London, United Kingdom

After a long day trekking back to Stirling to discuss my PhD, we decide to treat ourselves to a meal at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant in Edinburgh. Why not? The place is packed, we have to wait at the bar for about half an hour before we can get a table. The (double) gin and tonic is just what the doctor ordered for a tired body and a spinning mind. The thought of embarking on this crazy journing of doing a PhD is keeping me awake at night. The Jamie restaurant is impressive in size, feeling like a royal banquet hall with massive chandeliers and wood panelling, waiters neatly trimmed and tucked into white shirts and black trousers with short little black aprons. The type of place that always makes me feel underdressed and “van die plaas af”. The fact that we have a collection of bags, umbrella, camera bag, shopping bags and the by now hugely irritating bloody top hat with us make us in fact look like two bag ladies. It takes me all of five minutes to compose myself (actually one sip of the gin) and not give a toss. We are shown to our table, or should I say to our little tablet the size of an ipad. In spite of the opulant granduer of the place, it is clear that they keep the tables as small as possible to squeeze in as many paying guests. There is an outomatic assumption that these guests will be tiny, have midget like short legs and that they do not need to put anything down on the table – no wallet, sunglasses, cellphone, keys. Nothing. Because there is hardly place for the crockery and salt and pepper on this little tablet. To add to the granduer, the lights are just enough to assure you that you are not blind. Untill you try to read the very artful menu printed on percament with the smallest possible handwriting. The little candle on the table is clearly only there to add to the ambience – it serves no purpose what so ever other than taking up what little space could have been used for a water glass. With or without glasses, I cannot for the life of me see what is written on the menu. A further expansion on the ambience effort is the “music” – now not only am I as blind as a bat in this dark banking hall of a restaurant, the racket coming from the ceiling assures me that I am deaf as well. And while this internal dialogue is raging, I have a hard time trying to convince myself that I should just calm down, soak up the wonderful atmosphere and get over myself. Our order is a meatplatter for me and bruschette for Victor to start, two prawn pastas and a tiramisu for me and panacotta for V. Botlle of red (the price of which would buy us a case of 6 at home). The next thing (we have now added two wine glasses and a bottle of red wine, a caraffe of water and two water glasses to the tablet) the waiter plonks down two tins of tomatoes on the table – to hold the meat board which duly arrives with great aplomb. One slice of cheese (see through it is so thinly cut) on a paperthin piece of left-over pizza crust, a slice of polony (they would call it ham) and a slice of prosciutto. On which is draped a gherkin. And a thimble with carrot sticks. To close my mouth which had dropped onto the table, I duly stuff the gherkin in. Only the find that it ain’t no gherkin, it is a chilly. Now I am NOT a chilly person – my personality is hot enough and needs no help from chillies. Within seconds I have heart palputations and start hiccuping as my diaphragm goes into a state of complete shock. Thank God for the darkness that no one can witness this little drama playing out at our table. Meanwhile, the table next to us (or rather the table sitting on our laps next to us) consist of a mother (totally exasperated by two teenage girls and a witless husband), two teenage girls and a father (witless). The teenagers are drawing interior designs of their desired bedrooms on their napkins whilst talking over each other, explaining where they want which piece of designer furniture to be placed. A cat fight duly ensues when the one apparently had stolen the other’s idea. The younger one (sitting on Victor’s lap) decided it is now time to jump up and down on the shared bench. Repeatedly. Jumping higher and higher. Just when I am ready to take the wine caraffe and beat her head to a pulp she stops. And then all the lights go out in the restaurant. Chaos ensues – I maliciously start talking loudly of terrorist attackes hoping that the (American) family next to us might leave. No such luck – for about five minutes the restaurant is dark (in fact just a tad darker that what we started off with), a wonderful reprieve from the horrible music and stunned silence from the eaters. Of course – the gas grills are grilling, only now there is no extraction fans, so within seconds the place fills up with smoke of chicken, beef and what ever else was being cremated on the salamander. At this point I decide to go for a walk outside. Within minutes of the lights coming on again, our main course arrives – a thin tagliatelle with prawns swimming in a watery soup interspersed with acidic baby tomatoes. I have been to Italy a few times Jamie. Pasta in Italy never, ever swims in a sauce. In fact, you have to really really dig to find a sauce – it is usually a refined, gently smearing of taste that infuses a plate of pasta with the most mysteriously gentle flavours. You are forced to eat more and more of the pasta in a quest to discover more and more flavour. When the last scraping are smeared off the plate with bread you still wonder what it was that transported you temporarily to a magic planet of subtle taste – was it really olive oil and garlic only? Truffle? White or black? The mystery lingers – you find it hard to hand the plate back without actually licking it out with your tongue like a cat grooming in the late afternoon sun. It never swims. Never…