wineBarre

Restaurant: 15 rue de College, Beaune

Hmmm. This is an odd one. Marie from La Regalade, a sort of biker's hangout near the edge of town, has opened in a small palace, very chi chi and nicely decorated on the rocade opposite the Hotel des Cedres. The leitmotiv of the Regalade was big, and with good fish. This is carried over to a certain extent, especially the big part, and you can't call the food any more sophisticated, though you could call it a lot more expensive. Service at Regalade was in my experience limited, and in the new palace it isn't much better.

Now, it seems to me that if you set up in an expensive looking place with top dollar prices, you might, even on a quiet Tuesday night when the wine trade is in town, make more of an effort with staffing and possibly even trying to anticipate the needs of customers. We had coats. We wanted water. We would have liked a menu. None of this was forthcoming. Food was decent but very expensive and there's no value here.

Restaurant Caves Madeleine, Beaune

This has been a target place to eat for a while. We have a bit of a routine in Beaune and Monday is normally Ma Cuisine night. Caves Madeleine's schtick is to sell wine at retail with a €6 corkage charge to drink in the restaurant. Food is good, especially the Blanquette de Veau I had, but slightly expensive at €20 for that dish. All starters were around €12. We drank well of 1999 Leflaive Clavoillons and 2008 d'Angerville Volnay. But apart from the wine, the main entertainment was the company. Down one side of the room are the wine bins from which you make your choice. Parallel with that runs a long, communal table. We were seated in the centre of it. On one side of us was a party of English speaking Asians on a wine trip with a French courtier/tour guide who was obviously taken with the very pretty girl opposite. He was next to me and I could see what he meant. I believe his luck was in. But it was to my left where the real interest lay. At the end of the table were a couple of young Germans, one a judge. Later, next to them came a pair of older American ladies who had been friends for 61 years, but never travelled together. Finally, filling the gap, arrived almost together an older man, I thought French, slightly eccentric, hummed to himself, did not eat the amount I thought his stomach suggested but seemed happy. A young American man sat next to me with his laptop. He was engaged in conversation by the ladies and to me, a cynic who has been listening to the Ripley stories on Radio 4, to be working the older ladies like a pro. His spouse had died young - he was only 35, he was an artist - a tenor, and everyone knows you can't trust a tenor - and anyway, genuine or not, whether the Frenchman on my right got his girl or not it was a highly entertaining evening.

Restaurant La Cadole, Givry

A new one for us. Found on the internet, the first revelation was that they answered an email and booked us in. It's a simple place with congenial hostess and staff. Food is local, wine limited but inexpensive, but with some older wine to try for relatively little outlay. We ate simple but very well and the atmosphere was jolly. Recommended if you are in the Chalonnaise. Open on Mondays too, which is a bonus.

Restaurant le Benaton

One of my favourite restaurants anywhere, this is a French establishment strongly informed by a Japanese ethic and aesthetic. Now that I've been multiple times, this was a chance to revisit some old favourite dishes without feeling guilty about trying new things. So to start a version of duck foie gras with the thinnest piece of toast you'll ever see and be able to eat. To follow half a pigeon, the breat simply roasted, the thigh intensified in a ball of crunchy breadcrumbs, some of the trademark 1% potato, 93% butter and 6% parmesan (all figures estimates). There were some terrific amuse bouches, not least a ball containing truffle oil amongst other things - no notes taken. The staff are great and the ambience relaxed and focussed on food and pleasure. If I were to quibble it would be about a slight lack of detailing in the preparation of the pigeon, but minor stuff and I can't think the bosses were in last night. Still an event and a repeat much anticipated.

Lucinda Childs: dance at its purest

I had absolutely no idea from Dance Umbrella's publicity what to expect from this work and, it seems most of its potential audience was in the same boat as the Barbican theatre was barely half full. Though that did mean we got a considerable upgrade to row C of the stalls - hurrah and thank you!

The piece is about an hour long set in a black box with a gauze front. There are three movements set to Philip Glass. Both the movement and the music are intense and of course repetitive. Projections of an older performance are set onto the gauze at times with the dancers and in time with them, while at other times in place of the dancers. The movement is extraordinary. Pairs of dancers sweep across the stage, straight-backed with a fluid movement of long travel with quick turns and straight limbs. Pair after pair give a mesmerising effect of perpetual motion, driving forward. Both the dance and music reminded me of an Escher etching with endless patterns and rhythm.

The second movement is a solo with more fluid limbs, but just as mesmerising. The dancers all have a lightness of movement and an ability to float across the stage and are obviously incredible fit. The gauze isolates them a little from the audience and their horizontal gaze and repetitive movement could make them un-human or superhuman but their personalities override that. One interesting facet of the show is that the continuous and loudly insistent music completely blots out any sound of breathing.

The third movement is back to pairs and another subtle change to the movement. Each twenty minute segment passes very quickly. The piece is exciting and energising and acted on my mind as a kind of massage, washing away the tiredness of a long week and in that way reminded me of Gilles Jobin's Braindance. This piece is a gem, deserves a bigger audience and has been another undersold highlight of the 2011 Dance Umbrella festival.

No Balls

Not a comment on some alleged cricket scandal, but more seriously on the 2010 Place Prize sponsored by Bloomberg. Ok, I've only seen 8 of the 16 pieces so far, but if there is a theme emerging, it must be, er, um, politeness. Sorry. All the pieces seem to me to be apologising for themselves. Self deprecation is a great thing, but not in art. Shyness can be attractive, but not in performance.

Do you remember previous Place Prizes? Even the longlisters were balls-out attacks on the audience and the judges and those selected for the theatre had a wider compass than what I've seen yet this year. Everyone from Bonachela to Schechter to Butcher laid down a challenge. This year, I'm afraid I've seen the academic piece, the workshop piece, the almost finished piece and a piece so unformed and completely unedited that I really wished I had taken advantage of the Place Prize plastic tumbler concession and brought in a very large scotch.

I have seen some great dancers. Two of the outstanding performers this year have been Chris Evans and Lise Manevits. 

What I haven't seen is anything cutting edge, anything not derivative, any attempt at a distinctive language. And a lot of the choreographers I respect; they have produced work in the past that I found uncomfortable, provocative or just beautiful. At a time of impending bloodshed in arts funding I expected some anger, some emotion, some outpouring of grief, perhaps. I do have the chance to see another four pieces. I hope I'm not still

Sorry.

The closer shave

For years I hated shaving so much I grew a beard. No one taught me how to shave and it wasn't until I ran across the King of Shaves oils and later gels - about eight years ago I think - that shaving became, if not a pleasure, at least efficient and not a cause of pain. They came with shaving tips too, which greatly reduced shaving rash and discomfort. When Will King introduced the King of Shaves Azor I bought one, and he was kind enough to send me another. The price of the handle is very cheap really, compared to the Gillettes I previously used as are the blades, and the blades last a lot longer. And they shave well and comfortably. But the handle/whole system always felt a bit flimsy. Not as in poorly made or glued together, just slightly insubstantial, a featherweight.

Yesterday I got a new Azor M from Boots, a day early apparently but the display was nearly empty so I wasn't the only one. This feels, and according to my inadequate kitchen scales is over twice as heavy as the old Azor, is grippier and slightly shorter, but with more business around the hinge area.

The Azor M is above. The other main difference is the skin tensioning pad, which is more than twice a large as the old one and the blades are new too. As a package the new Azor M feels much more secure in use, especially in the crucial early morning period when doubt and uncertainty cloud the day and control of one's razor handle is not unimportant. 

That isn't the significant part of using the new M. That is, that the sensation of shaving has disppeared, almost completely. Bizarre. I thought the old Azor was pretty good, especially when the blade cartridge had been in use for more than a week, which is when I really noticed the improvement over Gillette's incredibly expensive offerings.

 With the Azor M there is now no scraping at all. For the first time a razor blade really glides over the skin. The difference is extraordinary and very real. My right cheek is very content and the left is now feeling slightly hard done by as it was the control using the old Azor with a fresh blade.

Very well done to Will King's designers and King of Shaves. If they keep this up, I'll soon have no excuse for not shaving at weekends.

My iphone is a wonderful thing. Ok, it has an inadequate camera, but great apps to buy that conceal the inadequacy of Apple's software coding. The ipod music system doesn't have the sound quality of my Cowon, but at least iTunes manages to install whole albums that aren't interspersed with Italian lessons.
The wifi finds it difficult to pick up sources that other devices find trouble free, but when you can connect to a network - and yes I have rebooted it multiple times - then the speed of updating apps is wonderful. Though it would be nice if Apple was able to manage those apps in a rather more timely fashion. We all know that apps are updated on an almost daily basis and then get stuck in a bottleneck of Apple's inadequate resources. But Apps are wonderful. They are fun. They can be very useful. They add value to my extremely expensive device. And they will make it bloody hard to ditch the iPhone at the end of the contract.
Obviously I realise that in buying an iPhone - albeit on extended credit from O2 - is a long term purchase, an investment of sorts, that I am buying in to Apple's walled garden business model. I have volunteered to walk into the cage. I know it took their engineers years to invent the idea of cut and paste and apply it to the iPhone, and I am duly grateful, for the iPhone is a wonderful thing. Even when I can't get a signal for the phone part of the iPhone in the kitchen.
Of course I would like to be able to back up my information. If digital information isn't in at least three places, then it doesn't exist. I store my working documents on four different machines as well as up in the cloud. Emails are backed up from internet to machine too. But there is no meaningful backup for my iPhone, for it is a wonderful device that, as an Apple product attracts the highest margins in the business and so there is no money to resource the kind of basic abilities that I was using on my Nokias more than three years ago. Basic phone settings, even text messages were backed up and transferred from one phone to another. But on an iPhone? No chance sunshine. For example.
Over the weekend just passed my phone informed me of an update to the operating system 3.1.3. Do Apple engineers test these things? It didn't install. It crashed iTunes. It crashed the computer when I rebooted it with the iPhone plugged in. Finally I got it going at work this afternoon. All meaningful settings are gone, and I don't mean the apps, which at least installed, but the texts. I ask you, what could be more fundamental to the use of a mobile these days than the texts?
So I'm a bit disappointed with my wonderful smartphone today. Apple, please allow me to backup my data.

A happy customer speaks out. I wrote an email yesterday extolling the virtues of 2008 Chateauneuf-du-Pape. amongst the responses was this:
'I Discrimination against you, reject you and the elitist thread that runs through your promotions, this is not waste but hygene. You are wothless filth.' (sic)
I look on the positive side. At least he started reading it.

Working for a very small wine company means, among other things a torrent of communications requesting, more or less politely, bottles or even cases of wine for fundraising raffles. Now I have no objection to giving wine or money, or even my time on occasion, for charity. But when very wealthy lawyers, accountants and bankers want this, they are expecting us impoverished retailers to fund their egos and PR campaigns as much, if not more than their chosen charity. When your junior staff start on £45k per annum, not to mention senior associates and partners, is it really unreasonable to tap them up for a few quid? They can't be spending all that money on marching powder, can they?

Of course there is always a quid pro quo on offer. All the members of our tiny rugby club in SW43 or where ever will now know about your company and will flock to buy their wine from you. Hmmm.

When I do charity tastings, I now have a minimum target that must be raised on the evening and if the charity isn't getting at least a couple of grand, why should I spend hours preparing and entertaining the punters? If they want a cheap night out, they should go to the pub.