Three Days of Rain (and Cats in Chim­neys Part Two)

I think the crush is revived. Rejun­ve­nated, brought back to life like when you soak dried le Puy lentils overnight and sud­denly they’re all plump and invit­ing! Actu­ally, it’s prob­a­bly exactly that sort of metaphor that kills a crush. No sexy actor in his twen­ties wants to be com­pared to a lentil, not even the expen­sive ones from le Puy, France that keep their shape in a stew. But more on James McAvoy later. Oh, to see him in per­son! It was thrilling.

Life has been slightly fre­netic lately, owing on the one hand to a heavy but excit­ing load of writ­ing, worked into my nor­mal life sched­ule. Betty Crocker, any­one? Bundt cakes? My grandmother’s life as a hab­er­dasher in post­war Wis­con­sin? These things occupy my mind, or what’s left of it after Avery and Emily fin­ish their hys­ter­i­cal ren­di­tion of “Had a Bad Day” in the style of Alvin and the Chip­munks (Emily’s new cell­phone ring­tone, if you have to ask), and the builders frighten Keechie into the chim­ney with their lad­ders and drills. She emerged hours later, as you see, none the worse for wear.

All these things make for a lovely daily life, punc­tu­ated by the most divine six-hour-braised shoul­der of lamb with (see, you knew I’d come to it) le Puy lentils and gar­lic. I’m not jok­ing here. Gar­lic. It’s amaz­ing how much one 12-year-old child can put away. The lamb was a mere accompaniment.

Six-Hour-Braised Shoul­der of Lamb with le Puy Lentils, Rose­mary Pesto and Gar­lic
(serves four with leftovers)

1 2-kg shoul­der of Welsh lamb
4 heads gar­lic, one minced, the oth­ers whole with tops cut off
3 tbsps pesto
leaves of 2 stalks rose­mary
1 cup le Puy lentils, dried

Line a roast­ing dish with alu­minum foil (trust me, you will thank me later) and place the shoul­der of lamb in it. Run the pesto through the food proces­sor with the rose­mary leaves and the minced gar­lic. Smear the lamb with the pesto and place the three whole gar­lic cloves upright in the cook­ing dish. Scat­ter the lentils all around. Don’t worry that they are dried; the lamb juices will cook them.

Cook at 140C, 280F for about six hours, cov­ered with foil. After about three hours, begin bast­ing every half hour or so (only if you’re home to do so; obvi­ously you can leave it to cook on its own if need be).

About half an hour before you want to eat, drain all the cook­ing liq­uid (leav­ing the lentils and gar­lic behind in the dish) from the dish into a fat sep­a­ra­tor (a very clever imple­ment that looks like a mea­sur­ing cup, talks like a mea­sur­ing cup, but actu­ally sep­a­rates the fat from the good stuff in poten­tial gravy). Pour the good stuff into a lit­tle saucepan and dis­card the fat.

Scoop up all the nicely cooked lentils and hide them under the lamb. Turn up the heat to 220C, 450F and place the lamb, uncov­ered, back in the oven. Mean­while, heat the gravy in the saucepan and add just a lit­tle flour (depend­ing on the amount of liq­uid you have, prob­a­bly you will not want more than a table­spoon) and whisk care­fully till flour is dis­solved. Remove lamb from oven 15 min­utes from serv­ing time, cover with foil and let rest. Let the gravy cook for the time the lamb rests. Serve the lamb sliced thick, with lentils on the side. Scoop the cooked gar­lic from the cloves and spread on toasted bread.

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Now it’s hard to know whether to call this “roast­ing” or “brais­ing.” Truth be told, it begins by roast­ing and then lets out so much juice and fat that some­where the alchem­i­cal magic turns the process into brais­ing. You choose the terminology.

Well, that was Sun­day and then all hell broke loose. Meet­ings all day Mon­day, party here Mon­day night. Tues­day more meet­ings, phone calls, writ­ing, then Avery’s “Singing Tea” at school, so beau­ti­ful and touch­ing. I want to sit and lis­ten to her sing a capella all night some day. Maybe for Mother’s Day. Then a rush to get her to her overnight date and us to… “Madame de Sade” at the Don­mar, the third in their series of four (we’ve now seen the three, don’t think I can stom­ach Jude Law as Ham­let in May).

In point of fact, the only rea­son we ended up at Sade was because our dear friend Annie turned up the night before with tick­ets they could not use. And through a com­plex web of computer-equipment swap­ping, it was an even deal. But it was an odd, odd per­for­mance. Rosa­mond Pike, as gor­geous as they come, shouted a great deal, in a very wide dress, about Sadism (not sur­pris­ing). What was sur­pris­ing was how un-Sadistic it felt, not naughty or wicked at all, not even painful. Judi Dench her­self seemed very off. Frances Bar­ber was won­der­ful, but all too infre­quently onstage. In gen­eral, sorry to say, while it was beau­ti­fully staged, I found it tor­ment­ing to lis­ten to. Add to that, about fif­teen min­utes before the end of the play, the woman in front of me… vom­ited. Into her pash­mina scarf. More than ONCE. I could not believe any of my senses. And believe me when I say ALL my senses were involved in the repul­sive expe­ri­ence: I could hear it, see it hap­pen­ing, then sad to say… smell and nearly, well, you know, enough said.

The next few min­utes were the longest since, pos­si­bly, I was in labor for 18 hours. Why didn’t the sick woman bloody leave? But she didn’t. She care­fully made up her pash­mina into a scary lit­tle par­cel which she inserted into a plas­tic bag in her hand­bag, and… sim­ply stayed in her seat. Stink­ing to high heaven.

Lis­ten to this hilar­i­ous story my friend Patri­cia told me: she was sit­ting in the inter­val at “Les Mis­er­ables” here in Lon­don some years ago and over­heard an Amer­i­can lady next to her say to her Amer­i­can com­pan­ion, “Well, I’m glad we didn’t MAKE plans to go to Paris, if the con­di­tions are going to be like THAT!”

Well, after the vom­it­ing inci­dent, I prac­ti­cally had to be dragged out of the house the fol­low­ing evening to see “Three Days of Rain.” As so often hap­pens, I was grate­ful to have the ticket in hand, so I could not change my mind and stay home. I left John and Avery in the kitchen with two pots of boil­ing fab­ric dye and sev­eral hun­dred finger-knitted string bracelets (can you say ‘school fair’?), and escaped to my first conveyor-belt sushi expe­ri­ence, at Kulu-Kulu in Brewer Street. It is sad that I have got to my advanced age, and dare I say it with a more than pass­ing famil­iar­ity with the menu at Nobu (both New York and Lon­don), but have never sat myself down at a sin­gle seat in a sushi bar and watched the dishes go by. You just help your­self and then when you’re fin­ished, you pile up your dishes and the cashier adds up your total from the dif­fer­ent pat­terns of the dishes! Free tea! At first I grabbed a seat between two Japan­ese peo­ple and then thought, “No, I’ll never sur­vive,” so I moved my stuff to a seat next to two nice Eng­lish girls and they ran me through the ropes.

My god, I ate. Two plates of yel­low­tail, two hand rolls of soft-shell crabs (per­fectly fresh fish, prob­a­bly not sus­tain­able, but fan­tas­tic, and crunchy tem­pura to die for). A com­mu­nal pot of wasabi, a jug of soy sauce, and a host of dishes fly­ing by that I could not iden­tify. I nearly grabbed a plate of what I hoped was tuna in a spicy sauce, but found out just in time it was roe of some kind. No thank you. If it’s not caviar I don’t want roe, and I don’t even like caviar. Shrimp sushi, tuna sashimi, finally a cut roll of some­thing vaguely cucum­ber and avo­cado with prob­a­bly crab stick, and I couldn’t eat another bite. There were weird plates of mashed pota­toes with spring onions, gor­geous look­ing shrimp tem­pura which I will try next time, and salmon sashimi that I just didn’t have the appetite for. I said good­bye to my lovely com­pan­ions, picked up my dishes and paid… 14 quid. A mir­a­cle. I can­not wait to go back. Per­fect pre-theatre.

And then it was… James. I have never seen him, until last night, live. He was a rev­e­la­tion. Every time his head turned even slightly toward the audi­ence, the blue, blue bea­con of his vul­ner­a­ble, tragic gaze was beamed out­ward… he did not have to speak. But he did. And those iconic move­ments, very spare, very bal­letic, that I’ve seen on screen, were all there in per­son. No wasted move­ments, no acci­den­tal ges­tures. A gor­geous play of fam­ily tragedy in what seemed to me a clear copy of the Don­ald Judd studio/home at Spring and Greene Street, our old stomp­ing grounds in SoHo. The entire cast was cred­itable with believable-ish Amer­i­can accents, but James… his char­ac­ter haunted by the silence, neglect, genius, tor­ment of his father, the acci­den­tal love of the woman he’s taken from his part­ner, the sense of betrayal. If you go, sus­pend judg­ment for the first half which, it is true, runs slow. The sec­ond half more than makes up for it, and you’ll find your­self dur­ing the tube ride home ask­ing, “So why…?”

Just lovely. I looked up dur­ing MY tube ride home and there was my friend Char­lotte, com­ing home from a din­ner in the city. We kicked some­one out of the seat next to me and chat­ted all the way home, feel­ing grate­ful, ridicu­lously, for a fel­low walker home through Ham­mer­smith in the dark.

Tonight out AGAIN to Maryle­bone for a lovely sort of pan-London drinks party for a mixed group of Obama peo­ple, banker peo­ple, fem­i­nist peo­ple, arts peo­ple. All in all a group I could prob­a­bly have hap­pily spent sev­eral hours with but, alas, I had cho­sen this evening to teach my child, via mobile phone on the way home in the car, to turn on the oven AND the stove, hence mak­ing pos­si­ble a baked salmon and mashed potato din­ner. She was not markedly any more self-confident when we got home than when we left, but I have high hopes. Needed an evening home eat­ing my own food any­way… and we’re out AGAIN tomor­row night for a din­ner party. This is def­i­nitely not a nor­mal week.

The weather has been unbe­liev­ably gor­geous for the past week or so: blue skies every day, lovely breezes at night. But being Eng­land we know it can­not last and of course the weath­er­man aids and abets us in this fear. Just lis­ten to this fore­cast… “It’s lovely and blue up there now, but soon, we might have a few spit-spots of rain, look at this rain band, but then it will tend to fiz­zle out, really almost com­pletely, as we approach lunchtime… to give way to just a sort of patchy cloud.” That’s the Eng­lish spirit for you, lov­able as always.

I’ll end with a sad good­bye to the lovely Natasha Richard­son, just my age, leav­ing behind two lit­tle boys and a fam­ily who loved her. An extra kiss and hug for every­one you love tonight.