Falling Sky

Sun Shines In The Rusty Morning

via www.boston.com

Intersecting swirling trails left by the earlier passage of dust devils across sand dunes, as they lifted lighter reddish-pink dust and exposed the darker material below. Also visible are darker slope streaks along dune edges, formed by a process which is still under investigation.(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Pixies: Bird Dream Of The Olympus Mons

Even by The Big Picture's consistently high standards, this is a real treat. 35 photographs taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter since 2006 of the Martian landscape, 187 miles above the surface. They're quite remarkable and worth taking time to look at, landscapes that are both reminiscent of satellite photographs of Earth yet unmistakably alien, unmarked by the mucky paw of humans (well, #9 aside). And is that red weed I see?

(No, of course not - it's part of the Martian South Polar Cap.)

Scene From A Tollcross Bus Stop

Well, that was odd.

So there I am, waiting at a bus stop in Tollcross an hour ago, heading home after stopping off in town to get the usual saucy hit from my dealer, listening to Fuck Buttons' new album (stompingly good it is too) at a respectfully low volume. Three people in the queue - lady in (at a guess) her late 30's, old bloke around late 60's, me.  Old bloke looks at me, moves forward and gestures in a neutral way that suggests conversation.

I pop the headphones out. "Yes sir?" (respectful as always)

Waves a pointy finger in the general direction of my head. "What's that in your ears? What are you listening to?"

Quickly realise that naming the band in question would be a bad idea - "Uh, music."

Eyes get wider. "What are you doing that for?  Take them out!"

"Um, I'm just listening to some music, I've had a long day at work"

Turns away disgusted.  One minute later, turns around.  "Why've you got those things in your ears?  What are you listening to?"

"Music.  Just some music"

A minute passes.  Out of nowhere, he says: "Alright, keep calm, keep calm!"

Befuddled at what prompted this: "I am calm."

Looks increasingly exasperated.  "Why are... why are you listening to music?  Fuckin' pathetic!"

My eyebrows hit the ceiling. "I like listening to music, I've been in an office for ten hours, I think I've earned this."

He's hooked on the fuckin' pathetic meme now and jabs pointy-pointy in the direction of my right headphone. "Listening to music. Why are... och, that's fuckin' pathetic that is. Fuckin' pathetic.

(Let's be super clear here, this wasn't from having the music blaring out from the headphones - the volume was low, and even if it had been at top whack the traffic noise rumbling past would've drowned it out.)

I shrug, figure this isn't going anywhere, pop my headphones back in.  This increases his frustration and I can hear him over the bleepy scronk I'm listening to.  "That's just... och, fuckin' pathetic. Fuckin' pathetic" Keeps staring at me. I ignore him.

Receiving no further response from me, he turns to the lady, points in my general direction. "Y'see that... listening to music... fuckin' pathetic that" clearly expecting agreement.  This is not what he gets.

"No it's not, he's just listening to some music and you're picking on him, he's not hurting anyone and you're swearing like that... I don't mind him listening to his music but I do mind you swearing like that."

Oh crumbs. "Wuh... It's... listening to music..."

"He's just listening to music, stop being rude."  Thanks lady!  I'm still listening to my music to show I will not be stopped by this oppression.

Man to the lady: "Are you from 'round here?"

What?  "What? From Edinburgh? Yes I am from Edinburgh, and if you're not you should go back from where you came."

Oh lawd.  Still no bus.  It's only 20 minutes walk.  And as my very presence appears to be causing intergenerational social collapse on the streets of the capital, I turn on my heels and stride away, imagining that in some bizarre way maybe this looks like I've been victorious, rather than driven away from a bus stop by the hassle of a sweary old geezer. I wasn't upset by it or anything, it was just annoying in a bizarre, 'is this actually happening' sort of way.

So away I stride. Look at me, world, I think, I'm walking! I'm healthy! And I'm listening to music! Considering the time that passed before the bus I was waiting for finally overtook me, leaving was the best move, but in retrospect I would love to know how things turned out, to have thanked the lady for sticking up for me, and delivered some of the witty, cutting remarks that only came to mind five minutes after I'd walked away. And maybe tell him exactly what I was listening to.

Back In The Kitchin

There's already been two reviews of the day we went to the Kitchin earlier this month - you can read the Missus's here, or AA Gill's here (though he was there for the dinner menu, it was the same day). My gibberings follow!

I'd never heard of The Kitchin, the Leith-based Michelin-starred restaurant, until I went there for a belated christmas lunch with work colleagues in January this year, after which I've been champing at the financial bit to go back, partly to see how the menu changes with the season, mainly to introduce my good lady to the food there. The former point relates to the importance that head chef Tom Kitchin puts on seasonal food - and while it feels like all chefs and restaurants currently trumpet their belief in seasonal food, Kitchin really seems to practice what he preaches. More than the buzzword du jour, the concept of seasonal food is presented as the cornerstone of The Kitchin, reflected in the motto From Nature To Plate (the title of Kitchin's new recipe book, which we'll be checking out in a few weeks time). As to the latter, while I had cheerfully feasted on meaty goodness at the January lunch, the vegetarians of the group were equally enthusiastic about the quality of the meat-free food at the Kitchin. Finding decent restaurants that serve vegetarian food to as high a standard as their meat mains isn't always easy, so this was something I really wanted to share with the Missus.

Poetically enough, it was through the process of her becoming Missus - ie, we got married - that the opportunity arose, thanks to my new work colleagues (I'm now in a different building, same employer) clubbing together to get us vouchers for the Kitchin as a wedding present. Although presented with them in June, it's taken four months for us to be able to find the right time to go - while it's open on a Saturday, I much preferred the thought of going during the week - but a couple of weeks back, fighting back cold-related sniffles, we finally found a window in our calendars on a Tuesday. So, how'd it go?

Well, we went along for lunch rather than dinner - with the set lunch menu, you can get three courses for £24.50, two of which would be covered by the voucher, whereas the a la carte prices are notably higher and would've made a dent in our wallets even with the voucher. As for the tasting menu... well, a glutton can dream, because goodness knows what salary I'd need to be on before I could justify £65 plus drinks for dinner, though I've no doubt the quality would make it worthwhile. First Minister? Anyhoo, the Kitchin hasn't noticeably changed in nine months, nor does it need to, though curiously it felt smaller, cosier, more intimate this time round, the difference of not being in a large room-filling group. Though undoubtedly more relaxed than other restaurants of a similar standard (or so I presume), and even though I knew to expect it from last time, it's still a bit odd having waiting staff unfolding the napkin or refilling our water glasses with a bottle already on the table, since we've always expected to do that sort of thing ourselves. Still, it's not as if that's all the waiting staff do - on the contrary, they were excellent, knowledgeable in the food yet with an air to relax rather than to intimidate as the cliché of the high-class waiter leads you to expect. Speed of service was impressive without giving the impression of being rushed, the sense being of a well-oiled machine running smoothly, attentive but not intrusive.

Right, nosh!

One of the highlights of the January lunch was the appetiser, a cream of celeriac soup that was just bursting with flavour, so I was looking forward to seeing what little goodie turned up before the lunch proper. We weren't disappointed, presented with a little bowl of superb roast pumpkin soup, as rich and flavourful as that celeriac soup, topped off nicely with toasted pumpkin seeds. So good! Appetite suitably teased, onto the starter.

What's that, you yelp. Ravioli of braised squid served in a languistine consomme, I answer. Uh... okay, you say edging away. But stop! Whatever your experience or expectation of eating squid, this was a revelation. If I didn't know that there ravioli contained squid, I would never have guessed, nor could I have imagined what it was. Braised, that squid became something fascinating and new to my tastebuds, closer perhaps to sausagement in texture than anything else, yet with a flavour all of its own somewhere between meat and fish, complemented with a sweetly sour consomme so good that I struggled to resist the urge to slurp every last drop from the bowl. One suspects such things just aren't done in swanky restaurants, but if I'd had a straw handy...

Main! And that, chums, is roast mallard from Perthshire, served with wild Scottish mushrooms and sauce 'aux abats', (the latter translates as offal, in case you were wondering). Rubbish photo, taken too close to the dish and with low lighting it really does the food no justice whatsoever. This was wonderful, in another world entirely from the usual duck dishes available at take-aways and gastropubs, the meat succulent and tender, draped with a rich sauce that made every bite a pleasure to savour without overpouring the flavour of the dear departed duck.

Rounding off the meal, here's the dessert - pistachio soufflé served with pistachio ice cream. Two pistachio flavoured sweets sounds worryingly samey, but no! Instead it's a textbook example of just how differently one flavour can be prepared. The ice cream was cold (fancy that!) and smooth, triggering taste nostalgia of pistachio ice cream in France when I was a kid, countered by the hot and perfectly risen soufflé. It was a treat to note how both clearly tasted of pistachio, yet at the same time were so different, complementing each other nicely. Most of all, both soufflé and ice cream were sodding delicious, rounding off the lunch perfectly.

It'd be nice to be able to have at least one critical thing to say about the whole shebang, but it's annoyingly impossible - the Kitchin yet again proved itself to be adventurous, ingenious and surprising in its dishes, while still keeping its ingredients firmly rooted in Scotland. Service was impeccable, friendly, utterly devoid of snobbishness. Both lunches there have been absolute solid-gold knockouts, so good that £24.50 stops being a rather high figure for a lunch and starts looking like a downright bargain in terms of getting what you pay for. If you're ever in Edinburgh and want a meal to remember, a real treat, I find it very hard to imagine you could do any better elsewhere in the city - or beyond, as the ever-increasing award haul suggests. Go, go, go. And take us with you.

Fowey: In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country

Boards of Canada: In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country

Finally, after Cheltenham, St Austell, St Ives and Perranuthnoe, here's the last honeymoon post, four months after the event.

(Incidentally, this afternoon I'd typed a great long post for this that took a couple of hours to put together - only for Typepad to inexplicably lose and autosave over the top of it just now, which is immensely frustrating as I have no idea how it happened. The safest move seems to be writing the text of the entry offline on Ecto instead, but I had assumed the Typepad system was solid enough to rely upon. This suggests otherwise. Anyway...)

We'd spent a week staying two nights a time at three luxurious yet different B&B/hotels, allowing us to see different areas of Cornwall despite being reliant on public transport and our own little legs, but by this point we'd done all our touristing and just wanted to spend some time with each other, the countryside and not much else, far from the gibbering crowds, staying in the kind of place that normally we would absolutely love to go to but wouldn't be able to justify the cost. And so, Badgers Hollow.

Badgers Hollow is part of Coriander Cottages, based within walking distance of Fowey but far enough away that coach parties are but a distant memory. It's an old cider mill that's been superbly renovated into an environmentally kosher open plan holiday cottage, complete with solar panels, wood burning stove (sadly we had no excuse to light it, the weather remaining gorgeous for our whole stay there, but its presence makes the thought of a winter stay most attractive), fleece insulation (ditto on the winter stay), a jacuzzi bath big enough for two and a ultra-tech kitchen with appliances more intelligent than us, full of the sort of things that we'd have in our dream home, if only we could make it come true. But the location was the icing on an already perfect cake - the view from the front door looked like this...

And the view from bed:

Why yes, those are my feet. Not that we would often leave the curtains and patio doors open whilst in bed, but even if we did the only neighbours likely to see us were horses and ducks - oh aye, there was that pheasant that popped round one day. There are others staying in the adjoining barn and the main farm area, but it's arranged in such a way that if it's solitude you want, solitude you get, and so we did. We went for self-catering - while you can choose to have B&B rather than self-catering, it felt better to spend our time there living entirely at our own pace - besides, another week of meaty cooked breakfasts could have left me looking decidedly portly. There were some basics waiting for us when we got to Badgers Hollow - cereal, milk, tea, juice, local meat, fruit & veg - much of which lasting our whole time there, and there were a couple of lovely shops in Fowey itself where we could buy ingredients for dinner. Fortuitously, we were there slap bang in the middle of Cornish asparagus season, along with juicy strawberries and sweet little new potatoes, so my dinner usually looked something like this:

And it was absolutely delicious, as much a pleasure as eating at the Victoria Inn. The asparagus needed the barest of boils, that juicy taste well worth the peculiar smell that would follow, while the bacon and sausages from local butcher Kittows were easily a match for Puddledub and Crombies, washed down with whatever Cornish beer had taken my fancy that day:

We would have dinner (and breakfast, and lunch if we weren't elsewhere) sat outside either on the terrace or balcony with no soundtrack but birdsong, the random whinny of a horse and, now and then, highly aggrieved quacking from the female ducks as the mallards attempted their rather disturbing form of breeding, comically failing at every attempt from what we could tell, leading to their own aggrieved quacking as they walked away from the duck pond dejectedly, while an osprey would routinely arc through the sky, divebombing nests. The sun blazed down, a gentle breeze would blow across the field, multitudes of bunnies would appear in the neighbouring field at dusk, we were in our own little heaven.

Still, we did leave the cottage now and then, mostly to saunter down to Fowey, once to go on an enjoyably gradient-filled walk to a wee village, Golant. Fowey itself is a pleasant enough fishing village, though it feels as though it's tourism not fishing that keeps it going. Certainly not as annoying as St Ives, the amount of traffic winding through the thin streets could still be irritating and we tried to avoid later times in the day when it got busier. A pleasant enough place to visit, but a bit too busy for our tastes, especially with Badgers Hollow waiting for us - it was a relief to know we had that to go back to. We kept coming back to the Dwelling House, an excellent cafe (not that you'd know it from the website) with a particularly good line in cakes and (naturally) cream teas:

Yum! Their fish salad platter maintained the quality, locally caught fish served up with (that word again) locally grown salad, and no doubt we'd have eaten there even more if Badgers Hollow didn't keep calling us back. Food For Thought served a perfectly fine paella, prawn eyes beadying back up at me, but felt a bit too busy and polished for our overly-discerning ways, though their ice-cream stand was a tasty blessing. Pinky Murphys, on the other hand, was much more fun, full of genuine character and good nosh to back it up, while the location meant that those who drove straight into the centre of Fowey and never left it remained oblivious to its charms - we were particularly glad for their wi-fi connection to catch up on wedding snaps and emails. The aforepictured Bird shop is full of kids stuff, the kind of thing we nod approvingly at (stripes! wood! Moomins!) and White Doll Arts featured some lovely simple pottery, which we bought, and a floofy cat, which we didn't. And I could hardly visit a coastal town like Fowey without partaking in a fish supper, courtesy of The Other Place (I commend their restraint at not going for 'Plaice' there). There were a couple of restaurants that looked delicious for lunch - most notable Restaurant Nathan Outlaw - but without vegetarian choices on the lunch menu they were no good for us. A pity, but we probably would have felt utterly out of our depth, honeymoon or not, and when the alternative was home-cooked goodness eaten overlooking rolling hills as the evening sun gradually dipped behind the trees for a tiny fraction of the price... well, I can live with that.

It really was a little slice of perfection, as much as our week in Stromness last year, a brief step into a different life. With no mobile or internet signal to intrude, we were free to enjoy our own company, sometimes reading, sometimes just soaking up the gloriousness of it all, decompressing from the hyperchaos of wedding preparation, talking about the future and getting used to having a ring rattling around on my finger. It's hard to imagine any B&B topping Ednovean Farm, so self-catering was the only way we could improve on that experience, and so it did, ending the honeymoon on a gentle high. Living up to all the expectations we'd had, we couldn't have hoped for any better and we'd gladly go back (if finances would ever allow). Cornwall may not be the distant, far-flung location that other couples go for, but for us it was ideal - train-travelled, surrounded by countryside and coastline, very well fed, with the time and the peace of our own little world - a perfect honeymoon.

Do Do Do Do Do Do-Do

It would appear that Typepad now has a new inbuilt MP3 player functionality going on, so the following is basically to test whether it works or not.  But as it's a solid gold TUNE, feel free to have a listen - in keeping with the Synth Britannia docu on BBC4, it's Don't Go by Yazoo from their Peel Session back in 1982.

 Yazoo: Don't Go (Peel Session)

Jam Gone Wrong

A few weeks back we had a go at making a batch of plum jam.  All went well, but once jarred it clearly hadn't set and all looked too sloppy and syrupy.  Right, thinks I some time later, I'll put all the jam back into the pan, add some more jam sugar, boil it and jar it, that's sure to make it set.  And it did!

And there's four jars just like this, filled with ultra-dense super-sticky sub-organic matter! Anyone need some grouting done? Some homemade No Need For Nails?

Now I need to figure out how the deuce to get this... stuff out of the jars - I fear industrial solvents may be required. At this rate I'll never make it into the WI...

Not Dead, Merely Sneezing

With barely a peep here for a month now, I thought I should pop my virtual head over the virtual parapet and say AAAHHCHOOPLABURGH. Falling Sky's not been left in the lurch or anything, it's just that September was a particularly stuffed month, including but not limited to an absolute lorryload of preparation for a climate change/agriculture job interview (which I didn't get), looking after a poorly missus (who, just as she was getting better, had a disagreeable encounter with the Magimix) and then getting all snotted up myself, starting at precisely 8pm last Sunday.  Never has a cold started so suddenly - one minute I was tip-top, the next I was bunged-up beyond all description.  Who knew colds could be so efficient?  It almost took away from the dizzying pleasure of watching a large green New Zealand parrot joyfully hump Mark Carwardine's head.

Thankfully this little rhinovirus hasn't moved into flu territory (I'll be getting the vaccine for that next week, prime blog fodder if ever there was) but even so it's something a wheezy old todger like myself has to watch out for since it can trigger off an asthma attack - nuts to that - or lead the way for something altogether more grim, such as A MAN EATING SHARK.  Still, it's bloody annoying, since I'm spending all this time at home yet with no energy to actually watch something, read something, write something beyond a Facebook status.  If it wasn't for catching up on In Our Time and This American Life podcasts over the last few days I'd have gone knee-gnawingly barmy.  Feeling a bit better today but still pretty listless, snuffly and congested in the frontal noggin, at least I can now go beyond a sentence or two and type full - gasp! - paragraphs.  Progress... but even as I type that I feel my eyelids get heavy and reckon I should go and have a little lie down.  Dearie me!  The sooner this goes, the sooner I can see Up, catch up on a whole wodge of emails and letters and generally blow the dust off this here site.  Until then, ever wondered what a sneeze looks like in slow-motion?  Wonder no more!

Perranuthnoe: The Blue Room

The honeymoon continues!  Bidding goodbye to the palm trees of Boskerris Hotel and suitably full from a delicious lunch at Porthminster Cafe, we took the train southwards from St Ives to an equally sun-drenched Penzance.  It looked like a nice enough town, but we were heading for quieter things, taking a taxi out away from the town and into the south Cornish countryside, finally rattling up a country track to reach our destination, Ednovean Farm.

Photo by the Missus

We'd had a wonderful time staying at both Anchorage House and Boskerris Hotel, and would certainly recommend them to all, but Ednovean Farm has to be my favourite of the three.  An old farm where they still have hens and horses (I believe the room we stayed in used to be a cowshed...) with three rooms for couples, no children, beautiful gardens and a simply divine south-southwesterly view across rolling fields, over Perranuthnoe and to the sea.  We stayed in the Blue Room, undoubtedly the best choice, with a nice big bed, French doors opening wide to reveal the stunning view and a nice wee private terrace too.  As with everywhere else we stayed, there was a TV and DVD player, but with real world visuals like that we had no need for them, happy to sit outside and take it all in, the light, the countryside, the blissful peace of it all.  The 'look' of the room and accompanying bathroom was spot-on, put together with details that felt charming, never cheesy, and the roll-top bath was the perfect size for two. Breakfast both mornings was lovely, with the option (which we took the first day) of having a breakfast delivered to the door of our room, allowing us to cheerfully devour croissants at our leisure.  The second morning we went up to the gorgeous open-plan dining room/kitchen that damn near made us giddy with the sheer Country Livingness of it all, locally-sourced food cooked up on a Rayburn, the sizzling bacon drowned out by birdsong outside.  The hosts, Charles and Christine, are very friendly and helpful - anyone with a complete set of the Aubrey/Maturin books can't be bad - and Olley the cat was a far less yappy feline than our local mog.  And being welcomed with tea and eccles cakes certainly didn't hurt.

So what's to do there?  Well, we'd rather got all the touristy stuff out of the way over the last few days and had no particular plans, just the way we like things.  Walking, eating, reading, or just lazing around was pretty much the order of our two days there, with the coastal village of Perranuthnoe an easy country path walk from Ednovean Farm.  Perranuthnoe's a lovely wee place, reminded me of my home village Islip if it were plonked down by the seaside, surrounded by fields and tiny roads, old houses with welly boots outside.  Coastal paths head out to the east and west of the village as part of the South West Coast Path, both of which we gave a go - pretty easy-going, mostly keeping close to the coast, the westerly path bringing you towards Marazion and St Michael's Mount.  The beach at Perranuthnoe was a little gem, popular enough but never crowded to the extent of Carbis Bay or St Ives, a pleasure to stroll along or just sit on the rocks and watch the waves gently roll in, and a food cabin - appropriately called The Cabin - serving up way-above-average food and drink (though it's recently raised a veritable stushie in the village news with proposals for quadrupling its size).  There's a group of craft shops and art galleries brought together in an old L-shaped set of buildings, where we bought a cracking mono print by an artist whose name is sadly illegible on the artwork so I can't sing his praises, and I had another (delicious) cream tea in the sunshine.  And then there's Victoria.

The Victoria Inn dates back in one form or another to the 12th century, apparently.  It's a nice pink building, quite prepossessing and unshowy, the interior retaining that sense of an old village pub complete with nautical touches (a 3000W bulb from a lighthouse, model boats in boxes, that sort of thing), snug corners, free of pretence.  As with every other pub I went to in Cornwall, local breweries Sharp's and Skinner's ales were on tap (Doom Bar was particularly ubiquitous).  But the real draw is the food - it's a gastropub, but a gastropub par excellence, on a different planet to those pubs with twenty different mains, every one of them from a freezer.  Described as a 'destination pub', it was taken over by Stewart and Anna Eddy, the latter taking care of the food having previously trained with Raymond Blanc and Michael Caines.  The commitment to locally sourced ingredients is immediately apparent looking at the menu and specials, featuring Cornish crab, duck, beef, turbot, asparagus, mackerel, pork, strawberries, cod. We managed to book places for both Saturday evening and Sunday lunch and subsequently found out we were jammy sods to even have got one of them, another couple at Ednovean Farm having failed to get a table for Saturday.

Saturday night I went for a mains special, honey roast Cornish duck breast with sweet potato puree with apple and smoked bacon, followed with lemon posset with local strawberries and lemon shortbread.  The duck was a knockout, richer and juicier than any I'd tasted before, complemented by a puree I'd never even considered making with sweet potatoes but worked like a charm.  The lemon posset, aside from teaching me a new word, had a sharp sweet tang savoured in small spoonfuls along with the strawberries.  It was superb food, presented with care yet still in enough quantities to fill us up and at none of the prices or pretension that one might expect from a chef of such pedigree (the duck a bargain at £17.50, the dessert £5.25) and we slowly ambled our way back up the country paths as the evening sun slowly sank into the west, the landscape awash with a warm dusky light, rabbits scampering on the fields.  Sunday lunch was equally impressive, going for Cornish cod with local asparagus and lemon butter sauce, a great combination of flavours that made me grateful for going on honeymoon during proper asparagus season, followed up simply but tastily with some Cornish Moomaid ice-cream (with a name like that, how could I resist?), again quite excellent.  Honestly, you have no idea how much my mouth's been watering writing this last paragraph...

Is the Victoria Inn really worth travelling to Perranuthnoe for?  Absolutely, but there's plenty of good reasons to go to this little village on the coast regardless.  It's a refreshing break away from the busier, noisier parts of Cornwall, a path less travelled by tourists, and Ednovean Farm was such an absolute pleasure to stay at - we would gladly return. Slow lazy meanders along a near-empty beach, strolling along miles of coastland with nothing to hear but the sea, wind and birdsong, sat outside in the evening light reading or cosied up in the Victoria Inn, our stay in Perranuthnoe was as close to perfection as we could have ever hoped for.

Next stop: a little bit of Penzance, a whole lot of Fowey...

The Joy of Meades

Much celebration here in Castle Von Naggle this week with the appearance of a new three-part Jonathan Meades series on BBC4.  If you've seen his work before, hell, you'll already know whether you love him or hate him - he appears to be gloriously polarising - but if you've never had the pleasure, read on, read on.

Who is this Meades?  The introduction given to him on Clive James' website, a veritable treasure trove of intellectual goodies where a number of his writings are included, describes him thus:

"[A]n educated upstart who not only doesn’t know his place, but knows far more than his allotted share about all the other places. [...] The tradition that started with Betjeman and Piper’s Shell guides can now be said to have reached a culmination in the personality of Meades. [...] The latest and most subversive exemplar of a useful broadcasting tradition, he still startles me most in his journalism, which is best approached through his collection Peter Knows What Dick Likes (Paladin, 1989). The pieces selected here prove his gift for reaching sideways out of aesthetics and bringing in the sociology and the politics as well, with no care for who gets offended."

(The aforementioned collection being out of print, with tatty paperbacks of it being sold for over fifty bleedin' quid)

According to Wikipedia, Meades was born in 1947, trained at RADA and wrote restaurant reviews for the Times between 1986 and 2001, putting on a pound a year in weight in the process, then losing a third of his body weight in the year that followed.  He's also been writing for decades on architecture and culture and written a number of novels, most of which are annoyingly hard to find.  But he's best known (in this house anyway) for his work on BBC television since 1990.  It's not easy to put his programmes into any particular genre pigeon hole, and so much the better for it - ostensibly the starting point for much of them would be architecture, but they're as much performances as documentaries, lecture and cabaret in one, shot through with black, sometimes vicious humour.  They're also thoroughly opinionated, refreshingly so in days when damn near every programme broadcast seems determined to please everyone and offend no-one, and unashamedly intelligent, as linguistically extensive as Will Self yet without the sense of showing off.

Meades could never be accused of talking down to his televisual audience; his shows demand your attention from start to end.  This could be a recipe for boredom in an age of short attention spans and pandering to the stupid, yet his shows use the medium of television with an invention that escapes the rest of the industry.  The character of Meades who presents these programmes is a fictional construct of his own, perpetually seeing the world through red-tinted sunglasses, forever clad in a suit no matter the location, an incongruous glitch in the system, often played on for ridiculous effect (see the suit-free Terminator intro to Remember The Future).  This is not a man who takes himself as seriously as initial appearances would suggest, a man who understands the importance of entertainment (on his first interview for Little Atoms he speaks of his admiration for Marty Feldman) ensuring that an hour long broadcast never becomes dull, never turns into another generic opinion-free documentary.  His atheism is strident, unapologetic, undiluted no matter the religion, as befits an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

So what does he talk about?  He's covered subjects from the unsung architectural highs and lows of Britain (the extensive Abroad Again series), Stalinist and Nazi architecture, surrealism, food (the excellent Meades Eats series), Belgium, vegetarians (I dare not show that one to the Missus) and Northern Europe (the brilliant two-parter Magnetic North that first won us over last year).  But these are just the starting points, spinning off into parts historical, cultural, sociological, autobiographical, satirical.  He never takes the oft-trodden route of other documentaries, and his latest - Off Kilter - is no exception.

A three-part documentary (of sorts) on architecture in Scotland, prior experience of television would lead you to expect a focus on Edinburgh, C R Mackintosh in Glasgow and maybe a croft house or two.  Instead, the first part of Off Kilter focuses exclusively on Aberdeen, a city that's barely touched television screens except for oil documentaries.  I've only been there once, a stop-through on the way home from Orkney, and my first impressions were pretty weak.  Turns out I've seriously underestimated it, architecturally at least.  After a rather bizarre opening revolving around corned beef and typhoid, it hits solid Aberdonian ground - well, stone.  He points out how the use of Aberdeen granite gives 300 year old buildings a surprisingly new appearance, even CG-like, and highlights the local obsession with dormer windows and the fascinating churches.  As he puts it: "devil gets the best tunes, god gets the best buildings."  I'd wondered if he'd touch on Donald Trump's Big Adventure and he doesn't disappoint in the slightest, tearing into the whole unsightly business with passionate contempt.  Wonderful.

So, where to start?  Firstly - watch the just-shown first episode of Off-Kilter on the iPlayer, available until the end of the month, then catch the next episode on the Isles of Lewis and Harris, (says here: "Meades discovers serenity, Calvinism and peat bog bodies") which should be a real treat.

Secondly - buy yourself The Jonathan Meades Collection on DVD, a steal at under £14, which contains a selection of his telly work (Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad, Abroad Again) and both parts of the brilliant Magnetic North.

Thirdly - for the many programmes not included on said DVD, settle down at the YouTube Meades Shrine ("if you are going to get caught up in any kind of cult of personality, then you better make sure it's a good 'un.") which has pretty much every thing I think he's done in front of a camera, broken down into 10 minutes chunks and held together in handy playlists, up to & including Off-Kilter for those who can't access the iPlayer.  There's so much going on in his programmes that second- and third-viewings are even more rewarding than the first.  Intelligent, wry, genuinely enlightening television seems to be harder and harder to find, so thank the BBC for keeping these brilliant shows going.  Though the man himself may well shudder at the thought of such acceptance, Jonathan Meades is a national treasure.

TFOF: 17 Aug - 30 Aug

The extra 'f' is for fortnight.  And with two weeks to march through, no time to waste!  (Click below to see the full post, since there's oodles in it)