Lamb

The best meal I ever ate was in the Romanesque town of Sepulveda, north of Madrid, about 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I were taking a short holiday in Spain and we had been advised by a friend to head for this place carved out of the vast limestone plateau around Valladolid, just to eat the lamb in one of the many restaurants dedicated to the consumption of this beast. He said it was worth making an effort to get there. He was right.

Sepulveda

We were on a miniscule budget and our only means of reaching Sepulveda was by bus from Madrid, where we had found a cheap hotel from which to explore the city. The bus departed once a day, early in the morning and was scheduled to arrive at Sepulveda at about 1pm. Perfect. Except, of course, the one we caught left late and got later as the journey wore on. We'd skipped breakfast and were hungry.

When the bus pulled into the main square of Sepulveda at 2.30pm we flung on our rucksacks and rushed down the steps to the old town, hoping to find a restaurant still open. Alas, most seemed dark and deserted but we pushed on the door of one that showed signs of life and put on our most winning smiles. We realised that we were very late, we explained ingratiatingly, but we had come a long way to eat lunch in Sepulveda and was there any chance...? The proprietor seemed a little nonplussed but welcomed us in and said that, of course, we were welcome, please come in. Let me take your luggage. He showed us to a table - the best in the room - by a window in the empty dining room and left us alone. Charlotte and I smiled at one another in silent triumph.

A few minutes later, other diners started to trickle in to the restaurant and it dawned on us that we had arrived early, not late. This was our first visit to Spain. There was no menu. We placed no order. After a while a waitress appeared at our table with a board on which sat a quarter of a lamb, its kidneys still attached to the ribcage. She returned moments later with a large bowl of salad, oil and vinegar, a loaf of bread, a jug of red wine and another of water. Using two spoons, she tore the lamb into pieces and departed.

By now the restaurant was full and humming with conversation. The smell of roasted lamb pervaded the room. In the kitchens were huge, wood-fired clay ovens, in which whole lambs had been cooking since dawn. Their fat had melted through the flesh until all that was left was meltingly tender, aromatic meat, falling in strips off the bones, and sheets of crispy skin. The limestone around Sepulveda supports the thinnest of vegetation, all of it adapted to resist grazing. It is therefore full of the most fantastically aromatic oils, which seemed to have been concentrated in the flesh of the lamb. We ate. No, we feasted. Fat dribbled from the corners of our mouths and we washed it down with wine. We mopped up the juices that had spilled from the lamb's collapsing corpse with bread. We drank more wine. Truly, I have never put anything more delicious in my mouth.

We had been the first to arrive and I believe we were the last to leave. For the final hour or so we picked in a desultory way at the remains of the quartered carcass, its fat now congealing on the board. Eventually we had to leave and we staggered out into the still bright sunlight of a Spanish summer evening. We could not afford a hotel. The bus for Madrid had long since departed and the next one would not leave until the morning. We had a tent and sleeping bags and we decided to find somewhere to camp.

As we left the town, heading east, we soon found ourselves walking along the banks of a small river running through woodland. We were young. We were in love. There was no-one else in sight. Quite soon we found a meadow beside the stream and made love, lying naked in the long, damp grass. I have never been a fan of al fresco sex. As with picnics on the beach, sand gets in the sandwich(es) and the execution of the act is rarely as enjoyable as the fantasy. Of this particular experience, however, I remember nothing but bliss and afterwards a feeling of mellow fulfillment.

That was a long time ago. Charlotte and I got married and later got divorced. Roast lamb remains one of my favourite things to eat. I have tried often to reproduce the flavour of those Sepulveda lambs. It can't be done. I shall have to go back, which would be a terrible mistake. While I debate the merits of returning to Sepulveda I occasionally slow roast a shoulder of lamb, sourced from the best butcher I can find. It's not the same but, damn, it still tastes very fine. Tonight I am alone and, even if I weren't, I'd be beyond incapable, after eating, of putting on a rucksack, walking five miles and fucking in a field.

Tonight's supper

Proof that astrology works

Sometimes in life it is necessary simply to admit that one was wrong. I have been dismissive of astrology in the past on the (spurious, it turns out) grounds that the constellations are more worried about the eventual heat death of the universe than human affairs. Well, I was wrong and I'm big enough to admit it.

This morning I was drinking a cup of tea. I noticed that the mug from which I was sipping bore a remarkably prescient description of me (and presumably all other Capricorns). My Mum gave me this mug when I was a child. Goodness knows what a Freudian would make of that but I'm pretty sure that I'd be banged up if I gave a similar 'gift' to one of my kids. I'm thinking of starting a support group for other talentless losers born under the sign of the goat. Contact me if you're interested in joining.

A funny thing happened on the road to perdition

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, or so it is said. Occasionally the Devil arranges sideshows, mainly involving black comedy and pathos, presumably for the amusement of fellow travelers, en route to eternity in the fires. Last week, I found myself unwittingly involved in one such vignette.

I'd had a cold, a perfectly ordinary one, from which I was swiftly recovering when Elsje, my daughter, fell ill. It was agreed that I would babysit her the following day and I duly turned up at my former home at 7.15 in the morning. For some reason (alcohol, for once, was not involved), I was feeling terrible and I warned my wife that there was a possibility I'd have to call her and ask her to relieve me. As an aside, I realise that any woman reading this will be feeling sympathy that, measured in degrees Centigrade, would make sudden immersion in liquid helium feel positively Caribbean but, hey ho, there it is.

Anyway, I was lying on the sofa, feeling even sorrier for myself than usual. Elsje was...extraordinary. She immediately recognised that an emergency was in progress and that Milly was the solution. Milly is a hot pink, fluffy cat and Elsje's absolutely inseparable friend. Milly spent about an hour stroking me and muttering (through the mouthpiece of her mistress) 'don't worry, daddy, we'll make you better'.

Milly, the sainted cat

Lying there on the sofa, with Elsje and Milly in my arms, I wished I could preserve the moment in aspic. And then, quite suddenly, I became aware of a stabbing pain in the top, right hand side of my chest. I started to sweat and my teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. Flu, I thought, shit, my defences are down and now I've got flu. Then I started to feel worse. The sweat became menopausal and the pain in my chest seemed to clench. I noticed that my breathing was shallow. Fuck, I thought, I'm having a heart attack and I'm going to die in my five-year old daughter's arms.

I retreated to bed. Elsje and Milly followed me. What would you have done? I called my wife, asked her to come home and described my symptoms. Call 999, she said. I demurred. If you don't, I will, she said. I called 999 (conversations with Corinne tend to go this way - no offense intended). Now, extreme hypochondriac that I am, I have never in my life previously dialled 999, except once from outside a pub in Chalk Farm and that was an accident, honestly (alcohol was, on that occasion, involved).

Within a minute I was following the instructions from the ultra-calm voice on the end of the phone, scrabbling through drawers looking for aspirin and absolutely convinced I was about to die. I told Elsje, as calmly as I could (blubbing like a baby) that, if daddy went to sleep, she should help herself to a drink from the fridge and wait for mummy, who was on her way. I also tried to tell her how much I love her and, oddly enough, I think she understood. When the ambulance arrived, Elsje (I worship the ground upon which she walks) went downstairs, introduced herself to the ambulance crew and showed them upstairs to the sepulchre where I was by now resignedly awaiting death.

The ambulance crew looked at me and then at one another. 'Bit of a chest infection then?', said one of them. I was hooked up to an ECG, Elsje watching, fascinated and my ticker was diagnosed as being in perfect and unreasonable good health. I'm sure that we have all had the experience of feeling like a prat but I sincerely doubt whether many of you have felt as immersed in pratishness as I did then.

Corinne came home, confirmed with the ambulance crew that no, they were not cross about being summoned to deal with a severe case of man flu and drove me to the doctor. To my great relief, he said that I looked very sick and prescribed an antibiotic, which seems to have done the trick.

There are two saints in this story, or maybe three, and one fool. The primary saint is Elsje, who came as close that day as anyone is ever likely to, to restoring my faith in humanity. Milly, her accomplice, deserves an honourable mention. The second saint is my wife, who looked after me for the next two days, despite the fact that she was suffering from a chest infection at least as bad as mine. I will leave it to you to identify the fool.

Czech nymphing

Sitting on the loo at the home of an old school friend’s parents and unable without reading material to perform the function that had brought me thence, I reached for a thoughtfully located stack of magazines. Had I been in my friend’s loo, these would likely as not have been back issues of ‘Asian Babes’ but, as I said, it was his parents’ gaff and they are fishing nuts. Thus I found myself idly reading a leading article in ‘Trout & Salmon’ on recent advances in fly-fishing techniques.

I was just on the point of concluding that this wasn’t going to be one of my longer sojourns in the bog when two words caught my eye: ‘Czech nymphing’. According to the writer, ‘nymphing’ is nothing more exotic (or erotic) than a means of catching trout using three flies designed to mimic nymphs – an aquatic, immature stage of certain insects – that sink rather than float, as conventional flies do. Apparently the technique was invented in the Czech Republic, hence the full, glorious name.

A Czech nymph

A Czech nymph

Given that fishing is a hobby almost entirely practiced by men and knowing something of the fraught relations that can exist between obsessive men and their female partners, I couldn’t help but wonder whether alternative terminology would have been safer. I mean, imagine the conversation over breakfast.

Her: ‘Darling, I thought we might go to that new Ikea today, you know the one conveniently located only 400 miles around the M25.’

Him: ‘Sorry, love, promised Dave I’d go Czech nymphing with him this morning. It’s supposed to be infallible. Might try a spot of Norwegian naiading or Belarussian bottom baiting if we don't pull them in quickly enough.’

How differently things might have turned out had this revolutionary technique been invented in an earlier era, when men could get away with that sort of thing. In the Gospel according to St John, Jesus is reported as having said to his disciples ‘Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men’. If he’d known about Czech nymphing, however, I reckon he’d have abandoned those hairy bastards in Galilee, smeared lion dung on his donkey’s ass and pointed its nose towards Prague.