pretty, pretty, pretty good.

The band was El Guayabero, an excellent son group from Holguin on the eastern side of the island. They played 30-min sets of up-tempo son numbers with some boleros and cha-cha-chas mixed in. No one danced for the first two sets – maybe the people at the bar were shy? Others like us were scoffing down food yummier and more luxurious than you’ll find anywhere but in the very fanciest restaurants in Cuba.

The first time we ever went to Floridita was in January, for my friend Becs’s birthday. That was before we’d been to Cuba (Becs had been many times), before we realised that Floridita is like an idealised, fantasy version of Cuba. In reality I didn’t see anywhere in Cuba that looked anything like this. It’s the levels of consumption – no-where we went in Cuba looked this fancy, certainly not the type of places bands like this play (excluding Varadero – the tourist-only enclave, which I didn’t visit.) In our experience bands like Guayabero play to sweltering, smoky rooms with ineffective celing fans, and the dance floor heaves with expert Cuba couples and salsa tourists being taken for a spin by their Cuban insrtuctors.

During the third set, when we were moved off the table (you only get a 2-hour sitting on busy nights) and back to the bar, we decided to go for it on the dance floor. One couple had just taken the floor. Within seconds of us joining them the dance floor filled. The musicians looked utterly delighted. It must be a drag for a dance band to play to a motionless audience.

However, salseros, whilst the music and atmosphere are romantic and evocative (if not authentic), the drinks are wonderful and the food delish, it is not a cheap night out… And like us, you will probably still need to factor in a visit to a salsa club for a proper dance fix.

We went on to Salsa Republic@Club Colosseum, where the music of Maikel Blanco, Manolito, Issac Delgado, Adalberto and Los Van Van was as ever, wall-to-wall and sizzling hot.

P.S. Inexplicably, a photo of Becs and I dancing at the Manolito concert has rapidly risen to become one of my most viewed photos on Flickr. Is this blog to blame?

Let’s do the experiment. Here’s another MG & Becs dancing salsa photo – better quality, taken last night at Club Colosseum.

* the reference is to Hemingway’s habit of drinking “my daiquiri in La Floridita and my moijto in La Bodeguita” – two of Havana’s most famous bars. The line is quoted in one of Los Van Van’s most popular songs, “Tim Pop con Birdland“, a timba riff on the 1970s jazz classic “Birdland”. For those who are interested in such things, I reckon “Tim Pop con Birdland” may well be my keeper on a Desert island Disc selection…

Categories
raves

The Brilliance of Professor Pete Simpson

When I’m privileged enough to hook up with my late Mummy’s old flame and good pal Pete Simpson, moral philosopher, Aristotelophile and Monty Python fan, I like to play Devil’s Advocate and ask him all those tricky questions that the brightest of my atheist friends ask me when we’re up late drinking and they start on at me about believing in God.

Here’s Peter’s answer to this old bugbear:

But how can any religion be true if each one says it’s the one true religion?

Well, that rather depends on whether truth is important in religion.

If you believe that religion is simply a cultural phenomenon, that we are chosen for any religion simply because of our circumstances and ethnic background, then whether any one is more true than another does not matter; religion, in this scenario, is merely a preference, like a cultural preference for vanilla ice cream. And so what does it matter? Why get involved, why comment, why bother, if the truth of any religion doesn’t actually matter?

But if you believe that truth IS important, well then you have a problem because you can’t simply dismiss any religion; before you dismiss it you have to work through the evidence, the historical and other claims made for each religion.

Contrary to popular belief, most believers don’t dismiss other religions. The truth has been revealed in many ways, to different people all over the world, has been understood in different ways but there is a huge area of commonality, the greatest one is probably this: we are answerable to something higher than ourselves for our conduct during our lives. Afterlife or no afterlife (and religions certainly don’t agree about the nature or existence of afterlife) – there will be reckoning.

I’m always amazed when atheists accuse the religious of using belief as a comfort. I’d take more comfort in knowing that I could misbehave ad infinitum with eternal impunity! And that’s another thing that amazes me about atheists. How come so many of them are so darn well-behaved, altruistic and generally lovely? (I wouldn’t be, I’m sure I’d be ever so wicked…)

As my Mexican grandfather, Agustin Reyes Ponce used to say, “Sea por Dios” (It’ll be God’s doing…)

Categories
Joshua Files nostalgia raves science

Weekend in Cornwall

Prussia Cove, Porth-en-Alls

taken with my BlackBerry

Some dear friends of ours from my days in the Nuffield Department of Medicine were over from Melbourne. (That’s where the UK bioscience brain drain has been for the past ten years, or so it seems to me; if I count up all my best friends from doctorate and post-doc years about half have ended up in Oz. Okay, most of those were originally Australian, but hey…)

They’d always talked about taking us to their favourite haunt in Cornwall, where they’d rent a cottage almost every year when they lived in the UK. We hadn’t seen them for years, so this it was wonderful that this time, we could join them there.

I’ve been to Cornwall once before, North Cornwall, which is gorgeous but this place was even better! It has the Lizard on one side and Lands End on the other (both far in the distance); old smugglers caves, gorgeous little coves as well as wide, sandy beaches with all the stuff kids like (e.g. rock pools, pebbles, shells), amazing clifftop walks with views out to St Michael’s Mount.

So after a gorgeous weekend eating Cornish pasties (veggie and yummy!), visiting ice-cream parlours and eating cake, I’ve probably gained a pound or three, despite the exercise of walking.

My friend Magda gave me a lovely scientist flashback moment when she went through the slides for a talk she gave last week at a conference in London; a fantastically effective new way to use nano-particles as part of a new vaccine for diseases like malaria. My very first research job was with a team developing one of the UK’s earliest candidates for an AIDS vaccine, so it was vaguely familiar territory. I’m so proud of Magda, of all my scientist friends she’s the first to be made a full Professor. Professor Magda!

In other news, someone is selling a bound proof of The Joshua Files: Invisible City on ebay. There are only a few hundred in circulation, I believe…

Only!

It should go for a very, very reasonable sum, i.e. cheap-as-chips, given that at this point in time i) almost no-one has heard of the title and ii) almost no-one has heard of the author…

Categories
raves

Difford rules! More mixology…

cocktails1.jpg

Noam and Patrick, two young student lads came round for cocktails last night. I’ve known them both since they were little boys aged 9. It was great to have some guests who could go through lots of cocktails without passing out, like our usual crowd of friends (and me), who stop at two. Gave me a chance to try out some more recipes.

Last night’s discoveries of yumminess included:

Pineapple Daiquiri (cold and refreshing)

2 shots light rum, 1/2 shot gomme, 3/4 shot fresh lime juice, 1 shot pressed pineapple juice.

Shake with ice and then pour over ice-filled old-fashioned glass.

Havanatheone (Rose variant improvised by me)

10 mint leaves, 2 shots light rum, 2 spoonfuls rose-infused syrup, 1 shot pressed apple juice

Muddle mint leaves just enough to bruise, add other ingredients and stir until syrup dissolves, then shake with ice and fine strain into chilled martini glass.

(NB the original recipe calls for runny clear honey)

We also tried old classics like Mint Julep, Caipiroska, Mojito, Cosmopolitan, Gimlet and some of Difford’s own recipes. All fantastically good.

I felt fine until they left. I’d had two-and-a-half, including a Grand Margarita which has 3 shots of alcohol. But I’d also had a sip of every other cocktail I’d made. The room began to swim. I just managed to force a large glass of water down before I collapsed onto my bed.

I wasn’t drunk! Just sleepy.

Categories
nostalgia

MG and DB

Here’s my good friend DB, who I inherited from the one time in my life that I was ever in a Clique. It was at St Cross College, Oxford and for some reason the cool American grad students welcomed me into their urbane little set, who would always sit at the same table for lunch and watch as the Goddess Hoku opened her mail (often actually addressed to her as that…), and have cool nicknames for some of the more distinctive dons (we had a Panzer Fuhrer, a Yoda, Obi-Wan, and a Dingleberry). I’d always kind of admired the group from afar; when I eavesdropped their conversation it sounded like the Algonquin Round Table meets the Star Wars Fan Club.

I first got an ‘in’ with them when I overheard Hoku talking about my beloved PJ O’Rourke, whose book “Republican Party Reptile” I owned and loved, and whose new book “Holidays in Hell” was just out. Hoku and I became life-long friends following our walk to the bookstore to each buy a copy of HIH.

The group would meet in someone’s college room for video evenings to watch shows like “Sledge Hammer!” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle”, which were all new to me. We’d eat pizza and play with Legos. These were the type of people I’d never come across before at Oxford – right-leaning, funny, educated, witty and cosmopolitan American liberal-arts students. I was totally smitten.

This was back when there was still an Evil Empire and we had a gazillion Soviet nukes aimed at our heads, when the GDR was still cool in a grimly-socialist-black-and-white-movie sort of way – it wasn’t like being a neocon or anything. One of the group, Peter Schweizer, had spent time with Washington bigshots and had published a book entitled “Grinning with the Gipper: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of Ronald Reagan”

But as people invariably do in Oxford, they left. Eventually only two local hangers-on were left: me and DB.

We didn’t really know each other at first. The group was big enough that we’d only chatted at the periphery. When we exchanged phone numbers at the farewell party of the last of the group to leave, I wondered vaguely if we’d ever meet again.

We did though, and I’m glad because DB has been one of my best friends for years, through thick and thin. She wrote weekly limericks to cheer me up through one gloomy bit of my life, I stripped wall-paper with her when she bought a cottage that needed EVERYTHING doing. I introduced DB to the concept of Murder Mystery parties and then DB expanded and improved upon the concept until they were a thing of minor legend, at least in Hertford College MCR.

DB tempted me out for tapas, cocktails and a movie last night. We saw “The Lives Of Others”, the winner of last year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar. I haven’t seen such a touching, beautifully constructed and performed film for a long time. Everything about the film is just brilliant.

Fundamentally it’s a story of unrequited love and how a dutiful state security official metamorphoses into a Good Man when he falls in love with someone who he can never have, but who through her plight opens his eyes to the wrongdoing in his own occupation. It’s a film which sticks rigidly to Robert McKee’s stern advice to screenwriters that MEANING produces EMOTION. (As opposed to loud explosions and car chases…)

Great movie – thanks DB!