food porn

I don't think it's that surprising that the topic of choice at dinner last friday, between 7 expats with good jobs and a fairly wide range of conversational topics at their fingertips, chose to focus on BBC food for much of the evening. No fleeting reference for this channel of choice, long and involved discussions took place about the relative merits of the programs, the cinematography and comparitive benefits. The interesting part really, was that the chefs who are supposedly the stars, and the main draw that anchor the program, are peripheral at best to your average expat. The real star is the UK.

At the moment I'm watching the River House, which differs from the River Cafe in that the star is a beardie wierdie who lives off the land rather than pretentious Fulham women pretending to be Italian. The point is, as annoying as both cast of characters may be, both of their programs offer soothing glimpses of the land we've all left.

The River House currently has any old fishing bloke from the West Country looking dubiously at the bumbling host. Glistening rivers and the sun glancing through the trees is all I'm really watching. The River Cafe features someone with heavily highlighted hair shaving a truffle on some plain pasta, raving about the smell and charging seventy pounds. I'm looking out of the window behind them and remembering working in Hammersmith and wandering down that very stretch of river, or peering out of the big glass windows as the rain whipped horizontal, dreading my ride home on the trusty scooter.

Which is why BBC Food is good for me. It reminds me that there is a place which is my other home, and there are wonderful things about it I should cherish, as well as a number of reasons that I don't live there. Horizontal rain being fairly close to the top of that list.