Dinner with Gordon Ramsay...

Okay, not really.

But my friend Brenda was recently bemoaning the fact that she owns eleven cook books and has never made anything out of any of them. She and I had recently discovered that, by dint of our husbands' jobs, each of us often dines alone and I was reminded of a most excellent arrangement that I used to have with a neighbour of mine when I lived up in Seymour. 'Captain John' was stationed at Puckapunyal but lived off-base (and was, in fact, the only person under 70 in our little block of units). We both got fed up with cooking for one, so one night a week we'd each cook dinner for the other.

So simple! So tonight, Brenda and I instituted what we hope will be the first of many 'Ramsay night' dinners, where we take turns cooking from her Gordon Ramsay 'fast food' cookbook. First cab off the rank was panfried cod with caramelised onion and steamed greens, and a tomato and basil salad - see?! (This is our first attempt to do arty food photography). We're not sure about Gordon's preparation times - he swears every meal can be put on the table in 30 minutes - but then, we suspect he spends his time actually cooking, not talking for 17 minutes and realising the fish is over done! Tasted okay though. B's turn in a fortnight... bring it on!

Christiania

Exloring somewhere new is always memorable, but it wasn't really until today that Copenhagen finally grew on me.

In part, it's because we spent the day meandering through the old town, past stately buildings, along canals choked with moored boats, stopping to admire a heron in a lake in the middle of a park, staring at the graceful rides soaring skywards in the Tivoli Gardens (classier by far than your overlit anglo sideshow tat). And for all these things I wished I still had one more day.

But the real objective of today was to see a place Mikko told me about for years: the free people's republic of Christiania, declared by bikies and peace activists on former Ministry of Defence land in the 1970s and one of the world's great living examples of communal living.

I suspect the reality that Lissy and I explored today would fall a long way short of the Finn's anarchist ideals: "they just said Fuck off. You police not comin' here. And people power stayed," he used to say. "And they sent in the army, and the cops and they had riots and the people won".

It's true that battles like that have been fought here. But Christiania has been represented in City Hall since 1975. The people themselves elected to clean up 'Pusher street', and many of the one thousand people who live here now have kids who attend the onsite school. The local administration proudly boasts that their homes consistently exceed the local building regulations and that taxes and utilities bills are more likely to be paid on time here than anywhere else in the capital.

In the face of such massive bureaucracy, you understand why Christianians (and the city) need the million tourists a year that visit the site, and view the overpriced tourist shops, the £10 burgers as more an economic necessity - even though it feels a bit like selling out. If it helps maintain the rest of the ideal... perhaps...

Relics of the more fiercely independent past still stand: 'bevar Christiania' flags are everywhere, the Moon Fisher Cafe cynically boasts that after "6000 police raids since 2004" it's "Europe's safest cafe". You can still be offered drugs on Pusher street if you eyeball the right people. (Relax Mum!) And the public open space is rich with Tibetan prayer flags and other messages of peace. But a perfect anarchy? Not in the sense of a place where rules are not needed. I wondered for hours what Mikko would make of it. It was odd to be confronted with the reality of someone else's envisioned dream (I have no idea if he ever made it here himself): something that looks very different from the ideal he always described, which was an unrealistic vision that he ultimately shattered for himself anyway... Sigh.... There were quarts of tears - not least because I was travelling with 'past people' in tow - Lissy rang Ange and MsHelle and together we wrapped ourselves in a cloak of people who live life every day embodying a vision like this community and its ideals of freedom, spirituality and peace. And I realised that just because one person's dream didn't pan out, the dream doesn't have to be over. I really do wish I had just one more day...

Denmark: new experiences with old friends in a very old land

I've been jumping out of my skin waiting for this week: the arrival of viking raiders from Australia on Danish shores, for a summer of rampaging adventure. Fellow one-time Normans Fathma, Josh, Jeff, and Catherine, and new faces from the group they're now a part of, the Jomsvikings, have been planning this trip for months, and I was just so honoured to be adopted by their Sudhird, or southern garrison, for a leg of their journey. Also joining us was the lovely Lissy, a viking veteran of at least 3 different incarnations back home, who moved to Oslo in March. My Danish is non-existant but Lissy's a Norse veteran, and after an overnight flight (Ants had dropped me at the bus from Oxford at 1am) her familiar grin was a welcome sight indeed at Copenhagen railway station. She's travelled in Denmark before and been offered the use of a friend's home while they were away. Just 15 minutes from the town centre and exquisitely European - from the shape of the doors to the huge double glazed windows, the o-so-clever kitchen and a furniture style that's light on woodwork and heavy on books and art - it was hard not to feel at home.

Our travels started with lunch - Danish beef, lashings of potato, fish, decadent wine, lashings of gossip and news from home. Yum. Then, as it was Wednesday, the day Lonely Planet tells us museums are free, we headed off to the Royal Armouries and the National collection. Wow. Weapons - big choppy blades and spears, horse armour, gorgeous ivory-inlaid rifles, cannon - up to 200 pounders. I knew Ants would spit chips over my photos from the Armouries and I just wished he was here! But better yet was to come at the National Museet. This was truly the stuff of legend - the things we've drooled over for years in books: still shiny and bright a thousand years after they were wrought, and right before our eyes! The Jelling Cup: the Mamman Axe: the Gundestrup Cauldron, Ogham stones and case after case of cloakpins, rings, brooches and familiar pieces that we've been asking Roy Castell to cast at home for years. I nearly cried when I saw the original of Mikko's massive silver cloakpin: perfect in every detail. Oh wow... Pints followed - it's so damn hard to find Scandi cider that isn't sickly sweet, but we did okay - a rummage around for a supermarket and finally, a home cooked meal (Liss used to be a chef and whizzed up the works) before an early night, ahead of more adventures planned for tomorrow...

Roskilde!

I think Copenhagen is going to take a bit of getting to know, but Roskilde, which was Denmark's capital when the vikings ruled the waves, started tugging on heart strings from the moment we left the train station.First stop was the cathedral - the only one in the country until about 100 years ago - burial place of generations of kings named Christian and Frederik. I'm a total sucker for churches, but I've never seen one like this. Austere stone outside hides a treasure trove of gorgeousness inside. It seems that successive kings have each sought to leave a mark by adding a new niche in whatever styles was deemed contemporary in their day, so walking through this place is like wandering through very centuries of art and culture.
From there, it's just a short, pretty walk down to the harbourside home of one of the most famous shipyards in the world - and where we were reunited with Josh, and introduced to his travelbuddies, Daren and Rowan. I swear I don't know whose eyes, of all of us, were wider...
Roskilde town stands at the end of a long, shallow fjord, that in days of yore could be reached by ships sailing up any of 3 channels. As Danish supremacy on the high seas was challenged, around 1070 AD, the town occupants sank 7 or more ships in the fjord to block all channels but one- the hardest to navigate. Centuries passed and the ships were forgotten except for tales that in the mysterious 'reefs' in the harbour hid ghost ships - until the 1960s. Pieces of 5 ships dug up back then are still being painstakingly washed and preserved and put into a massive puzzle, with more than 20,000 pieces to each ship, and nothing to mark one boat from the next in their jumbled piles of timbers.

But even better than the guided tour that spun these stories so compellingly - Lissy, Josh and I donned life vests and went for a sail! 'You know you have to row' the woman in the ticket office had said, when we bought our tickets. We didn't know that the Aussies in the group, having travelled the furthest, would also get to man the tiller and the sail lines. We were all buzzing as we adjourned to a cafe in the town, for another amazing meal, lashings of cider, and yet more endless chatter. Daren and Josh, with US driving experience, piloted us down the wrong side of the roads all the way home, and we collapsed into sleep. Knackered again. And deliriously happy.

Trelleborg

I've been blogging my Denmark adventures for hours now, and I still haven't touched on one of the most amazing experiences of all...

Trelleborg fortress was said to have been the site of a mighty battle a thousand years and more ago, between Svein Forkbeard and his father Harald Bluetooth. Trelleborg was under Harald's protection, so what better way to pick a fight with the old man than to sack his town and pillage the townsfolk? Svein and his army then sat down to get dead rolling drunk (like all good norsemen!) and had their asses comprehensively wupped when Harald and his honchos turned up the next morning.

Svein, being the son of a royal, was merely exiled instead of being killed outright... he and his men sailed West and terrorised the land they found there... until Svein's descendant, Canute, was finally accepted as the English king.

So all that was amazing - as is the long house and the amazing fighting, the long house and other period buildings that have been reconstructed on the site. But better than all that was that, among the thousand or so re-enactors who turned up for this week-long battle, were Fathma, and Jeff and Katherine, and Josh and the boys, and Lissy, and me.

And cherry mead (the Dane's bless 'em, call it Vikingseblod).

A picture tells a thousand words, so I'll let this lot say the rest.

But if I can't get Ants back here next year, I'm coming alone if need be...

Silly signs...

Okay, after all that text heavy babble, this bit is easy to keep short.
These signs obviously mean something very different in Danish to the way they read in English.
I'm sayin nothin!

Saul music festival

My mate Jules (Julian - could a chap have a more english name?!) has been going to festivals with a certain group of his mates for about the last 25 years... so it's something of an honour to be allowed to tag along and be an honorary 'one o the blokes' for a weekend. And what a weekend!

The Saul Canal boat Festival is in Gloucestershire, is little and intimate and brilliant craic! We arrived Friday night and blagged our way onto a spot at the folk club, which was held below decks on an old metal barge, which had brilliant accoustics and - as we learned when a jet of water streamed onto the stage - a leaky tarp! Still - we had lovely feedback and one of the real performers thought I was someone famous before the weekend was out. Shucks!

But the star attractions were still to come: the big names included the likes of James Fagan and Nancy Kerr (well known to the Half Moon set and due at Oxford folk club next weekend to plug their awesome new CD), rising stars Jackie Oates and Pete Taylor, medieval musicianists Horses Brawle, Ray Moore (probably no relation to Christy, but also an Irishman), and Jules and the lads' favourites - Show of Hands. But my favourite new find of the weekend was the o-so-composed Ruth Notman (below), who at just 18 has an A-level in music and 5 years' experience singing in folk clubs around Nottingham. Wow. Jules was wowed too - but more by the stunning good looks of Ruth's cellist Rachel... I did try to remind him that these lasses are only 5 years older than his students, but the man was undeterred...He wasn't the weekends biggest dork, however. Having drunk 10 pints of cider during Sunday, I proceeded to make a complete twat of myself trying to be fascinating around Steve Knightley (Willz, I'm sorry!). On the upside, I spent even more on CDs than I had on ciders...ah well.

The other advantage of this festival is that it's held just up the road from Jules' mate Dean's house. Dean's house used to be a pub - about 400 years ago - and still has its own taproom and bar, where the boys can smoke inside, every liqueur and spirit you can imagine is lying in the rack, and beer is bought in by the keg for weekends like this one! So we were able to drive in and out of the gig each day, wading through mud at times but as all venues were under cover - who really cared!To cap the weekend off, I had a divine half price head massage just as the sun came out on Sunday, and the best Thai curry I have yet found in England - for less than 4 quid. Could it get better than this? Only if Ants were here!

Tewkesbury 1471-2008

The Battle of Tewkesbury is, to high medieval re-enactors, what the battle of Hastings is to Dark Ages nuts. Our friends Simon and Stella first introduced us to "Tewkers" and the concept of bill fighting over a few beers in a pub in Eynsham. When Ants started working at Warwick castle, our debut at this mass battle for the benefit of the adoring public was only a matter of time...
So, think War of the Roses, cousins battling distant cousins for the throne of England (and sometimes, possibly, topping rellies much closer to home to ensure they have the best claim on their side..). The Earl of Warwick, Richard 'The Kingmaker' Neville, can't make up his mind which side he's gonna be on, having backed Lancaster, then York (or was it the other way round), and then gone back again...

Anyway, there were a bunch of key battles in 1471 and this was one of 'em, and I can't even remember who won anymore, but the point is, we all went even though it had pissed with rain for days beforehand, only got a little bit wet, and slept on the floor of a 14th century house right opposite Tewkesbury cathedral (okay, possibly it's just a very large church - but really impressive!). One of our club members lives there - he's an antiques dealer. The floor was slopey as hell and 'orribly hard and I banged my head 3 times on the lintel going in and out of the doorg (Anthony, despite being nearly a foot taller than me, missed every time - bastard!), but the point is, this house WAS THERE when the original battle happened, which is even more cool than the fact that in 2008, thousands of thronging crowds turned out to see us, a thousand or so re-enactors re-enact the battle, shop at the very cool market, and listen to medieval bagpipes (see below).

Cracking weekend!