The New Wave

I’m standing up. It’s really happening. OK, so I’m more horizontal than I am vertical, but I have two feet on the deck and my bum is off the board. At this moment, this fraction of a second, I’m surfing. But then – splash! – I’m down and out. Water shoots up my nose and my knees bounce off the seabed. The board flips over my head and its leash tugs at my ankle. A jellyfish hovers right in front of my eyes. I feel I should apologise to it for causing such a disturbance.

I stand up, fully vertically this time. I recover the board, step back from the jellyfish, blink the sea out of my eyes, and turn to see my instructor grinning. “You were standing,” yells Ricky Martin, who runs the Alive Surf School and is totally cool with jokes about la vida loca. “I’m really stoked for you!”

The scene of these first-time surfing heroics is Portrush, a charming seaside town in Northern Ireland, an easy drive or train ride from Belfast. Its amusement arcades, chip shops and souvenir stores aren’t going to blow any minds, but the location is fantastic – a mile-long peninsula jutting into the sea. You can’t walk down a street in Portrush without hitting a long, sandy beach. The Giant’s Causeway, one of the great natural wonders of Europe, is fifteen minutes’ drive away, and the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge is just down the road, too. It’s such a friendly town. The ladies at the reception of the Ramada seem more excited about my minor achievements on a surfboard than I am.

Ricky was born and raised in Portrush. He picked up the surfing bug as a teenager and represented Ireland in competitions in Portugal and Spain. He spent his twenties in Sydney and Glasgow, toiling away at office jobs, but when a childhood friend needed to sell his surf school last year, Ricky spotted an opportunity to change his life. He’s now living down the road from his parents with his partner and his four-month old baby, and he’s head-over-heels in love again with his teenage passion.

An hour and a half before the historic moment when I almost stood up, I squeeze inelegantly into a wetsuit and make my acquaintance with the board. On the safety of the sand, Ricky shows me how to avoid what surfers call ‘wipeout’, when you’re unceremoniously flung into the water. The trick, he explains, is to position your body on the centre of the board so you’re properly balanced. Catching a wave is all about timing, and when you’ve got that wave right where you want it, you need to paddle like crazy, arch your back and flex your arms, and then stand up on two feet. Practice makes perfect.

I’m nervous and at first I struggle. I fling myself onto the board and the waves crash into me, hurling me off. But with Ricky’s help and encouragement, my timing improves. The waves are getting friendlier, gracefully carrying me on their backs rather than just knocking me sideways. I’m enjoying myself.

The next day I return to the water to take things to the next level. But it’s tougher out there. The waves are coming thick and fast and I feel like a boxer taking a pummelling. Walking against the tide after each attempted surf is exhausting and my upper body strength, which I need to propel myself onto the board, is rapidly declining. I need longer to recover between each effort. I stare at the famous Barry’s amusement park on the coastal road and wonder why there’s a giant red apple next to the Big Dipper. My thoughts turn to my cosy hotel bed and the possibilities of a takeaway pizza.

After two hours in the water, we return to dry land and Ricky treats everybody in our group to an ice cream, exactly what our sea salt-splashed mouths are crying out for. I’m shattered but determined to get back in the water as soon as I’ve got my strength back. One day, I tell Ricky, I’m going to be able to stand up on that board. And I’ll stay up. I’m going to tame those waves. And I’ll do it right here in Portrush.

Published in JetAway, Aug/Sep 2010

The home restaurant phenonemon

The neighbours must find it rather odd. Every Wednesday evening since January, two dozen strangers have congregated outside a small flat on a Stoke Newington housing estate. The flat belongs to Horton Jupiter, a musician, DJ and amateur chef whose decision to open a restaurant in his front room has sparked a phenomenon. Within months, numerous home restaurants, also known as supper clubs, had popped up throughout the UK.

Using applications such as Facebook and Twitter to get the word out, these courageous cooks have dragged the restaurant industry into the social networking age. And home restaurants are, above all, social. Guests are seated at large tables, dinner party-style, and encouraged to chat to strangers. It's a world apart from a candlelit dinner for two.

Horton had no intention of being a pioneer. “"I have a book called This Diary Will Change Your Life and each week it sets you a task",” he explains. "“Week two was to start a restaurant in your front room, so I did."” He set up a Facebook group for The Secret Ingredient and devised a menu of vegetarian Japanese food. “"At first it was mainly friends, but by week six I had 24 complete strangers parading through my house, which was exciting and strange. It just exploded.”"

Mealtimes at Horton's don't always go to plan. "“It's a chaotic experience round mine,"” he cheerfully admits. "“I'm not saying to people 'come to my restaurant'. I'm saying 'come to my place to hang out with an idiot and get fed'."” The frequent delays and clumsy service add to its charm. "“Pretty much every week for six months I've forgotten to put the rice on",” he confesses. “"There are always delays, which in a proper restaurant would be unacceptable but when it's somebody's house these things don't matter. I don't worry if I spill a bit of juice in the middle of a plate. I'm not a graceful swan serving food, I'm a maniac dashing around the kitchen.”"

Horton charges £20 for six small courses and a welcome drink. It's good value, although he believes value for money has little to do with his experiment's success. “I don't think people are seeking a bargain,” he says. “I think people want a personal experience. Going round somebody's house and seeing their CD collection or their underwear on the washing line is exciting.”

Two weeks after Horton opened his living room for business, the food blogger MsMarmitelover turned her Kilburn home into The Underground Restaurant. An ambitious, experienced cook, MsMarmitelover had toyed with the idea of running a home restaurant for years, having visited similar projects in Cuba and Italy. "“I blogged about Horton, who I knew from the time we were in an anarchist samba band together, and decided I'd do it myself,"” she recalls.

While Horton sticks to his tried-and-tested (and excellent) menu, MsMarmitelover likes to make life difficult for herself. At the end of the month, she'll be creating dishes heavy on umami, the fifth flavour, and hopes to serve breast milk, although she's been having trouble sourcing it. When she celebrates Elvis' birthday in January, everything will be deep-fried. Regardless of the theme, she always offers cooked-from-scratch organic vegetarian food, home-baked bread and a welcome cocktail for £25.

Horton may have few qualms about his amateurish tendencies, but MsMarmiteLover hopes her evenings run without hitches. “"You don't want drama and conflict,"” she says. “"You want it to go perfectly. You don't want people to laugh at you and your house."” But while she's committed to good food and service, she believes it's a mistake to imitate street restaurants. “"You shouldn't be offering tables for two,"” she says. "“It's so interesting to sit at a big table and meet a selection of new people."” She also takes her role as a host far more seriously than most restaurant head chefs. “I try and make it a theatrical experience, so I always dress up. I wear lots of make-up. It's all a bit Rocky Horror.”

This summer, the floodgates burst open and dozens of home restaurants opened throughout the UK. On an average week in London, you can find Sunday brunches, afternoon teas, haute cuisine and barbecues taking place in living rooms, kitchens and gardens across the city. We've even started seeing twists on the home restaurant concept. The Rambling Restaurant combines the supper clubs' DIY ethos with the uniqueness of a flash mob. "“I like rambling around London finding interesting venues and the challenge of fitting an event to a space,”" says its co-founder Abi, who's prepared home-cooked meals in Waterloo squats, Clapton art galleries and music festivals. "“People love the unpredictability of Rambling events.”"

Home restaurants appear to operate in a legal grey area. So far none have experienced any trouble. “"The government would be foolish to clamp down on them,"” says MsMarmitelover. "“It's entrepreneurial and great for tourism. If you're coming to London and don't know any Londoners, it's a great way to see inside people's homes and meet new people."”

Horton may be a trailblazer, but he's reluctant to be the movement's figurehead. "“I find it very exciting that so much has happened and I'm incredibly proud,"” he says, “"but I don't feel I'm part of a movement. I'm just doing what I do."” It's given him a source of income, and a renewed belief he should always act upon his more outlandish ideas, although that's not necessarily a good thing. “"Some of my proceeds go to the Save the Bees campaign and I thought I should get in touch with Mr C of the Shamen and get him to re-record Ebeneezer Goode with the chorus 'Bees are good, bees are good'. He never got back to me.”"

Published in Hotline magazine. Image from quirkyguide.com

In Pursuit of Nothingness

Life moves slowly at Basata. A group of Egyptian students play cards and drink tea. A Brazilian woman practises yoga on a mat on the sand. A local builder steps away from the bamboo hut he’s been meticulously crafting and lights another cigarette. He’s in no hurry.

I’ve been somewhat less productive. I spent my first hour at Basata cross-legged on a rug, looking beyond a radiant blue sea to Saudi Arabia. The distance seems almost swimmable. Since then I’ve read two-and-a-half books, taken one medium-sized walk, eaten two huge meals and two mini-pizzas, and slept far more than is necessary. I’ve had no access to TV, the internet, newspapers or a mobile phone, and I’m on my own. The experience was at first daunting, but soon liberating.

I only stopped staring at Saudi when the sun fell behind the mountains and it become too dark to see my own fingers. With the screen on my MP3 player acting as a makeshift torch, I tiptoed across the sand to the communal area where dinner was being served. I shared a table with a Swiss mother of two, a regular visitor since the camp opened 24 years ago. Basata, she warned me, can become an addiction – she hasn’t holidayed anywhere else in years. After a fantastic meal of fried fish, spicy rice, bean stew and homemade potato chips, Basata’s founder, Sherif El-Ghamrawy, wandered over to chat.

Basata means “simplicity”. And in the 1980s, Sherif and his Swiss friend inform me, simplicity was even simpler. There were no showers, just buckets of water, and the villas at the back of the beach hadn’t been built yet. Despite such improvements, I’m assured Basata’s character hasn’t changed at all. It’s still an antidote to the mega-resorts of Sharm El-Sheikh. It’s still a place that does minimal damage to the environment. And as I was about to discover, it’s still a place where people from around the world stay up late talking in English, French and Arabic to people they’ve only just met.

The following evening, our dinner party swelled to double figures. After a fantastic vegetarian meal we talked until we got tired. At one point, a child tapped me on the shoulder, handed me a piece of cake, and told me it was his parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. I followed him inside and found Sherif and his wife quietly toasting their marriage. A small gathering of friends, family and guests stood around half a cake and a few cups of tea. It’s a party, Basata-style.

When I arrived, the softly spoken owner was there to greet me and lead me through the guests’ kitchen, past baskets of vegetables, a handmade fridge stocked with juice and water, and a bakery where cheese pastries and pizzas appeared each morning. I should help myself to whatever I needed, Sherif said, and keep a tab on a piece of paper.

While he trusts his guests, Sherif does have rules. It’s an Egyptian camp, he explained, so guests must respect the local culture. Drugs and alcohol are strictly prohibited, while topless bathing and public displays of affection are strongly discouraged. Sherif told me the story of a beautiful German actress who walked into the local mosque in her bikini. I assured him I posed no similar threat to the community.

While I adored it, Basata is not for everybody. The days can be hot and the nights can be cold, the squat toilets are primitive, and you can almost hear the flies laughing when you sit down to eat your breakfast. But it works like a dream. The five-star hotels in Sinai are splashing out on plasma TVs, iPod docking stations and heated swimming pools in their efforts to lure in “the right kind of tourist”. The irony isn’t lost on Sherif, who regularly attracts CEOs, politicians and celebrities by offering them as little as possible.

When he opened Basata in 1986, the term eco-tourism didn’t exist. He’s a pioneer, but it’s the simplest of ideas – an environmentally friendly camp inspired by the Bedouin lifestyle and culture. My accommodation for these three days has been a bamboo hut on the beach with a mattress and a few rugs.

I’ve spent much of my time lazing, daydreaming and sleeping on these rugs. The constant hissing and crashing of waves has a meditative quality. Counting stars through cracks in a bamboo ceiling is like counting sheep, only it works. On my second day at Basata, I hardly did a thing. On my third day, I did even less. I curled up on a pillow and spent the hours before my taxi arrived fully engaged in an activity I don't do nearly enough of in my everyday life – nothing.

To be published in J Magazine, April-May issue

Genre baiting

Screamo, for the uninitiated, involves a person screaming repeatedly, as if they're about to be killed or do some killing of their own, while a guitar is played as loudly and badly as possible. The other component, crunk, thoughtlessly fuses hip-hop, pitch correction software, dreadful spelling and a man with a microphone vomiting repeatedly. This deranged marriage, pop music's answer to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, resulted in Freaxxx, the debut single by American crunkcore offenders Brokencyde. The critic who argued that Freaxxx represents the fall of Western culture was being generous. Watch it on YouTube and cry.

Crunkcore may be the worst offender, but it's merely one of 50 or more unlistenable genres to have kicked, punched and spat at our fragile cochlea in recent years. Gabba, electroclash, crabcore, donk, schaffel, powerviolence, sludge metal, spazzcore, hyphy - one by one the 'next big things' in music have come, gone, and left us with nothing but tinnitus and silly haircuts.

These new genres then go on to spawn thousands of preposterous sub-genres, bacteria-like lifeforms that only exist due to an endless process of fanatical categorisation deemed necessary by people with marginally different silly haircuts so they can differentiate themselves from people who listen to guitars or keyboards being played with marginally different chord structures. This is why the dustbin of music history overspills with such faddish nonsense as handbag-trance, nu-folk, blog-house, wonky-pop and chipmunk-beat*, to shame but a few. For every half-original idea we're seeing at least 150 hyphens.

So who's to blame? Have musicians realised that everything's been done before and invented ludicrous sub-genres to cover up their lack of ideas? Have music journalists realised that writing about music is indeed like dancing about architecture and coined ridiculous terms to compensate for their lack of vocabulary? Has the rise of MP3 players, which require us to tag all tracks by genre, made us hastily manufacture new terms so our music collections appear artificially bigger when we scroll down our i-Pods? Or is it simply that young people tend to define themselves by the music they listen to, and are inventing new trends to remain ten minutes cooler than their friends?

While most attempts at genuinely new forms of music are nothing more than disposable rehashes, occasionally something original appears. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases these new breeds turn out to be sworn enemies of the human ear. In our desperation to innovate we're creating monsters. Whether it’s a dodgy remix or an illicit mash-up, or Metallica collaborating with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra - it all sounds terrible.

Every over-hyped new genre, sub-genre or sub-subgenre blends two or more pre-existing styles, which are almost always incompatible. I'm all in favour of a bit of experimentation, but just because Heston Blumenthal can make bacon and egg ice cream taste good, it doesn't mean a producer in Germany should have the right to make a Gregorian chanting version of Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven. In every murky corner of every obscure genre, incompatible sounds are inbreeding, crossbreeding and half-aborting, and tomorrow's teachers, soldiers and world leaders are injecting these malformed sounds straight into their heads. Freaxxx by Brokencyde is irrefutable proof that the madness has to end before something unthinkable happens.

It's time to take action. For the sake of our collective sanity, I propose we limit all popular music to five genres: pop, rock, jazz, classical, electronic (possibly incorporating hip-hop) and world (everything else). If there's still any doubt about the correct classification of a new piece of music, the musician has to get written permission from me first.

* I made this one up

To be published in Esquire Middle East

Six legged snacks and other dining challenges

My father is a strict vegetarian, which perhaps accounts for his displeasure when I arrived at his Bangkok home clutching a bag of deep-fried caterpillars and other assorted insects.

He demanded I dispose of them instantly. I glanced at my souvenirs from the previous night, a motley collection of wings, bodies and legs from which grease had seeped via a hole in the plastic onto my fingers, creating a vile smell, and I had to admit he had a point.

Seventeen hours earlier, at a roadside stall outside the Sukhumvit subway station, an insect dinner had seemed much more appealing. Fresh from the fryer, the creepy-crawlies had tasted like nutty popcorn. A friend and I had devoured grasshoppers and maggots with gleeful abandon. It had helped that it was too dark to properly see what we were putting in our mouths.

It was the first time I had eaten insects, but not the first time I’d eaten something most people would consider repulsive. In the name of journalistic endeavour I have slurped snake soup in Hong Kong, tucked into fish-head curry in Singapore and timidly nibbled dog meat in Vietnam.

Gulf Air’s destination cities offer numerous opportunities to indulge in culinary eccentricity. Paris offers frogs’ legs, snails and horse meat, London has a scattering of traditional cafés specialising in jellied eels and Frankfurt has blut zungenwurst, a meatloaf made of cow blood and tongue. But it is in Southeast Asia that the extreme eating stakes are raised to another level. In Shanghai there are establishments that serve plates of live shrimps which attempt to bite your fingers as you raise them to your mouth, and live baby octopus that hang on to your chopsticks for dear life (see for yourself on YouTube).

In Manila they have roasted dried chicken’s blood (served in the shape of video cassettes and called “betamax”), bull’s testicle soup and various dishes made from worms. But the star of the show, and perhaps the most nauseating and repellent dish on the planet, is balut, also known as “eggs with legs” or “treat with feet” – an egg containing an unborn duckling. Since the baby hasn’t fully developed, the bones, beak and feathers are tender and soft. In the final round of the US game show Fear Factor, the contestants’ challenge was to eat balut.

Some Filipino supermarkets in Dubai sell balut, but I have never been able to bring myself to try it. At one restaurant in the Emirate, however, I did tryikizukuri, a Japanese dish of live fish. The thing flapped furiously as we picked at it with our chopsticks, and I wondered if the other people in our group were having similar thoughts to mine: does this make us bad people?

The first thing to say in my defence is that I’m not alone. Extreme eating has become something of a fashion. Ten years ago, chef Anthony Bourdain ate iguanas, braised bats and still-beating cobra’s hearts for his book A Cook’s Tour. To write The Man Who Ate Everything, American food obsessive Jeffrey Steingarten became an avowed omnivore, a person who could live up to his book’s lofty title – although he could never bring himself to eat insects. Just as well he never visited Archipelago, then: the menu at this London restaurant includes six-legged specials such as chocolate-covered scorpions and garlic locusts. Meanwhile, the signature dish at the UK’s Fat Duck, regularly hailed as one of the world’s top restaurants, is snail porridge.

Last month, the travel guide publisher Lonely Planet released a book called Extreme Cuisine, a guide to finding “delicacies that creep, crawl, sizzle and spit”. The guide doesn’t only contain grizzly photographs of dishes such as maggot cheese (Italy), guinea pig (Peru), raw chicken (Japan) and alligator cheesecake (USA) – it also tells you where to go to eat them. Extreme eating hasn’t just become socially acceptable – it’s become mainstream.

Most extreme eaters are playing provocateur and showing off, but they are also motivated by a passion for food and a desire for new experiences. As the world becomes increasingly branded and homogenised, it seems harder to find that rare commodity we call authenticity. When we eat like cavemen, we leave the other tourists behind and become liberated from squeamish culinary prejudices.

Unfortunately, the longer my friend and I searched for scorpions and cockroaches in Bangkok, the flimsier this argument became. All the stalls selling insects were on Khao San Road and Sukhumvit, where backpackers and tourists frequented cheap bars and seedy nightclubs. As I photographed my friend snapping a grasshopper thorax between his front teeth, I caught the vendor’s seen-it-all-before stare. Were deep-fried insects only eaten by inebriates with cameras? Were we really that predictable? I wasn’t a global citizen. I was a tourist in search of a cheap thrill.

At least there was nothing inauthentic about the intestine soup we found at MBK, one of Bangkok’s busiest shopping malls. There is nothing glamorous or witty about eating thick coils of fat. We didn’t look cool eating durian, either. It’s a fruit often compared unfavourably to old socks, sewage and rotting flesh, although Thais are more likely to tell you it’s a heavenly combination of wine, cheese and almonds. It’s so smelly it’s banned in most public places, and although I’m not a fan, I felt vindicated when the stall owner told me that foreigners aren’t meant to eat it.

I also found bowlfuls of authenticity in the restaurants of Bangkok’s Chinatown. Bird’s nest soup is made from an actual bird’s nest, constructed entirely from birds’ hardened saliva. It is a downright unpleasant thing to put in one’s mouth, and is prohibitively expensive. In parts of China it is cited as a miracle cure for all manner of illness. I certainly can’t imagine anybody eats it for fun.

As I wandered through Chinatown, I saw numerous edible oddities I felt compelled to try – heads, feet, tongues and the legendary ant-egg soup, a staple of the extreme eating circuit. I returned to Chinatown in search of meat a few days later, but something was very wrong. Where I had once seen tendons I now saw tofu. It was the first day of the Vegetarian Festival, and the whole of Chinatown was meat-free.

I had a bowl of vegetarian curry and headed home, visibly distraught. My father asked me what was wrong. He laughed out loud when I told him.

Originally published in Gulf Life magazine.