Rate Tired

Every day for three weeks, I've been sitting here in front of the computer into the wee hours trying to pull everything together for the launch of the business. It's hard graft! No wonder there's no so many entrepreneurs about these days. I'd kill for a glass of wine and a night in front of the telly watching Inspector Barnaby in Midsommer or some other mindless drudge.

Onwards and Upwards...

Nuff Said!

I don't normally write about work, but seeing as I am about the only person who isn't writing about the British Council at the moment, I'd thought I'd better say something. Here it is, courtesy of the FT!

Ready... Teddy... Go!

Only a couple of weeks now before lift off! Scary stuff. Lots and lots to do. No time for sleep. But I've got a feeling it's going to be good. Very good! Who want's a Teddy? Get in touch if you do.

http://www.wheresmyteddy.com/

Some Minor Thought Excretions

Fall. I like that word. Much better than Autumn. Right now, the garden is littered in fall. Last week, I caught a deer on film in the garden eating leaves, which got the kids excited. This morning however the sky had fallen on our heads. All a bit Larkin for me - The sky is as white as clay, with no sun, work has to be done. And yes, it would have been utterly miserable if that was the case, but fact is I am now on holiday, so couldn't care less. After dropping the kids off at school, it was back a'bed. I made a passing effort to read Jenkin's biography of Churchill, but the sheer weight of it made my arms ache and my eyes heavy. I slept until lunch, when I had beans on toast. Spent the afternoon designing a beer label (see attached) for me and my mate's brewing company, Mid-Life Crisis Ales. The beer will be bottled this Saturday and therefore ready for Christmas. Hopefully this time around it will be drinkable. Did some work on Where's My Teddy, which is an uphill struggle at the moment as my business Partner RD is in the Fjord's of Norway and up to his eyeballs in his new job and it's hard work alone. Read extracts from Elliot's Wasteland, "I will show you fear in a handfull of dust". Cool. Listened to Radiohead's new album which is awesome. And they've totally redefined the record industry paradigm to boot. Excellent. Back a'bed!

Working on Teddy Today

Today I am working with richard on Where's My Teddy

Airports are the Coalmines of the Travelling Class

As a kid, I had a fairly narrow escape. In the eighties, Thatcher had the wisdom to close the local pits, and thereby closed off a career path which I might otherwise have fallen into. If I'd been born only ten years earlier, it could well have been a different story. But I wasn't, so at the time I thought I had escaped a fairly horrible fate. Life, I thought, held possibilities. How little I knew! Instead of working down'pit several hours a day, I now spend most of my working life killing time in airports. I skipped the coalface, but I still need to get into lifts and climb onto travellators to get to work, and instead of coal dust there's diesel fumes. It's the same games with different names.

Over the past couple of years, I have grown to hate airports with a passion. (I'm penning this from the airport lounge at Stockholm International, while I'm waiting - yet again - for a delayed flight to Warsaw). There was a time for me when airports had a little personality, and they held the excitement and anticipation of travel to some exotic destination, usually with a holiday in mind (it was rarely, if ever, I travelled with my job back then). Now the reverse is true. In fact it is so bad that when it came to booking the upcoming holiday to Italy, I did everything I could to avoid traveling by plane. Airports are now synonymous with queues, bad humours, heat, random and often savage security measures, tedium, more queues, and non-informative information announcements. And they all look the same too. On more than one occasion now, between connecting flights, I've stepped off of a plane and had that panic attack that signals that I do not only not know what airport I'm at, but I don't even know what country I am in. J.G. Ballard once called airports "instant communities". That's only partly true these days - now they are more like beachheads at the end of civilisation, where we can witness at first hand how the attrition of modern life is slowly rubbing out the human soul. Why? Because nowadays airports are always the first to respond to the front line dangers of how we live now, so the crap that currently happens at airports is a warning shot from the future that lies ahead of us all. God help us!

Only another two more hours to go. The Duty Free shop is closing and the cleaners are mowing the concrete. Why is that man holding a dead parrot?

... zzzzzzz

Summertime!!!

Summer at last. The sun is out in Sweden and people are already building up for the holidays. And yes, I admit it, I'm already singing the Will Smith song, damn it. Before you know it, it will be Midsummer and crowds of Swedes will be dancing round maypoles doing bunny impressions while my British friends get bogged down in the Glastonbury mud. Magic. Plus it will be time to open my pub for the fifth season (see right for last summer). I can't wait. But before that it's the family Taylor trip to Italy and Legoland next week. Hurrah! Boats, Cars, Planes, and Trains. But in typical Taylor fashion, my perfectly formed plans to get my car down to Italy in order to buy booze has gone awry. Today, the Swedish case for stopping the import over the Internet of wine and spirits was thrown out by the EU court. While this is great news, it more or less renders my hard work in getting the car down there pointless. All of Italy's wine's are in principle now only a click away. Now I have to drive a car thousands of miles instead of merely clicking items into a virtual basket. Buggeration. Still, it will at least spell the beginning of the end of the Swedish alcohol monopoly, which is as as good a reason for enjoying a bottle of Champagne if ever there was one. Cheers!

Rube Goldberg Machines?

Don't try this at home... Find out what this all means here.

Swedish Football

They do it diferntly in Sweden. Never seen a goal like it in my life.

It's been a bit quiet of late. Bodil is on some military course out in the archipelago (don't ask), and I'm alone with the kids for yet another week. Missed out on a visit to Odessa, but I'm now going to Warsaw. Working on "Where's My Teddy", and we are starting to get excited (see right). It could be loads of fun and make money, or loads of fun and a total financial disaster. We'll see. Daytime punctuated by Sammy having a massive nosebleed after colliding with Alice on the trampoline. Haven't seen that much blood come out of anyone in ages. The garden looks like the scene of a particularly brutal boxing match.

Charmed, I'm Sure!

Vespa or Lambretta?

Stayed up way too late yesterday watching Quadrophenia, even if today was a bank holiday in Sweden (I now have an insatiable itch to buy a moped, plus Parka and a tailored Italian Suit). By 7.30 this morning I'm already up and about waiting for the neighbour to knock on the door, signalling the start of our 5K run. I feel surprisingly perky to say I finished off a bottle of wine by myself only a few hours earlier. At 8.30 I run to the bank to pay off the builder who has re-built a wall for us and at 9.00 I drive Samuel to football and watch his team crush the opposition 2-0 (a fact about which I get absurdly excited, hopping about on the touch line like it's made of hot coals). By 10.00 I'm home and I feel like I've already done a full day's work. But no. It's off into the garden my son to digg up the patio. What joys! This takes the best part of the day, give or take the snooze I squeeze in after lunch. I'm now feeling physically wrecked and tired, with the back of a 90-year old. If it wasn't for the Alsace Riesling currently lubricating my inner parts, I'd be as stiff as a board.

Hysterical Hypochondriacalisms

Not a great start to the day. The NHS Direct self-diagnostic website results prove my worst fears - that the bout of fever I had two days ago can be nothing less than - wait for it - life-threatening blood poisoning! Bodil looks on incredulous as I explain my latest medical findings. Wisely she decides to leave me to my own hysteria to do some gardening. Undeterred I make the dash across town to the emergency ward, where I am seen by a nurse and treated with what can only be described as disdain. It is not, would you believe, blood poisoning. I am in fact nothing short of 100% fit. My fever was merely a normal reaction to coming off the penicillin I've been taking for my infected wisdom tooth. I return home feeling both ridiculous and relieved at the same time. Bodil gives me a "there there" pat on the head, and puts me to work planting grass in the garden. In the afternoon Alice has a friend over to play. Normality is finally restored in the evening, when we play the Mr Men version of Snakes and Ladders, and I lose.

Turning Japanese

Today we paid a small fortune to do little more than fall asleep in style. But I have to say it was worth it. A day out at yasuragi while the kids are away with friends. Bodil and I get about a week's worth of rest in a single day. Fabulous. And I learn how to bath Japanese style whilst sitting down too. Hot tubs outside in the April sunshine, and a fifty minute massage put me to sleep for most of the day. Bit freaky though being in a place where everyone has the same togs - felt a bit like a mix between a wealthy retirement home and a mystic cult. Maybe if we'd stayed a bit longer we would have been invited to a mass wedding. Who knows?

The Yogurt Incident

Alice has a breakdown in the shop over yogurt. I'm forced to temporarily abandon my after work shopping expedition to carry a screaming child outside, past what feels like hundreds of disapproving eyes. Back at the car Alice is inconsolable, and very angry. It takes more than half an hour before we're friends again. The lack of newly foraged food causes us to raid what is a very bare freezer. It's only my second day and Alice is clearly winning 2-0. I consider it a small victory however that I didn't give in and buy the yogurt which I know she never eats, even at the price of having to eat an old frozen sausage with macaroni. But its exhausting. I've just spent two hours tiding the house and picking up a smashed plate covered in ketchup which splashed up the walls (thanks Alice). Tired? Right now I could lay some zeds for Britain.

Flat Pack Houses

Monday. It's a Bank Holiday so a nice, easy start to the day. Drop Bodil off at Arlanda Express for her trip to Vietnam. Meet up with P and family for a look around HusExpo, where I promptly loose Alice in the maze of houses (at this point Bodil has been away for all of 2 hours!). Not a great start to my "flying solo" week with the kids. Manage to find a flat-pack house I like though called x-house. The blurb says that, "if you can build Lego, you can build this". I'm expecting to sit back and watch Sammy do the work. Hopefully though we'll get something like this to replace the country house, which is feeling increasingly small as the kids get bigger. Watch Prime Suspect on TV and read up on Russia and Belarus for my trip next week.

Easter Witch

A relaxing Easter break for the Family Taylor down at the country house. Alice dressed up as a "påskkärring" (Easter Witch) and went around the neighbours houses with Sammy leaving picture cards and collecting candy. Manage a few 5K runs in the woods to burn off a little fat. Fit a new hand pump in the pub that was recently donated by the Embassy bar (pity there's no beer barrel as yet on the other end though). I'm thinking about doing a huge brew for the summer to keep us all in real ale during the dry months July and August. We'll see. Anyone got a spare beer barrel?

Super Tuscans

28 March 2007

Ordinarily Systembolaget isn't up to much, but it can at least organise a decent wine tasting. Last Wednesday was my first visit to one of their regular shindigs, and I have to say I was impressed. The theme was none other than Super Tuscans - which i thought would be perfect preparation for the family Taylor trip to Italy in June. I wasn't disappointed.

Our host was a fairly young and extremely competent dude, who introduced his subject with an ease that spoke volumes about his experience of tasting Italian wines. We were to taste two flights of wine, all blind, and all classified as Super Tuscans. We began with three wines from the same producer. Always one to put my foot in it, I began by proclaiming that the third of these had a more pronounced Sangiovese nose than the previous two - only to find to my shame that it had in fact the least amount of this grape varietal of the entire flight. Oh hum! I guess Stephen Spurrier's place at Decanter isn't under threat just yet... But this revelation threw me into a conundrum. I'd said this about Sangiovese because the third wine had the most "Italian nose" of the three (this at least all of us were in agreement with), but if it wasn't the Sangiovese that was doing that, what was it? It can't have been the grapes (which were more Bordeaux in style than Italian), so what was it then? Frustratingly, the answer is still out there somewhere, but I for one have no idea where it is...

The second flight upped the ante a little, and turned out to be a tour de force of some of the best Italian wines around. Despite this, I came away a little confused by some of these. The best weren't in the class of some of the better Bordeaux wines I have tasted at home - despite being in some cases about five times the price! So in that sense I was a little put off. Then again I did come away with more of a feel about what new Italian wine is all about. Not all of it was to my taste (or wallet!), but it was definitely an enjoyable experience. Check out the wines below. Oh, and if you get the chance, book yourself on one of Systembolaget's upcoming events before it's too late. Cheers!


First Flight (all from Mazzei)

Bronzone 2004. 100% Sangiovese. Dark cherry red; roasted, fruity vanilla nose; warm in the mouth with a good level of acidity, toasted oak and vanilla, fruity with good length; pretty good! 7.5

Serrata 2004. 65% Sangiovese, 30% Cabernet Sauvignon, 5% Merlot; Dark cherry red; a more roasted nose than the Bronzone; taste smoother and more rounded, less vanilla, more berries; good to very good! 8.0

Belgvardo 2003. 70% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Sangiovese, 10% Merlot; same dark cherry red; a very "Italian" nose (but clearly not related to the Sangiovese element!); rough tannins (needs more time?), shorter on length and less balanced with lower acidity; good; 7.0 (but most expensive of the three!)

Second Flight

Gaja Ca' Marcanda Magari 2003. 50% Merlot, 25% Cabernet Sauvignon, 25% Cabernet Franc. Medium dark red; very big, perfumy nose, flowery rather than elegant; nice and rounded taste, fruity, light and balanced acidity; easy, good drinking! 8.5 (Others in the group called this "too nice" and "characterless" - they were wrong, but worth the asking price? No way!)

Le Stanze del Poliziano 2003. 10% Sangiovese, 70% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Merlot; Dark cherry red; slightly sharp and greenish nose (still too young?); still fairly tough tannins, long legs, Pretty good but needs time? 8.0 http://www.carlettipoliziano.com/

Antinori Solaia 2000. 75% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Sangiovese, 5% Cabernet Franc. Dark cherry red; pungent and fairly flat nose; nice and rounded taste, smooth, noticeably "old" taste, woody; very good. 8.5 http://www.antinori.it/ Wine of the night, but only just.

Le Macchiole Messorio. 100% Merlot. Brickish red with lots of debris (high sediment, almost soup!); burned, spicy, peppery nose, complex and rich, but too "brown"; not as exciting a taste as it should be, fairly flat and tired; this one was not for me! Supposedly one of the most Petrus like wines in Italy, and not far off in price either! 100 GBP a bottle and upwards. 7.0 http://www.lemacchiole.it/

Blogback

I took March off. Too much going on. But now the Blog is back!

Album of the Month: March 2007

Monotony is Underrated

I was once discussing music with my old Kiwi pal Johnny Bitburger in some nondescript “piano bar” in London. We were on the subject of electronica. As a graduate of Classical Music, Johnny was passionate about the role of monotony. It was, he thought, an underrated skill. It takes a good musician to master the form, building multiple layers of music with small shifts of focus on a sparse canvass. Most fail badly, ending up with something which is simply dull and tedious; other’s try and put too much into it, ending up with a wall of ear-aching cacophony (most trance I’ve heard would fall into one of these categories). But done well and monotony can be a mesmerising, almost transcendental musical experience. And this is exactly where the latest Swedish electronica hotshots Studio sit. Even at an early age, they have mastered the art of restraint and monotony to perfection.

A lot of the sound of Studio’s debut album Yearbook 1 reminds me of Happy Monday’s remix land - a great “baggy” sound that goes round and round in wonderfully sustaining loops and beats. There’s a good dash of Balearic in here too (references to “Solid Good Times” and “Beach Life” abound), and some bass lines shamelessly nicked from Peter Hook. Throw in a little reggae guitar, some retro VIC-20/A-Ha synth effects, and some (yet again) Duran Duran moments (what is it with that just now?) and you’ll get the general idea. The lead-singer (if you can call him that – he only shows up for two out of the ten tracks) has the same intonation as Shaun Ryder, but without the edge of menace. All the tracks have short, abstract titles, and in general last for anything between five to fifteen minutes. It’s the kind of music that I want to play at my (wholly imaginary) pool party this summer late at night. Apparently these songs have been around for a while on various limited edition 12 inches, which, of course, haven't even remotely registered on my aging radar. However they’ve now put a whole year's releases onto a CD album thingy for old fogeys like me and you to enjoy. If you liked the old "Madchester" scene – and I did – then you should get a copy of Studio's album immediately. If you do you’ll have what must be one of the year’s albums on your hands already – and it’s only March (well, almost)! 8/10

Recommended Wine: Yearbook 1 is definitely late-night, Mediterranean beach style summer music. Music this cool needs a cool wine to go with it, so I'm going for a fruity and fun number, in this case a California McManis Viognier from 2005.