Lunch at Dinner with Brass Band Accompaniment

Dave and I were at Marble Arch yesterday, trying to catch the tube, and we were surprised to find the arch covered by scaffolding. Apparently it's undergoing a big renovation/restoration. It normally looks like this (third picture).

Why were we at Marble Arch? Well, it was the conclusion of a long afternoon! We met up for lunch with one of Dave's friends from the world of band directing, Scott, and his partner Matt, who are visiting London. Scott's here on a sabbatical and Matt just joined him a week ago or so. We ate at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel -- a perfectly natural place for lunch, right?

Dave and I went to Dinner 12 years ago (!) and I remember being impressed by it. We liked it this time as well. We had a table by the big windows overlooking Hyde Park, where I ate adventurous dishes like buttered crab loaf and salmon dressed in champagne. In creating the menu, Blumenthal supposedly drew inspiration from English dishes served hundreds of years ago, but needless to say he's tweaked those ancient recipes quite a bit. I doubt anyone in the early 1700s was serving salmon with champagne gel.

Here was Dave's appetizer -- the "meat fruit," which is just what it says. It's a chicken liver parfait made to look like an orange, down to the tiniest detail. Again, probably a bit more refined than it was in 1500, which is supposedly when the dish was created.

While we sat at the table a marching band went by the windows in full regalia -- red or black jackets and tall plumed hats, accompanied by chaps in old-fashioned bowler hats and medals on their chests. We wondered what on earth was going on, and apparently it was an event known as Cavalry Sunday. There's a video of the band here in case you're interested. I don't see the gents in bowler hats in the video so maybe they came onto the program later. Anyway, that was an interesting surprise.

After lunch we walked across the park, despite massive quantities of blowing tree pollen that made me feel like my face had swollen to twice its normal size. We got to Marble Arch and found the tube station closed, so we wound up taking a bus home, but that was easy enough. There's one that runs from Marble Arch straight up Finchley Road practically to our door.

I gave everything in the garden a good watering yesterday evening, even the grass. I used the sprinkler, which we almost never put out, but we've had no rain in weeks and none is in the forecast. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I ran that sprinkler for probably two hours, moving it around so everything got a good drenching. I'm already hearing talk of drought and a possible hosepipe ban later in the summer because of reduced rainfall, so I figured we'd better water while we can.

Remember how I was lamenting the absence of squirrels in the garden this year? Well, I take it all back. Suddenly they're everywhere, and they're ravenous. Our oriental poppy was all set to bloom, sending up a fat fuzzy bud on a stalk, and I was so excited because it hasn't bloomed in several years. And then yesterday morning I went out and found it decapitated, the bud gnawed on the ground. I suppose, to a squirrel, it looked like some sort of exotic nut. No poppies this year. ☹️