A masterpiece of ancient Rome in a Bucks stable … for just one more week

 Tucked in the Buckinghamshire countryside, for just one more week, you can see one of the finest complete mosaics of the Roman Empire.  If that's not surprising enough, get this: it's from Israel.  This is its last stop on a world tour while its new museum in Lod, near Tel Aviv, has been under construction.  If you're lucky enough to live anywhere in striking distance, get to Waddesdon Manor before the special exhibition ends next week.

What's the big deal?  There are very few mosaics from the Roman world that are this big (50 ft long by 27 feet wide) and in such perfect shape.  Other than two missing spots at one end, it's perfectly intact.  It  is marvellously beautiful.  And it conveys a sense of culture and conviviality that reminds us of just how good life could be in the Roman Empire.  Even at its edges.

This was, fairly obviously, a dining room floor.  Just below the central octagon two leopards … the standard bearers of the wine god Dionysos … hang off the sides of a large wine flagon.  The immediate message is clear: welcome, you'll have a fine time here.

If this first image promises fine drinking, the rest tells you how well you'll eat.  On one end, a dazzling variety of fish that might end up on your plate swim beneath the ships out to catch them.  On the other, a bevy of creatures of the field and forest.  Around the centre, the best of both, shown in loving detail.  And in the central octagon, an exotic scene of African animals, including an elephant and one of the earliest giraffes shown in Western art.  Its quality … in colours, in realistic portrayal of the animals, in the stylistic unity of the whole piece … is on par with the finest examples I saw in the blockbuster Bardo museum in Tunis, Tunisia (Which I wrote about here).

It's all the more interesting because it comes from Israel, someplace we don't often associate with peaceful, cosmopolitan daily lives in the Roman empire.  (Blacker episodes of a destroyed temple or Pilate's judgement are more likely to come to mind.)  Amazingly, it spent the past 1,700 years just one meter below ground level.  Experts believe it was a fluke of all four original walls falling inwards that protected the floor.  It was only another fluke, of road construction, that revealed it to the modern world.

How did it get to Waddesdon?  The manor is one of the homes of the Rothschild family in England.  Unsurprisingly, the famous family of Jewish bankers have strong ties with Israel.  This house has always been a quirky one; it's a perfect French chateau set in the middle of the English countryside.  So why shouldn't they have a perfect Roman imperial floor in their barn?

If you have nothing on next weekend, get there and check it out before it start its journey back home.

Tower's poppies best part of day of too-expensive restaurants & plans gone astray

Restaurant Reviews:  Gaucho, Tsunami

You would have to have unplugged yourself from all national and social media over the past few
months to be unaware of the poppy installation at the Tower of London.

Since the 5th of August, volunteers have been "planting" ceramic poppies in the moat.  By the 11th of November there will be 888,246; one for each British fatality in World War 1.  Officially called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, it's the wonderful idea of ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper, and it is … with no exception … the most emotionally gripping piece of installation art I have ever seen.

It's effective in photos and on television, but nothing compared to the impact of seeing it in person.  If you have the chance, go.

The poppies flow out from strategic points atop the Tower's battlements, cascading down like a stream into the moat below.  Piper has worked magic, with placement that leaves subtle lines of green and undulates the flowers.  The naturalistic curves mean that you can can look closely and pick out individual blooms, or allow your eyes to go slightly out of focus and take in the vast ocean of red.  It's stunningly beautiful, drifting between the greys and whites of the stonework and the emerald green of the grass.  Until you remember what it actually means.  Every stem, a death.  All those names, on all those war memorials, accumulated here in horrific, terrible beauty.  It is very hard to hold the tears back.

It's also a fine reminder that this is fundraising season for the six major charities that support our armed forces.  This year, you can buy one of those ceramic poppies in addition to your usual label-decorating support.  More information here.

The rest of our day out in London couldn't really stand up to that.

We'd planned to wander through Borough Market and graze across gourmet food carts for lunch.  While I get this way fairly often for work, Piers hasn't been here for years.  I wanted to show him how London can hold its own against similar food markets in Paris and Barcelona.  But I hadn't counted on the weekend crowds.  It was shoulder-to-shoulder madness, with queues 20-deep at every dining and drinking option.  There may be more vendors here on a Saturday, but I'd advise the relative sanity of a weekday visit.

So we started walking up the south bank of the Thames, thinking we'd find someplace before too long. Through Hays Wharf, past numerous riverside pubs and restaurants, all were packed.  Leading us, finally, tired and starving, to the first empty table we saw at Gaucho Tower Bridge.

Really, I should pay more attention to my own blog.  In August 2010 I said of another of its branches that I'd return to any of the other restaurants I'd been to rather than "this outrageously expensive Argentinian chain … that is clearly set up to extract every penny it can out of its well-heeled clientele." I said more.  Nothing's changed.  We had nice but unexceptional steak tartare, some tasty sides, a decent bottle of wine, and spent precisely five times as much as the most generous budget I'd envisioned for market grazing.  Never again.

My plans misfired on the British Museum, as well.  With a quick lunch before the poppies, we should have been into the Ming exhibit by 3:30.  Instead, waving our membership cards for last-minute admission, we arrived just before 5.  With less than half an hour to skip through before closing, I can tell you that the show offers a beautiful range of objects and paints a wonderfully comprehensive picture of life during one of China's most culturally sophisticated eras.  It's also exciting to see how versatile the new exhibit space is, being used in a very different way than for the previous Viking show.  Clearly, I need to get back.

After recovering from all that rushing around with a pint in the Museum Tavern across the street (an old favourite), we trekked across town for the last planned event of the night.  Meeting our friends Tracy and Beric usually calls for sushi, since we're all big fans, and a good friend tipped Clapham's Tsunami as "good as Nobu, but much cheaper." Had to be tried.

Maybe it was the fault of our late lunch.  We weren't particularly hungry, and we were still in a bad mood from the sticker shock of the bill.  We found the menu overcomplicated and trying too hard.  Foie gras sushi?  Please.  Fusion can go too far.  They accidentally served us a yellowfin tartare we didn't order.  In a little mason jar, with fancy toasts and odd dressings.  All too fussy.  Meanwhile, we spotted no Japanese faces in the open kitchen, and there wasn't any option for combination sushi platters.

We ordered a satisfying variety a la carte.  A shared double order of their soft shell crab tempura was
the standout, by far.  Otherwise, it was tasty and nicely presented, but nothing special.  Had I only had the light lunch we'd planned, I'd probably have left hungry.  Our portion of the meal cost about the same as our lunch, and that was with double the wine.  Good value in comparison to Gaucho, but I know I would have been much happier pulling sushi off the conveyor belt at my enduring favourite, Hiroba on Kingsway.

Fortunately, the company outweighed any disgruntlement with the food, and the poppies made the trip into town … and all the expense … worth while.  I just wish more of that cash could have gone to services charities rather than to the restaurant bills.

Zaha Hadid dreams a futurescape I'm ready to occupy

You don't find me talking about work much on this blog.  It's rare that the world of corporate communications in the IT services industry intersects with the culture, travel, food and wine I write about here.  But sometimes, the planets come together and there's a wonderful moment when my "work" world makes my "life" soul sit up and take notice.  Yesterday brought one, in the form of a senior director from Zaha Hadid Architects.

My company was sponsoring a conference in central London on innovation.  On the agenda: "smart cities".  That's the concept that with technology and connectivity we can do amazing things to make cities better places to live.  While having less impact on the environment.  The architects were there to point out that things can look good, too.

I'd long been aware of Hadid, whose buildings regularly show up in design magazines and culture supplements.  She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and pretty much the only woman getting headlines in a thoroughly male industry.  I've only been in one of her buildings … the swimming pavilion in London's Olympic park, because most of her work is scattered around the world.  But I had an impression of buildings that were curvy, dramatic, elegant and beautiful.  In a word: feminine.

Turns out that's just the start.  The Hadid practice's philosophy is an organic, people-centric riposte to the brutalism of late 20th century architecture.  Probably more akin in its philosophical foundations to high Gothic than to Meis van der Rohe, as Director Patrick Schumacher explained in a fast-paced, intellectually rich illustrated talk.  I think some of the IT and corporate crowd were starting to drift.  I could have listened to him all day.

In Hadid's vision, social order requires spiritual order. Architecture is a force for good that can prevent a collapse into chaos.

The typical modern city, clustering streets and buildings with little reference to the unique topography around us, is creating ubiquitous urban sprawls with no local distinction.  They have no soul.  It's the natural topography that gives a place identity and order.  Schumacher used the outskirts of London as his example: "a cancerous outgrowth, identity-less."  The feature that gives it unique identity?  The sinuous meander of the Thames.  Thus Hadid's architectural prescription for modern London is round and meandering, something we saw in the aquatic pavilion.

Schumacher said this starting point creates "islands in the urban menace."  They further humanise their designs by focusing on, and celebrating, the spaces where people come together.  Entrances, atria and hallways are all big design features in Hadid buildings.  Rejecting the fashion for putting a building's guts on the outside, they clothe their work in "smart skins" which hide what's going on.  Just like a living creature.

There's no denying that Hadid buildings are boldly modern.  But this philosophy makes them human and organic as well.  Many are huge, but there's a warmth and intimacy about them.  The skin, the curves, the relationship with the surrounding topography … it all drew my mind back to the great Gothic architects, with their forests of columns branching into canopies of groin vaulting, illuminated by massive windows.  Hadid is modern, but the company philosophy is rooted in ancient truths.

Certainly, they're top of my list should I ever be called upon to found a utopian city.  And I'd love to attend a proper lecture from Hadid or one of her partners.  But for now, I'll just have to add more of their buildings to my travel "bucket list".

Familiarity breeds appreciation for Sherfield's Four Horseshoes

We are blessed with a truly fine local pub.  I was reminded of just how blessed this weekend, when we had the rare circumstance of two pub meals in one weekend.  Dinner Saturday at the favoured Four Horseshoes in Sherfield-on-Loddon, lunch Sunday at our old local, The Queen in Dummer.

The vast gap between dining at those two pubs drove home the superiority of the Horseshoes.  And prompts me to tell you more about it.  Because, frankly, it's worth a drive for non-locals to eat here.

It has all the qualities you'd expect of a proper local pub.  It looks the part, with Georgian bones, an open fire, exposed beams and a garden.  There's even a skittle alley.  A satisfying seasonal menu on top of expected pub classics like fish and chips and burgers.  But, importantly, it's not just a restaurant.  The bar opens into two rooms, and you're as welcome to drink and socialise as to eat.

Most importantly, perhaps, it's owned and run by a local couple who are almost always around.  Scott and Jules were long-time village residents when the last owner decided to retire.  Scott, seeing the place's potential, bought it and started the transformation into the gem we see today.  This summer, they did a major renovation of the interior, losing the dated elements that said "old boozer", laying wooden flooring throughout, brightening things up.  The old world charm remains, but now there's a touch of modern elegance as well.  All this means that there are, inevitably, locals in this local.  Scott and Jules remember names, everyone chats socially, and it's clearly a meeting place for the neighbourhood.

It's the food, inevitably, that gets us through the door.  (At two miles, it's just far enough to keep us from wandering by for the swift pint alone.)  We've come to depend on seasonal specialities, local game, good sauces, deftly-handled vegetables and tasty desserts, all prepared well and served with attention to presentation.  Saturday was no different.

I started with a duck and cranberry terrine served with warm brioche which, had I been restraining my appetite, would have been enough for the whole meal.  Piers tucked into the ultimate winter warmer: an enormous home-made Scotch egg (above), centre still jigglingly soft, served on a salad studded with black pudding.  Our friend Guy went a bit lighter with a line of bacon-wrapped sardines.

The specials menu was so tempting we each were deciding between three possibilities.  I don't think there was a chance to go wrong, however.  We all ordered different things, and all proclaimed satisfaction. I had my first venison of the new season, rare with a rich sauce and horseradish mash that was worth giving up carbs the rest of the week for.  Across the table, my second choice of Gressingham duck looked fabulous (and tasted so, too, in the bite he gave me).  Guy's tower of liver and onions on a bed of creamy mash actually smelled good enough that I might reconsider my aversion to this dish in future.  I ended with a slice of lemon tart, which was no doubt an indulgence too far, but I wanted something to cut the rich flavours that had gone before.   (The boys settled for more wine.)

The next morning we went clay shooting.  It was an exquisite early Autumn day: trees just touched by hints of red and yellow, clear blue skies with billowing white clouds, just a hint of chill in the air.  The view from Chalky Hill offers up a panorama of rolling, pastoral beauty. There are few things so quintessentially English as being out in this landscape, surrounded by people in tweed and Barbours, well-behaved hunting dogs at their sides, practicing your shooting skills.  Just in case you get invited up to the big house sometime soon to bring down a few grouse.  I, of course, won't bring down anything unless I practice a great deal more … although I do seem to be better with the clays that mimic rabbits.  It might be the memory of the little pests that ate my flower garden in Texas.

Such a morning pretty much demands lunch at a country pub so, being on the other side of Basingstoke, we headed for The Queen in Dummer.  When we lived nearby, this was the best gastropub in the area.  It's high on charm, and the menu looked promising.

Just like the horseshoes, there's a standard pub menu and specials on the board.  But the arrival of the food revealed a vast divide between the two kitchens.  Scallops tasted past their prime and hadn't been cleaned thoroughly, corals neither removed nor fully included.  That might have been excusable, but grinding your teeth against bits of shell was not.  Salt and chili squid had a too-heavy breading that made them look suspiciously like they'd come out of a freezer bag.  Local wild boar lacked seasoning and was let down by what was supposed to be an apple and Armagnac sauce, but was just a sweet, gloopy mess of onions.

Everything came out on the same heavy, industrial white plates, potatoes and veg piled on artlessly.  Rationally, I know presentation does nothing for the taste of the food.  But the Horseshoes has invested in new china of different shapes to show off different dishes, and dresses them with an artful tower here, or a swirl of balsamic glaze there.  It ads to the sense of occasion.  At The Queen, the plates looked no different than what you might dish up at home in a hurry.

Such a stark contrast, so soon after a fine dinner at The Horseshoes, reminded us that if we're staying local … we might as well stay really local.  Because we have something special on the doorstep.  And those of you without the gastropub of your dreams?  Climb in the car and head to North Hampshire.  We'll meet you for a pint.  And maybe the chef's tasty rabbit papardelle with mustard cream sauce.


Sadly, The Four Horseshoes lost its chef during the summer of '15 and the owners decided they'd had enough of the business. A change of management is on the cards. Until new ownership and a fresh review, this article is no longer an endorsement, but a fond memory of what a local can be.