Mixing It Up
It’s always important to disturb the algorithm by inviting a few challenging combinations of guests to keep things fresh and alive.
We relocated to Fishguard, Pembrokeshire five months ago, time flies. We’re organising our first gathering to be held on the quayside this coming Sunday, so naturally we’ve been agonising over the guest list. A classic conundrum where the combinations are endlessly entertaining inside your head, but potentially fireworks when it comes to seating those guests around your table.
Back in Salisbury where our pool of friends consisted of a few hundred, and after living amongst them for over forty years, you had a pretty good idea who got on with who, and who distinctively didn’t get on with whoever else, the list almost made itself. Although it was always important to disturb the algorithm by inviting a few clashes along, a few challenging combinations to keep things fresh and alive. That’s what gatherings are for, whether they be intimate dinner parties, or more elaborate, exuberant crowds downing bowl food and beer on a very narrow strip of cobblestones adjacent a five-meter-deep harbour of water.
In Fishguard, well Cilgwyn, there’s a strong tradition of guests bringing food contributions to such elaborate gatherings and with an influx of Spanish and Peruvian neighbours, the hot ticket is tortilla. I’ve written about this before, but the level of competition the humble Spanish onion and potato omelette invokes is astonishing. Otherwise generous and warm individuals become quite vitriolic when describing the efforts of their friends and family even, in producing, in their eyes, an inferior product.
There are only three ingredients, potato, onion, egg, along with olive oil, salt and pepper, that’s it. The results are remarkably different, but the passion those differences inspire can be overwhelming. I produced my classic tortilla, one that has been praised for over twenty years and offered it up to the Spaniards a couple of months ago, at another gathering. ‘Pero, no es tortilla’ they gasped, and the reason it categorically wasn’t a tortilla was that it had smoked paprika in the onions and nutmeg in the egg. In their mind, no spices are used, and to be honest, in Spain they seldom are.
Then there’s the texture and colour, the classic, produced by Nieves Barragan Mohacho at Sabor in Heddon Street, London, just off Regent Street is rooted in the culture of the north of Spain, in the Basque country, Bilbao to be precise. Pale yellow in colour with a very runny interior, eaten on a plate with a fork and sometimes a spoon. Jose Pizarro, who hails from much further south in Extremadura and has a couple of restaurants in Bermondsey Street, to name but one location, I’m reliably informed encourages friendly tortilla competitions amongst local chefs and restaurants. Not something you would expect from a gathering of Italian chefs battling to produce the finest risotto, but maybe that happens too.
Back to the gathering, the great joy of moving to a new home, county, country, away from all your friends, not that moving away from friends is a great joy, but the joy of meeting new people, is that they have no idea who you are. And you have the opportunity to be whoever you would like to be. You even have the opportunity to be the person you’ve been trying to be for most of your life, if only your parents, family and friends hadn’t been so vehement in wanting you to be the versions of yourself that fitted best with them.
So after five months, we’ve gathered a group of diverse people to celebrate with. A mixed group of individuals who collectively reflect the mixed group of personalities we inherently are. I’m sure we all have collections of friends we would never invite to the same gathering; they just wouldn’t get on. My days of fox hunting with The Wilton Hunt and the throng I jostled with at the Hunt Ball, were certainly not the same crowd I shared many a field with, jumping up and down to music of a predominantly repetitive beat, to quote the Criminal Justice Bill in the early nineties. Nor would the Cambridge undergraduates, friends in the mid-eighties, have ever got on with my pogoing mates at the 100 club in Oxford Street, or my shoe-shining soul boy mates at Wigan Casino in the mid-seventies.
Then there’s the great phrase, ‘you can pick your friends but not your family.’ And how true that is when you’re somewhere new. And that’s what you do. Back in the land of old mates, you would be introduced to people by other friends who thought you might get on, have something in common. But here in Fishguard that luxury doesn’t exist, so it’s back to basics at the local brewery where you, literally eye someone, or a group of people up and think to yourself, ‘I quite like the look of them, I’m just going to wade in and introduce myself’, and that’s what you do, and so far the results have been rewarding.
I stumbled into a conversation with a guy a few weeks ago, which quickly migrated to the topic of food, restaurants, chefs and recipes and particularly to the restaurant Barrafina, which is a favourite from many years ago. He was the business partner of the guy who runs the Bluestone brewery who I’ve got to know over the years I’ve been coming to Pembrokeshire. He was telling me that, together they were about to open a Spanish restaurant in St Davids, in the south of Pembrokeshire at the end of this summer.
Beside myself with excitement, I invited them all to supper a few weeks later to get an update on their plans and to feed them one of my favourite Spanish dishes from Barrafina, Arrocina beans with chorizo, morcilla and pork belly. I messaged the Bluestone owner, Simon saying the invitation was open to any significant other the new guy may have. Turns out he had two significant others, both guys, and I was about to entertain my first throuple. ‘How do you think that works’ said Simon, ‘best not to overthink it’ I replied.
Naturally it was a great evening, and the lads went down a storm in our household. We seem to be gathering an intriguing, eclectic, entertaining, new group of friends, with food at the core whilst simultaneously, blasting the algorithms out of the water.
