1. The Blues Kitchen

I can’t believe I have managed to go so many years of nights out in Camden without finding this place. Blues/jazz restaurant and bar, with chequered baby blue wallpaper, little wooden tables and a great American-south feel.  The kind of place where the barmaid whose been making your cocktails all night gets up on stage and belts out “Ain’t No Sunshine” with a voice that will knock the olive out of your martini. Head there on a Wednesday night for 2-for-1 cocktails (making them an amazing £3.50 each). And if you’re into Bourbon, they have quite an impressive selection. Cocktail recommendation: The Gin Julep.

www.theblueskitchen.com

London lovin’

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”

So said Samuel Johnson, one of the many writers and artists helplessly absorbed in an ongoing love affair with London town. I, now in London for the a while before I disappear to another capital, would like to test his unbounded love for the thrilling streets of the capital.

Admittedly, I am already a bit of a London elitist myself. After many stays in many European cities, I always return to London thrilled to be back somewhere where the buses are red, the sky is grey and the people are every colour under the sun. But, having spent three years at university outside this multicoloured capital, I, the permanent defender of everything “London”, feel the need to justify my own love affair with the city and rediscover the crooks and crannies that make it what it is. Whatever that identity may be.

So whilst I’m here, I will endeavour to visit places in London that I’ve never been to before and make a record of them in blog form; a short and sweet review of any restaurants, bars, cafes, parks, streets, theatres and the like which I happen to discover whilst back in the capital. So, when I leave it again, this time, I hope, on a more permanent basis to another exciting capital, I will be certain that my love for London can never be usurped.

“A sunny place for shady people”

Travelling along the Cote d’Azur, it does not take long to understand why F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of American New World decadence was set on the French Riviera of the 1920’s. The strip of French coast-line, with its average of 300 days of sunshine a year, is still as beautiful and glittering as the lavish world of Dick and Nicole Diver, the wealthy, glamorous but fatally tragic duo of Tender is the Night. The Divers’ world is one which oozes money and decadence, a world which slots perfectly into the the sun-drenched towns along the alluringly blue Mediterranean coast line. It is hard to envisage the tragedy of the novel, with its morass of broken families and identities, taking place in the charming winding streets of each pastel-coloured “vieille ville". And yet, ironically, it is the persistent sunshine which brings out the darker edge in this scenic setting. It is the sun which makes the coast glitter in a way which suggests a restless impermanence, a shroud of volatile and intangible light. Perhaps this feeling is induced by mere paranoia on my part, an impact of the tragic outcome of the novel still firmly imprinted in my mind. Or perhaps, it is the feeling of money in the air, the awareness that this is a slightly rootless world constructed on paper, ink and rays of sun, without anything hugely substantial holding it to the ground. In places such as Beaulieu, Ville Franche and Antibes, the big coastal houses and the littering of private yachts certainly endorse this notion. In Saint Jean Cap-Ferrat, the Rothschild Villa with its intricately designed numerous gardens and 18th century style house, stands again as a reminder of the sheer overflow of money that existed here in the early twentieth century.

Nowhere, however, is this hedonistic excess more obvious than in Monaco, a place of tall, grey concrete, and big, big bucks. The private yachts are stacked high and mighty in its port, almost on top of each other, creating a mountain of luxury which greets you as you enter the tax-free city state. Lamborghini’s and Ferrari’s drive past on the roads which annually stage the Formula One Grand Prix. This is the 21st century equivalent of the Diver world, hovering above the ground idealistically and aimlessly, totally divorced from reality. Like the £35,000 bottle of champagne on the bar menu, it is total insanity. And yet, almost a century after the money, sex and tragedy of Fitzgerald’s world, it persists, the sun still beautifully shining on.

Photos all my own