Food should be fun and taken out of the hands of foodies… and chefs.
I’m writing this while eating my Swedish ‘vacuum cleaners’ or dammsugare for fika. These are named after the tube-shaped vacuum cleaners of the Fifties.
I had been given them in my godispase, or goody bag.
Clean sweep
The godispase had come courtesy of the Stena Estrid, Swedish ferry cruise company‘s http://www.stenaline.ie and www.stenaline.co.uk maiden journey between Holyhead and Dublin.
It is, in truth, the closest I will get to a vacuum cleaner but it shows the Swedes’ sense of fun.
The Swedish dammsugare
To name this sweet after a common household gadget.
And it’s good to see that the world has been watching because it’s not for nothing that Jim Henson looked to Scandinavia for his madcap Swedish Chef.
Somebody dropped a pen in front of us… had it been Victoria it would have been no trouble because she’s wearing Aer Lingus’s new rip-resistant, extra comfy cabin crew slacks.
Victoria tells me that she had a split when she bent down (it’s a regular part of the job on the cabin crew) when she was wearing the trousers of a previous airline.
Louise’s special touch
Aer Lingus http://www.aerllingus.com showcased their new uniforms yesterday at a glitzy event in Dublin.
It is the first uniform change in 22 years, but again it is designed by the Petra Pan of Irish fashion Louise Kennedy,
Behind the Madonna soundtrack and the crew putting on their vogue on the runway the most important thing is…
How comfortable the uniforms are for the staff.
And let’s be honest here lads, it’s really about how the lasses feel.
On the bridge: We’ll look after you
Of course the look is important – no self-respecting woman wants to go to work in something they don’t feel a million dollars in.
After gliding across the runway, Victoria shared with us her delight with the new uniform.
Particularly with the trousers which she said she could see herself wearing in both hot and colder climates.
There are 25 redesigned garments including those new trouser options for female with Kenmare Green.
Girl power: And there’s style and comfort
The turquoise/blue ‘Kenmare’ shade captures our national colour.
And ‘Midnight’ navy blue skirts and trousers a good choice if you’re handling food and all the other things you have to do on a flight.
The new uniforms will be rolled out by the 4,000 cabin and ground crew around the world from February 10.
They used to be brown!
It would be safe to say that the Aer Lingus uniforms have come a long way…
Since those Sybil Connolly military-style rich brown suits from 1945 – the green came in in 1948
So as they say it’s Kenmare Green for go.
Victoria, Oisin and me.. and that glass didn’t take my leg off but if it had they’d have helped out!
I’ve always found that Aer Lingus flies the flag with distinction.
And I’ve seen first-hand how the ground staff and cabin crew go about their business.
With a friendly smile while also solving any amount of problems in an unfussy and efficient manner…
I’d given up on finding my ciocolatta di calda densa after the owners of Campo de Fiori in the next town went home to Italy,
But Tomasso at Caffe Delle Stelle here in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, put a bit of colour into my grey winter’s day.
Chocolate is a gift from the gods so much so that the Incas believed it had magical spiritual powers.
So who am I to disagree?
And here are a few of my favourite hot chocolate dens.
The Caffe Pedrocchi, Padovahttps://www.caffepedrocchi.itVenice has its St Mark’s Square and Rialto Bridge and its masses but there’s a quieter, hidden Veneto city.
Where Giotto’s handiwork inspired Michelangelo and you can find St Anthony’s tongue!
This grande cafe dates back a hundred years and hits the right note between posh and prego.
The Old Chocolate Shop, Bruges, Belgium: I can’t recall Colin Farrell sipping hot chocolate here in the cult movie In Bruges.
But he would have been more chilled if he had.
This canal city is famous for its choccies but don’t press your noses up against the windows… come in.
The Old Chocolate Shop https://www.oldchocolatehouse.be looks straight out of a nursery rhyme… and you should deffo try the gingerbread and truffles too.
That is after sampling the bacon-flavoured chocolate in their tasting kitchen. We left with a hamper. And you know what I think of New York but here’s a reminder… Old New York: Hamilton
The Cafe Savoy, Prague: Everyone raves about Vienna, and it’s not to be missed.
But cafe society permeated throughout the whole of the old Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire.
Its Savoy Hot Chocolate which uses hot milk hails from the Dominican Republic; the Savoy dessert hot chocolate is made of Valrhona chocolate and hot chocolate.
It is served with whipped milk and you can add it to the cup to melt with the chocolate.
Hot chocolate is one of life’s little gifts to yourself.
Barcelona for hot chocolate
It can be drunk in hot and cold weather despite what my waitresss Mardy Maria thought as we lunched inside from the 30C Barcelona heat… Surfing the seas in Barcelona
My Catalan isn’t that great but her hand gestures suggested f****** eeji or something like that.
Tell me where your fave hot chocolate is and I’ll share the love.
A little big woman: Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi
Sometimes it’s the design that catches you and stops you in your tracks.
And so it is with this remarkable little woman,
The President of the USA, Lydon Baines, Johnson took extraordinary measures in stopping her saying her piece at the Democratic Convention by having television change its schedule.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s life was extraordinary, born into a sharecropping family and picking cotton from the age of six, she was later forced out of her home, threatened with her very life and beaten.
All because she wanted to sign on on the voting register.
She summed up her struggle in the Civil Rights Movement thus, and of course nobody could say it better: ‘I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.’
Us journalists like to think of ourselves as hard-bitten but I had to choke back the tears walking through the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam…. http://www.annefrank.org.
The audio narrative dwelt on a passage in her diary where she mentions that she wants to become a journalist when she’s older.
And what a journalist she would have been… ethical (yes, some of us are), prying and fearless.
Amsterdam is one of the world’s great cities and Anne one of history’s greatest figures… http://www.iamsterdam.com.
Statues should be provocative and the Czechs have this one down to a T.
‘Piss’ is the good people of Prague’s commentary on the politicians who have urinated all over their country.
You’ll not see it here but once the water gets flowing they pee all over the map of the country.
The Czechs as well as being the world’s biggest lager drinkers, per population, with some of the world’s best beers, are wonderfully anti-establishmentarian.
There are statues to musical giants all over the world but while former Thin Lizzy lead singer Phil Lynott isn’t the best or most famous singer of them all, try telling that to Dubliners.
It is a tradition now for visitors to Dublin to have their photo taken outside Philo’s statue off the main Grafton Street shopping thoroughfare.
That other statue, the Tart with the Cart, Molly Malone? Well you can leave that to the uninitiated.
He’s obviously not the only Horatio or the biggest, and as I’ve alluded to already some not too far from here even blew him up.
But he was a survivor, except when he was killed obvs, and he lost an eye and an arm.
Death might even have been a better gig too as he was transported home in a vat of rum… a good way to go and one that the Bajans would have approved of.
Until, of course, his old shipmates drilled a hole in the vat and drunk the rum!
Statues are a controversial subject but my Bajan hosts were keen to tell me that Nelson was part of their story too.
And so ignore the white liberals who like to speak for black people, they’re glad to have him keeping his one eye open on what’s going on in Bim.
Martin Luther stood as a defiant symbol of Dresdeners refusal to see their city disappear after the Allies’ firebombing at the end of the Second World War.
The Dresdeners rebuilt the obliterated Frauenkirche sixty years later, after they had got rid of the Communists, using as the plans photographs they had asked the public to send in from their weddings.
Dresden was known as the Florence of the Elbe and it is one of the great architectural stories of our age, or any age, to see how the Dresdeners have rebuilt their city to the same grandeur of its renaissance days.
Yes, the Little Mermaid is more visited, but personally I prefer the top-hatted Hans in the heart of Copenhagen.
Hans was an eccentric all right and once decamped on Charles Dickens, walked around the house in the starkers, and made it difficult for Charlie to show him the door.
Nelson Mandela Voting Line, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
March to Freedom: In Port Elizabeth
Statues shouldn’t just stand there. No, really. And this is a moving symbolic Voting Line which sums up South African democracy.
This is our host Sisseko and beside him a kid as he would have been back in 1995 when South Africa had its historic vote.
It is also immersive and you don’t have to climb up a plinth to get next to it as they do in Glasgow when they put police cones on the Duke of Wellington.
It is the way I should imagine that Nelson, a native of the Eastern Cape, would have wanted it.
And you’ll be able to roll up at the bar and then into the pool which I might just have tried out.
Celebrity spotting is an everyday pastime in SoCal, Southern California.
And I was fortunate enough to see and meet a host of them at the American Travel Fair www.ipw.com which was being hosted by Anaheim www.visitanaheim.org.
Natasha Bedingfield, Jason Derulo, the Beach Boys, Snoop Dogg…
The biggest stars for me though in La La Land are the living legends, those who will never die.
Such as Marilyn Monroe who still parades the Walk of Fame near her star and hand prints…
Lying with Marilyn
I spent a weekend with Marilyn: in Venice Beach and at her last resting place in LA where a very unwelcome neighbour moved in.
