I really like this photo that I took in Lisbon a couple of years back, but I seem to be the only one. Still, it really sticks in my memory as an image for me. What do you think?
A recently hectic calendar has meant no time to go to the supermarket, which isn't such a bad thing as it has shown us the back of our kitchen cupboards for the first time in a while. As we chomp through the ancient stocks a few surprises have come to light. One such was Astronaut Ice Cream, given to me as a Xmas present a year or two ago, but still good till December 2010 if you believe the foil sachet. And yes, this was in the cupboard, not the freezer.
It's real ice cream, but freeze dried, so all the water has been removed. I expected to find a powder to which I'd add water for some surreally room temperature ice creamy experience, but no. Inside the feather light pack (contents: 19g) is a single slice of Neapolitan ice cream. It looks like ice cream, but it's completely dry and crisp, with the texture of a really fine, dense foam. And apparently it's "ready to eat" as is.
So I snapped off a piece (actually the block was somewhat shattered to start with) trying not to get shards of ice cream in my eye and popped it in my mouth. It's crunchy to start with, but very quickly turns to dust which immediately combines with the saliva in your mouth to become something like ice cream. However the airy texture has been lost and there's only so much saliva in your mouth, so it's denser and perhaps pastier than the real thing. That said, it tastes the part – no doubt about it. I wonder if freezing the block to start with would add to the ice-creamy experience or just make it weirder.
I can see how the weight saving and longevity of freeze-drying are handy for trips into space, but the astronaut will still need to consume the same total quantity of water so I would have thought that vacuum packed hydrated food would take up less space overall and just be outright nicer. In fact paraphrasing from Wikipedia's article although freeze-dried ice cream was developed on request, it wasn't that popular, and was only taken into space once on Apollo 7 in 1968." It was a good present though and a conversation starter.
No, this is not really a BMW.
Ever so slightly cloudy but virbantly coloured beer – like egg yolk almost.
A somewhat bitter, thirst-quenching summer brew. With the terrible summer having run out of what steam if had, that’s probably why it was a pound a bottle in Sainsburys. Hints of honey perhaps, though hard to tie down.
Very pleasant indeed – it’s a shame I’ve only just discovered it as the summer weakly waves goodbye.
I’ve got it home now, and boy is it heavy: nearly 2 stone on its own, and nearly 3 stone in the box!
My first tentative steps at playing are being guided by this page: http://www.accordionlinks.com/play.html. It’s quite gratifying to bash out a recognisable version of Merrily We Roll Along and Oh When the Saints, with quite a depth of sound.
You can’t see the bass buttons very well in this picture, but there are 120 of them in 6 rows.
Read the first and second instalments if you haven’t already.
With a renewed vigour I set out in search of a larger selection of accordions, courtesy of a dedicated shop stacked ceiling to floor with them: Accordions of London in Kilburn. The proprietor, John Leslie, is a fantastic player (he treated me to a bit of a show piece), teacher and all round accordion authority. At least that’s the way it seemed and I have no reason to doubt it!
I learnt yet more interesting things (as I am prone to doing):
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His Chinese accordions are similarly priced and look near identical to the ones I saw the day before, though John says his are better as he’s very particular with the factory about exactly how they are specced. They certainly seemed a bit nicer to play, but I’m so far from being the authority on such subtleties that I’d have to place an expensive long distance phone call in order to speak to that authority.
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His Eastern European Luciano accordions are a bit more differentiated and I understand they come from the Weltmeister factory, but again, specced to John’s exacting standards. The problem for me is that a half-decent size one of these starts at about £1000.
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I had a go on one of the properly expensive machines (one of John’s own) and it certainly felt nice and played beautifully. One thing I noted was that the more expensive the machine, the better it was at evenly putting out sound in both bass and treble at the same time. The ones I tried yesterday were terrible in that respect.
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A proper non-budget model starts at about £1200 and that’s second hand. One of the two rooms was filled with more serious models, ranging into the many thousands of pounds. And very nice (and heavy) I’m sure they were too!
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John reckoned I should get a full size model (41 keys, 120 bass) because otherwise it wouldn’t fit me properly. He advocates sitting down to play with the accordion well wedged between legs and chin. Smaller models can’t be wedged in that manner.
So, all very exciting, but it was looking like a bleak prospect for me and my limited budget. It was either that or pay £1200 for a fairly good 120 bass model, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.
John and his assistant scoured the somewhat dusty shelves and eventually found a Parrot accordion for about half that price, with the full complement of keys and buttons, 4 treble voices with 13 switches and 5 bass voices with 6 switches. And a decent pair of straps and a hard case. So, the right size and well specced! It’s a new accordion but it’s been sat on the shelf for a few years, by a Chinese manufacturer of not particularly special repute. It’s clearly not as good as most of the others in the shop, but it’s now mine!
I’d post a photo, but I’m not picking it up until later in the week after the metal strap bracket has been moved so as not to dig into my leg. All that remains now is to lug it home and learn how to play the darn thing.