A gourmet weekend in the offing

It's only Wednesday, but I'm already busily making my plans for a rather foody weekend.

The Other Half is off to Perpignan, in the south of France, to see his Rugby League team take on the Catalans Dragons. He'll set of early on Friday and take the day to travel south by train – and spend Sunday doing the same thing in reverse, with Saturday set aside for the match and (hopefully) a little food shopping.

In the meantime, having worked last Sunday (my first ever studio photo shoot), I'm going to take Friday as time off in lieu.

So – what to do, what to do? Or more importantly: what to eat?

Everything on that score will be centred around a Friday morning trip to Borough Market, where I know that, amongst other things, the range of seafood that I'll be able to get will be higher than Broadway Market the following day.

So, I'm starting from a point of trying to work out what dishes I want to eat.

Let's see: top of the list is scallops – to be pan seared and served with cannellini beans heated with chili and garlic, and some salad leaf.

After that, possibly some crab with spaghetti – I've done this a few times with dressed crab, but fancy trying with meat that's still in rather larger pieces. Once you've got the meat out, you simply warm it gently in olive oil, with a little red chili and garlic (yes, I know there's a bit of theme developing here).

I'd also like to have some sea bass – a whole fish, stuffed with fennel tops and baked in a coat of packed sea salt (no chili, note).

So, three days to cater for and three meals decided thus far.

Brindisa, the wonderful Spanish deli at Borough should enable me to find padron peppers – one bag will do me twice as a starter.

These are beautiful little things: you fry them in a smallish amount of ht olive oil, hopefully getting some of the skins slightly charred. Then serve with a garnish of course sea salt – and eat with your fingers, picking up by the stalks and biting off the fruit. Around one in 10 is hot. All are glorious.

It seems that we're well on the way to very simple food – Italian and Spanish influences – and a bit of heat to get the old endorphins going.

Ahhh ... endorphins. Those lovely little things that go through the roof when we've having good sex.

Anyway, back to the food.

I also quite fancy having a big dish of spaghetti with roasted tomatoes, red peppers and ... errr ... red chilies, pulsed with toasted ground almonds and a little virgin oil.

So that's four meals. What about some meat, though?

I am wondering about trying a couple of little quail, splitting and flattening them, and then cooking them on the griddle pan with a bit of course salt and some ... you guessed it: red chili. The weekend is in danger of becoming a culinary homage to the late Rose Gray, River Cafe co-founder.

But that is just coincidence – it's simply the perfect opportunity to stuff myself with the sort of nosh that I adore and that The Other Half is less enthused by.

So, where are we: Ah yes – three days to plan for and five meals provisionally planned (plus a couple of starters). One more meal to go, as I attempt not to waste this opportunity.

Ummm. Perhaps I'll leave that final choice until I see what's on display.

Not that I'm just going to be cooking and noshing for three days.

I may take in a gallery – I fancy a very relaxed stroll around the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, having not been for years – or I may try to think of some personal photographic project (perhaps I'll just photograph my food) or I may even try my hand at making some artisan chocolates.

And then I want to re-watch Visconti's film of Death in Venice and David Lean's Summertime to get myself even more in the mood for our forthcoming trip.

But now, after the snow, the Catalans have warned that the match may not go ahead.

I've told The Other Half in no uncertain terms that he's going anyway – he can't get a refund on his train tickets! And I have plans!

Sun, sea and salt

The sun on your skin has to be one of the most sensual experiences ever. Warmth in the air and salt on the sea breeze. Gulls wheel above, flying and shrieking as though out of nothing but joy.

A friend sent me some extracts from Mark Kurkansky’s excellent Salt: a world history this morning, and managed to turn my mind straight away to the south of France; to Languedoc-Roussillon, to the Mediterranean coast, to the vast salt pans visible from plane or train and, most of all, to Collioure.

The little port, nestling below the Pyrénées, has two claims to fame: anchovies and art. The art in question is Fauvism – Matisse thought the light there the most beautiful in the world. The little fish were integral to the village’s economy; salted and dispatched to various parts of the world, valued as the finest anchovies anywhere.

Just reading about it made me long to be back there. The pebbled beaches leave the Mediterranean crystal clear. Venture in and fish will soon be swimming around your legs. Don a snorkel and goggles and float, face down, gazing into a different world; a world where sunlight, refracted through the water, glistens all around.

Keep your eyes open and watch: spot the tiniest of lifeforms shifting around in their shells; creatures scooting out of sight behind rocks as the seabed falls away and weeds sway languorously below. Daurade as big as dinner plate and busy shoals of multi-coloured smaller fish go about their business.

Stay still: let your body stop. And just watch.

Wander along the narrow, winding streets of brightly painted houses: admire the art – there’s plenty of it. Sit at any one of the seafront cafés and watch the world go by. Banish any timepieces.

Lunch on anchovies and olives, or sardines charred on an open grill right next to the beach and stuffed between bread with the fingers. Dine on squid dipped into unctuous aïoli or tuna with ripe tomatoes and fresh bread dipped into virgin oil, squeezed from the groves on the surrounding hills. Drink the sweet, local Banyuls to start, before moving on to a carafe of the house rosé. Perfection in simplicity.

Relax and let the place rub away all the stress and the tensions of modern living. And still the sun; blissfully hot, caressing the skin; the water, lapping the shore, and the blue, blue sky overhead.

The end of February nears. It’s still chilly in London, although milder than for some weeks. Time for winter to end. I need the sun on my back and the salt in my nostrils again.

Life and death in Venice

When Jane Hudson disembarks from her train in Venice, she’s full of excitement at the prospect of spending time in the beautiful city. But her awe at the beauty of the sights takes a blow when the sights that she sees include Italian men eyeing up women in a rather obvious manner.

As her dream holiday unfolds, Jane is torn: desperate to be her independent self on the one hand, but lonely on the other; shocked by the sexual openness that she sees around her, yet desperate for an experience that has eluded her.

And when she meets handsome antique dealer Renato de Rossi, he challenges a whole host of her beliefs about relationships.

Written originally for the theatre by gay US playwright and stage director Arthur Laurents, before being scripted for film in 1955 by the quintessentially English talents of HE Bates and David Lean (more famous for Dickens and deserts than romance) Summertime, Lean's own favourite film, is as astonishingly open work for the time.

It’s quite clear that there can be no hope of anything but a holiday romance, and Renato, separated but married, challenges Jane to question her illusions: that all romances could be out of the storybook of her dreams, with a complete set of idea criteria. Indeed, he even tells her that Americans are mixed up about sex.

So when Jane makes her decision, she is under no illusions, but chooses to embrace life. Extraordinarily, in terms of the 1950s, there is no price that must be paid by this unmarried woman who has an adulterous relationship, and the film closes with no moral judgment.

The judgment of the viewer, though, will surely be that she was right to grasp the opportunity: that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. It is better to have reached out and grasped the opportunity to taste the life-affirming power of love and lust, passion and sensuality, than to have fled in the belief that somehow those things are wrong unless governed by strict rules.

And it brings to mind another work set in the same city – Death in Venice. Thomas Mann’s novella, filmed in 1971 by Luchino Visconti and starring Dirk Bogarde in the central role, tells the story of acclaimed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who is utterly dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity.

Tired and disturbed by a strange encounter with a rough-looking man he sees on a walk, the writer resolves to take a trip to Venice. Once there, he is appalled by the appearance of an elderly man who has tried desperately to use make-up and a wig to make himself look young.

Once installed in his hotel, Aschenbach finds himself fascinated by the young son of an aristocratic Polish family who are fellow guests. Over the weeks, it becomes an obsession and, even when he realises that cholera is ravaging the city, he stays put, refusing to warn the family and convincing himself that, if the boy Tadzio dies now, he will never age and lose his beauty.

But even as Aschenbach tries to regain his youth, his own trips to the barber for hair dye and make-up a pathetic mirror of the man at the beginning of his visit, he realises what he’s doing and warns Tadzio’s mother.

A day later, as the family prepare to leave, the sickening author sits in his deckchair, watching the boy bathe one last time. Delirious, he sees Tadzio as an almost classic vision beckoning him. Aschenbach attempts to rise, only to fall back, dead from the cholera.

Mann, who spent a lifetime struggling with his own sexuality, partly intended the piece to show passion and sensuality as a disease. But it is far more than that.

For Aschenbach, at the end, has an epiphany: finally, he is full of joy – full even of life. He pays for it with his life, but his existence before that lacked anything but dedication to his work. Work as disease, denying the human being the chance to blossom fully, to become.

Mann, like Aschenbach, was disciplined and ascetic, his writing almost a duty. This was the Protestant work ethic applied to art. Perhaps he believed that, if he gave full rein to his own passions, it would kill him – or at least his work. Perhaps that, by submerging himself in his work, he could kill the passions. But perhaps he envied Aschenbach too, for that final epiphany: a salvation, if you will, that is earned at the last by his warning to the family to flee.

Unlike Jane Hudson, Aschenbach pays a price that we know of. But as with her, Venice opens him up to sensuality and pleasure: as with her, it breaks down the barriers of Anglo-Saxon repression and fear and even guilt, and offers him, however fleetingly, a moment of pure beauty.

Life and death intertwined in Venice. Two works created by two very different northern European artists, but both reaching a strikingly similar conclusion. To live fully, means to live sensually and passionately.

Girlies doing it for themselves

On the off chance that you’ve been off world for the last week or so, yesterday was Valentine’s Day.

Now in the dim and distant past, The Other Half announced to me that he isn’t “romantic”, so over the years I have become accustomed to 14 February being just like any other day. At least when it’s at the weekend, one doesn’t have to put up with hearing colleagues announcing their own plans for the evening debauch.

It does all, of course, beg a few questions. We’ve been together for almost 20 years and, for the first 10 or so, I’d send him a card but was quite used to the lack of any reciprocation. Yet in the second half of that sentence, I have begun to feel differently. There is even, occasionally, a little sense of annoyance. Why? Have I perhaps decided that I actually deserve a bit of that “romance” – however soppy it may sound? Or, worse still, have I started to succumb to the dread god of commercialism, and am merely now hankering after what Hallmark tells me I should have?

Whatever the answer, instead of pondering too long, I have the chance for a little girlie indulgence today – and fully intend to make the most of it.

Super League – the pinnacle of European club rugby league – has recommenced. So, packed lunch in his rucksack, The Other Half set off at 8.50 this morning for the twilight zone. Or Yorkshire, as it’s sometimes known.

Girlie plans can now be put into place.

Actually, most of those “plans” flew right out of the window at the first hint of reality – I can do (or not) what the hell I want: there is nobody else to answer to. In a fit of indulgence, I took a stroll to the nearest shop that I know of that sells crumpets, salving my conscience by buying an Innocent smoothie (two of my five a day) as well as the crumpets, which later dripped with good, unsalted French butter.

I took the time to sit in a café-bar near Colombia Road flower market and browsed the music section of the Observer, feeling so at one with the world that I even enjoyed a lengthy piece about Saint Bono of the U2 without feeling the need to snarl cynically.

Later, I messed around with the camera at home, producing nothing of value except a few lessons in lighting.

Then I chilled in front of the TV and watched some cricket.

Those plans had included serious amounts of this and serious amounts of that. And all of it worthy. But here I am now, a risotto on the hob (yesterday’s stock smells glorious as the Arborio absorbs it), tapping away on my laptop in the kitchen, feeling relaxed and at ease. Usually, this is the point at which I start guilt-tripping, as that old time Protestant work ethic invades my leisure, leaving me with a sense of having wasted hours simply by relaxing, but rest has a great deal of value all of its own. And for today at least, I have successfully banished such guilt.

The risotto is a simple one – more Jamie Oliver. Take ye basic rice dish, add lashings of wonderfully fragrant thyme, fresh stripped from the twigs, stir in rich Marscarpone at the end and serve with a topping of toasted breadcrumbs and slivered almonds. I promise you, I’m not depriving myself.

I have a single-portion almond and pear tart for dessert, which will be perfect as I will pour myself into my armchair and watch a film. Since this is still my post-Valentine girlie day, I’ve selected Summertime, David Lean’s beautifully shot tale of a repressed Anglo-Saxon spinster (Katherine Hepburn) on the holiday of a lifetime to Venice, being swept off her feet by a touch of Latin passion (Rossano Brazzi).

I can’t claim that there are any great artistic reasons behind this choice – although one could perhaps suggest that Brazzi was a piece of Italian art in his own right (and oh, he had taste – his beloved wife Lydia was more my shape than that of an Ava Gardner). I shall lech in quiet pleasure. I first remember seeing him as Emile de Becque in South Pacific … “Some enchanted evening” … oh ye Roman gods (even though he was a Bologna boy).

In those days I didn’t know what lust was, imagining naively that what was going on was love. Ah well, we all grow up – and I am unapologetic. I like the story too: all we girls, brought up with that Protestant work ethic and repressed senses, could do with a little of the Latin in our lives.

The Protestant work ethic has been shut in the cupboard in the hall, where it's thumping the door and squeaking in protest. But it can bang all it likes – it’s not coming out tonight.