Legends of the Sun Pig

What do you buy the person who already has everything? My darling Snoogums and I ask ourselves this question every year at Christmas, usually in connection with my parents. Something for the house? (They already own every conceivable kitchen appliance.) Books? CDs? (Tried that–and it turned out they already had them, so we ended up keeping them for ourselves.) Jewellery? Clothes? (Been there, done that.)

What we really wanted to get them was something unique, something unforgettable. And so we eventually our thoughts strayed into holiday territory: a weekend break somewhere. They love eating out, and they love old-fashioned country hotels, so we found them the perfect combination: an overnight stay at the Darroch Learg hotel in Ballater, Deeside, with dinner at the hotel’s award-winning restaurant.

As it turns out, my family had been asking themselves the same question about snoogums and me. (Us? Difficult to buy for? Never!) This produced an amusing scene on Christmas morning, when it was revealed that *they* had clubbed together and got us a weekend away, too. Not at Darroch Learg, though, but at our favourite restaurant, “The Plumed Horse” in Dumfriesshire. Super yum!

The Plumed Horse is another experience I have written about on Dooyoo, so I won’t go into too much detail about it here. (So here’s your “not much detail”: The Plumed Horse has just been awarded their first Michelin star, an accolade reserved for true excellence in cuisine. Their fish soup (a delicate yet intense broth, serving as the base for a tower of monkfish, sea bream, salmon, scallops, cockles, oysters and caviar) is just out of this world. My main course was roast breast of duck, layered high upon a bed of crispy noodles, and topped off with a slice of pan-seared foie gras. For dessert, we shared the grandest assortment of desserts I’ve ever seen on a single plate: their “assiette of Plumed Horse mini desserts” consisted of chocolate tart with white chocolate and orange ice cream, passion fruit brulée, apple bread and butter pudding, coffee and Tia Maria mousse topped with chocolate coffee beans, and three different sorbets (cassis, peach, and pistachio). Every course is a treat not just for the tongue, but for the eye as well. As Will Keane (played by Richard Gere) says in the film “Autumn in New York”: “Food is the only beautiful thing that truly nourishes.” Words to live and eat by, indeed.)

Anyway, back to Chipperkyle, the original purpose of this review! On our last two visits, we have stayed at the Deeside B&B just across the street from the Plumed Horse. This is a fine little B&B, run by the wonderfully friendly Mrs Cowan. Staying here means that you can enjoy a bottle of wine over dinner, and not have to worry about driving anywhere afterwards. However, Mrs Cowan is currently away on holiday in New Zealand, so we had to find an alternative.

The alternative arose in the form of Chipperkyle, recommended to us by Tony at the Plumed Horse. He said that he hadn’t been there himself, but several diners had stayed there and thought it was excellent. At £36 per person for bed & breakfast, it is a quite bit more expensive than the Deeside B&B, and it’s also about five miles’ drive away. However, it was a recommendation from someone we trust, and we decided to go with it.

We approached Chipperkyle from the direction of Kirkpatrick Durham, a tiny village about ten miles west of Dumfries. The sun was just hovering on the horizon. The snow, which had been alternately circling hawk-like and dive-bombing our car all day, decided to take another run at us. The directions we had been given told us to look out for a small white cottage with yellow window frames, after which the house should be just visible through the trees. What we didn’t know, was that the cottage is a gatehouse standing at the entry to a driveway leading up to a fabulous 18th century country mansion. I had been expecting something far less grand!

In the wounded glare of the setting sun, we approached the house with a genuine sense of awe. The hills beyond were gently dusted with snow, and massive trees formed imposing silhouettes against the rapidly whitening sky. We drew up behind the house. Just as Snoogums was snapping off a couple of photographs, Willie Dickson strode out the back door to greet us and whisk away our bag. We followed him into the house, trying not to look too much like tourists with our mouths agape.

The interior of the house matches the outside perfectly: military prints, watercolour landscapes, and oil portraits line the walls. The floors are covered with soft yet plain beige carpets, overlaid with oriental and middle-eastern rugs that you just *know* predate carpet superstores by at least a generation. The sitting room is a picture of comfortable elegance. Antique sideboards and cabinets stand at a formal parade rest around the perimeter, brandishing fine china, vases of fresh flowers, and family photographs. The large open fireplace is surrounded by sofas that beg you to sink into them with a deep “aaahh” of contentment.

Willie and Catriona Dickson are charming hosts, welcoming and chatty, but without being intrusive. We had had a fairly long drive down from Edinburgh, through blizzard conditions in parts, and all we really wanted to do was crash out on a bed and relax a bit. Better than this, though, was the option Catriona very kindly presented to us: tea and home-made biscuits, still warm from the oven, served in front of a freshly laid log fire.

After a satisfying period of lounging around, reading the papers, and gazing out at the bunnies hip-hopping about in the snow, we moved up to our bedroom to get freshened up for the evening. Chipperkyle only has two guest rooms, both of which are twins with private (but not en-suite) bathrooms, and which are in perfect harmony with the rest of the house: antique dressers and wardrobes, wrought-iron twin beds with dazzlingly white sheets and lusciously thick feather duvets and pillows…heavy drapes hanging like great cloth pendulums in front of the tall windows…perfectly aligned, vertically striped wallpaper, even though the walls themselves are far from plumb…a tiny vase of fresh snowdrops. The thought and planning that must go on to co-ordinate and maintain such a vast and intricate ensemble is astonishing. Yet the Dicksons make it seem completely effortless.

The private bathroom we had was large, with an enormous bath, a separate shower cubicle, and a bidet. (I’ve never quite got the hang of bidets.) The towels were some of the largest I have ever seen: they must have been at least six feet by four, and could easily have doubled up as wrap-around sleeping bags. Stepping into one after a warm shower was like stepping into a fuzzy burrito.

The only regret I have about staying at Chipperkyle came the following morning. Our dinner at the Plumed Horse had left us too full to indulge in a cooked breakfast. Sitting at the enormous dining room table with the Sunday papers spread out beside us, I had a small bowl of muesli, and Snoogums had some cereal. We both had a slice or two of some rich poppyseed bread Catriona had just baked, but really, anything more would have left us feeling bloated and sluggish for our drive home. It’s such a shame because apparently Catriona, in addition to baking fabulous biscuits and bread, also makes her own sausages. Next time, though, there shall be no excuse!

And there will be a next time, I’m certain. Apart from the fact that we need to stay somewhere when we go to the Plumed Horse, the welcome we received at Chipperkyle was fantastic. The house itself looks like something out of a Jane Austen costume drama. If you’ve ever fancied yourself living like a minor noble in a country mansion, looking out of your windows at acres of rolling hills and thriving farmlands, sipping fine earl grey tea, and generally feeling like the very model of elegance, then Chipperkyle is most definitely for you.

I’m clearly a bad parent. Wee baby Alex is only three months old, and already Snoogums and I have left him alone with other people on four separate occasions!

Okay, so they weren’t complete strangers. My parents have some experience of child raising, but their techniques are thirty years out of date. My brother and sister-in-law are both smart and sensible, but until Alex came along they’d never held a baby before. How could I possibly entrust the life and well being of my baby boy to these people, even for a few short hours?

What if something happened to him? What if something happened to the sitters? What if there was a fault with my mobile phone? Maybe they’re trying to call me right now, but can’t get through! Quick, where’s the nearest pay phone? No, no! We should catch that taxi straight home to make sure he’s still breathing!

Pish tosh, I say. (I also say: bear with me for a bit. I’ll get to the restaurant soon.)

Human beings are enormously resilient, even at such an early age. Both Snoogums and I take a very dim view of modern trends in paranoid parenting. We have no intention of swaddling Alex in a protective blanket until he leaves home. We are quite happy to leave him alone on the rug or in his bouncy chair nearby while we go off and surf the net, cook, or do the dishes. Sometimes we even (gasp!) let him cry himself to sleep.

Teaching him how to relate to, and behave around other people is part of this attitude. We firmly believe that if he realizes there are other people who take care of him from time to time–and just as well as mommy and daddy, I might add–he’ll grow up to be a more adaptable child.

“Flow with it,” is the motto Snoogums grew up with. To a child, it is supposed to mean that the world doesn’t always revolve around you. Most of the time, there is stuff going on, like trips to the shops, visits to family, and work around the house. You may not be interested. You may even actively dislike these activities. But they’re going to happen anyway. So you can either paddle upstream, resisting the current and causing everyone grief, or you can Flow With It. The latter course has benefits for all: your parents stay relaxed and chilled out, and you get ice cream. Or chocolate.

FISHERS BISTRO (I told you I’d get there.)

So anyway, last week was our eighth wedding anniversary! (This whole lead-up was really an attempt to explain why we felt it was quite acceptable to leave Alex for the evening, and go out and enjoy ourselves on our own again for a change.) Fishers Bistro was the name; a pleasant evening of good food, wine, and intimate conversation was the game.

Fishers is situated on the Shore in Leith, a mere couple of hundred yards away from the Scottish Office, the new Ocean Terminal shopping centre, the Royal Yacht Britannia, and dozens of trendy pubs, bars and restaurants. It is tucked into the ground floor of a 17th century signal tower, and has a pleasantly close, low-ceilinged atmosphere. Fishing nets strung across the walls lend a certain nautical theme, while Victorian prints of gentlemen fishing add a freshwater touch. The plain wooden tables, simple place settings, and a clear view over a serving counter into the small kitchen give it a relaxed, continental air.

We had booked our table for 19:30, and even though this was a Monday evening, the place was almost full already. Our waitress showed us to a nice little table in the very far corner of the room, from where we could observe everyone else. Throughout the evening we were attended to by at least three different servers, and I think I counted five hovering around in total. This seemed quite a lot for a relatively small place (I reckon the whole restaurant would seat about 35 at a push), but it did mean that there was always someone ready to take your order, or pour more wine. Although a lot of the customers were smartly dressed the staff were all casual, which contributed to the friendly and relaxed atmosphere.

Fishers is a fish and seafood restaurant. For people who have been dragged there against their will and insist on having a chunk of meat with their dinner, there was one non-seafood starter (a warm salad of pigeon breast) and main course (roast lamb chops with coriander and lemon couscous) on the menu. But really–you go to Fishers to eat fish, and they have it in abundance.

The menu changes with the daily catch, and on our night we were told they were all out of queenies. Well, shucks. I suppose I would have felt more disappointed if I’d known what queenies are. Everything else, though, sounded seriously tempting, and I had a hard time deciding what looked best. Would it be the baked fillet of sole, stuffed with cream cheese and spinach? How about the stuffed whole sea bass with chorizo sausage, mozzarella and olives? In the end I settled on a char grilled tuna fillet with a mango, red pepper and basil salsa (£5.75), followed by a fillet of grilled wild arctic char with roast pepper mash and lobster bisque (£12.50). Yum!

The tuna was charred to a deliciously smoky crust on the outside. Like a fillet of beef, a tuna steak doesn’t have to be cooked all the way through on the inside, but I felt that mine was a little underdone. I would have preferred the choice to have it closer to “medium” than “rare”. The quality of the tuna was excellent, though, with a tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture and a clean, almost freshwater taste that contrasted beautifully with the grilled crust.

The mango and pepper salsa was tasty, crisp and fresh. Taken on its own it was marvellous, but after a few bites of tuna and salsa together I started eating them in alternation. The contrast between the warm grilled flavour of the tuna and the cool fruitiness of the salsa was just too much for a single mouthful. It’s a bold combination, but too disconcerting for my palette.

The main course was the first time I had tried arctic char, and I fell in love with it immediately. The arctic char is distantly related to salmon, and like salmon its meat is dense and rich. But there is none of the oiliness you get with salmon, and in taste it is probably closer to trout than anything else. Taken with a generous dollop of creamy mashed potatoes and roast red peppers, and a smear of lobster bisque, it made a heavenly combination. If it wasn’t considered inappropriate in polite company, I would have licked the plate to sup the last of the bisque. Fortunately, though, I had saved some mopping-up bread for just this eventuality, and was saved from social embarrassment.

When it came to choosing dessert, I was torn between honeycomb ice cream in a brandy basket with chocolate sauce, and a warm chocolate and pear tart. I’d seen other diners being brought both, and both looked decadent and tempting. The chocolate and pear tart (£4.95) won, but turned out to be a disappointing choice. The pastry was too dense, the chocolate filling was too dry, and it was loaded with nuts that simply overwhelmed whatever pear flavour might have been there. The single dollop of ice cream that came with it tasted bland and supermarket-bought. What I should have had (and what Snoogums wisely selected) was the baked amaretto peaches, topped with white chocolate cream and syrup. She let me have a large bite, and it was awesome.

Overall, Fishers was a fine place to have our anniversary dinner. The atmosphere was relaxing, and the food was good. But to be honest, we could have been taking a picnic on the moon for all it would have affected our enjoyment of the evening. We’ve had a great eight years together now, and the arrival of wee baby Alex has placed us in a blissful state neither of us could have imagined possible. Our senses are heightened with happiness, and every new experience seems imbued with magic. That evening at Fishers will stay with us forever as a sparkling point of joy in the constellation of our new parenthood.

I first visited a Pizza Express in 1995. I was on a training course in Marlow, Bucks, and my car had just exploded, so I felt like I deserved a little treat for myself. (Actually, it was only the exhaust that detonated. It blew a hole in our bank balance all the same, though.) Since then, I’ve been to branches in London, Edinburgh and Perth, and every time the experience has been consistently good.

This evening, we were in Perth to pick up my mum’s car (which we’re borrowing while my parents are off on holiday), and we decided to grab a bite to eat while there. The Perth Pizza Express is, like many others, a converted bank branch. Bank branches seem to have the right kind of space that Pizza Express restaurants go for: light, bright and airy, with tall ceilings, and all the acoustic subtlety of a tube station. Wee baby Alex stayed asleep for most of the meal, but when he woke up, his yells echoed through the restaurant like a yodeling constest in the back of a Ford Transit.

The food was good, though. Between the four of us we ordered two portions of garlic bread, and a portion of dough balls with garlic butter. At £1.45, each order is fairly inexpensive, but I’ve always found the portions a little stingy. The garlic bread is a single chunk of golden brown baked pizza dough, glistening with melted garlic butter. Very tasty, but one is rarely enough. On the other hand, massive all-you-can-eat platters don’t really fit in with the restaurant’s stylish modern demeanour. On yet another hand (er…), no-one is going to stop you from ordering more than one portion.

When it comes to choosing pizza, I’m pretty unadventurous. I like pepperonis and chillies, so the American Hot (£6.70) is usually the one I go for. Pizza Express’s pizzas are about nine inches across, and are made in the traditional Italian style: a thin base, topped with a relatively plain, un-herby tomato sauce, with thin slices of mozzarella draped on top and melted in place. This way, the cheese doesn’t end up spread evenly over the surface, so you end up with more varied bites. Personally, I prefer this to American style pizzas, where the base and crust are generally thicker, and each bite tends to be more uniform.

Although the American Hot pizza is loaded with sliced green jalopeno peppers, the flavours of the tomato sauce and the mozzarella cheese still come through clearly. I think this is the main reason I like Pizza Express: the ingredients they use are clearly of a very high quality. The tomato sauce is fresh and tangy, the cheese has just the right stringy texture, and the pepperoni sausage is recognizably meaty instead of greasy and bloated with generic spices. I’m a big fan of pizza, and this one ranks very highly on my list of all time greats.

If you’re not a pizza lover, there are a small number of other items on the menu, like cannelloni, lasagne, and melanzane parmigiana. This is a bit like lasagne, but with the strips of pasta replaced by slices of aubergine. Snoogums and my mother both had this. I tried a bite, and while it wasn’t as dark, rich, greasy and overcooked as it I like it, it was sweet and tasty nevertheless.

On this occasion we didn’t have wine, but from previous visits I remember the house red and white as both being nice and slurpable. Likewise, the desserts are all fun and unobjectionably sweet (the tiramisu is particularly good, though). But the name of the restaurant really spells out what they’re best at: pizza. They have branches all over Britain, and if you fancy something a bit more adventurous and a little less bland than your local Pizza Hut, try Pizza Express instead. You won’t be disappointed.

If you’re relatively new to this whole Internet thing, you may not remember the olden days when there was no such thing as Internet Explorer. Web browsers started out as simple things (ah, good old NCSA Mosaic!), used by researchers for publishing papers and documents. Then came Netscape, and an increase in popular and recreational usage of the Web. Around 1995, Microsoft decided they wanted a piece of the pie (it was only later they decided they would like to have the whole pie), and out popped Internet Explorer.

Now, in 2001, the Internet is one of the main reasons people have a computer at home. Your web browser is now much, much more than a simple document reader: it’s your gateway to the on-line world. Chances are, it’s the first thing you start up when you switch on PC, and it’s the last thing you shut down. It’s a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a telephone, a shopping centre, a village hall. There are few people who would dispute that it’s a communications revolution.

And more likely than not, your gateway to this revolution is Internet Explorer. But why?

Two reasons. First of all, Microsoft fought a hard battle to make Internet Explorer the default browser for anyone using any form of Windows. Because most people use a Windows PC (sorry, Mac fans), and have a natural reluctance to change default options, Microsoft was going to win that battle from the start. (Although recent court actions in the US have proved this to be an illegal business tactic, this conclusion is about five years too late for it to matter.) But secondly, Internet Explorer is a very good product! It had features that people wanted, and after version 5 it was much faster at displaying web pages than Netscape was. As we all know, on the Internet speed matters.

But is there anything even better out there? For me, the answer is yes, and the product is Opera.

I say “for me,” because of the way I use the Web. My browsing habits include reading a lot of sites whose primary purpose is to serve up news, opinion or information in text format. I’m out to absorb as much information as I can, as quickly as possible. I don’t care about pretty logos or snazzy animations. Just plug me into the wire and feed me from the source!

I first tried Opera earlier this year, when I was revamping my own web site. I was trying the page designs in the various versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape. I’d just read an article about Opera, so I decided to try it out as well. After just a few hours of using version 5.11, though, I knew I had something special on my hands. So I kept on using it, and being pleasantly surprised by how good it was. And a few days later I was hooked completely. At work, I still use Internet Explorer (most of the projects I work on use IE as their sole target platform), but it seems awkward and slow now, just like Netscape did when I first switched to IE.

So here is the list of things that, in my opinion, make Opera a better product than IE (in reverse order):

5) Multiple Document Interface (MDI)

Michael Marshall Smith is the author of three novels, Only Forward, Spares and One of Us, which have assured him–in Britain, at least–the status of Hot New Author. This status is quite rightly deserved. Only Forward is a true masterpiece of modern fiction, weaving a unique blend of science fiction, psychological horror, fantasy, dark humour, and genuine literary charm. He has been a bit quiet of late, but this appears to be because he is taking more time than usual over his next book, The Straw Men. (Working title, currently due some in August 2002. Check www.michaelmarshallsmith.com for updates.)

Smith has an engaging narrative voice that draws you into his books like a snake charmer hypnotising a cobra. You’re led into a world that you know is strange, but because his characters are so convincing and sufficiently comfortable with their own reality, you go along with it, thinking, yeah, this is cool, this is interesting, and then suddenly–snap. The trapdoor shuts behind you and you can’t get out. The protagonist is on a nightmare ride, and you’re right there with him.

What you make it is Smith’s first story collection, and it brings together eighteen pieces from 1988 to 1998. The stories range from humorous (“Diet Hell”) to downright disturbing (“More Tomorrow”), with several excursions into tender and deeply touching (“The Man Who Drew Cats”, and “Always”). What they all have in common, though, is Smith’s confident narrative. Whether his protagonists are witty and urbane bachelors bemoaning their lot in life, or old men sipping their beers in their favourite bar and swapping tales of old times, they are always believable. You know these people. You see them every day. You live and go to work with them.

This is exactly what makes you uncomfortable when the world in these stories suddenly takes a turn for the worse (which it does in most cases). Rather than choosing the option of supernatural horror (although in “A Place To Stay” he does his own take on vampires), Smith stays firmly with the psychological. Inside the human mind lie terrors far more upsetting than the worst creature from the dark dimensions.

One of his recurring themes is the continual questioning of reality: has the world gone mad, or have I? As in his novels, Smith explores the possibilities of this question in several of these stories. “The Owner” and “The Fracture” follow the protagonists through their descent into insanity. In “Foreign Bodies”, like in all three of his novels, he examines his characters’ reaction to the revelation of truths so hideous they’ve kept them hidden from themselves.

Another common thread running through the stories is that of (romantic) relationships gone awry. Many of his characters have been through a psychological wringer, involving painful break-ups and the inability to find or keep hold of love. Smith’s sharp wit is at its finest when he lets his twenty-something single males rant about women, work and life in general; his tenderness and compassion shines through most when he talks about love. Here is a writer with a lot to say, and I have a lot of time to listen.

If this all seems a bit heavy and deep, well, it is. This isn’t an easy read. In places it is profoundly unsettling. The first story, “More tomorrow” built up a feeling of genuine dread in my stomach, and left me feeling shocked at its end. “Always”, the second-last story, produced a lump in my throat. It took me about a week to read through the whole collection, because I had to give some stories time to sink in before I was ready to read the next. Like strong drink, it doesn’t take much to intoxicate. Take too much too quickly, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked in the head.

There are inevitably a few weaker stories here as well. “Sorted” is blunt, and covers the same ground as “More Bitter Than Death” but with much less flair. “The Dark Land”, one of the earlier stories, is fairly perfunctory in terms of its plot, but is interesting in that it seems to lay a lot of the foundation upon which the novel One Of Us is built.

On balance, though, the good stories outnumber the bad, and the excellent outnumber the merely good. I can’t give the book anything other than a top rating, but I should warn that it will not be to everybody’s taste. To draw a somewhat inaccurate analogy, in terms of the experience it provides it is far more Blair Witch than Scream: deep discomfort rather than slash ‘n splatter. Read it and be impressed.