It’s been over a month since we last put an entry on the blog. Time flies when life gets in the way, doesn’t it? Work, travel and other hobbies have been making much demands on our free time, and we’ve had to oblige lest we go stir crazy from lack of variety. Certainly, food is one of our interests, but we decided to take a short break from writing about cooking and eating so that we could get a new (and perhaps fresher) perspective on the kind of material to put on this blog.

Going back and reading through the entries on this blog, they could best be described as a collage of procedural articles on cooking or play-by-play descriptions of where and what we’ve eaten. And that is really quite different than how we had originally envisioned our posts to be. Christina had started this blog with the intention of sharing different out-of-the-ordinary experiences with other people. She wanted to not only describe the food, but also relate it to memories or experiences that others could identify with. This is of course easy to conceptualize but a lot harder to execute. Banging out post after post with “meaning” in relatively short order did not come easily or naturally, and we soon found ourselves falling into the habit of writing a diary about what we cooked and where we ate. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it just isn’t what we had started out to do.

Those of you who watch Top Gear will know who Jeremy Clarkson is. For those who don’t, Clarkson is an English television personality and auto journalist with a carefully cultivated polarizing personality. You either love to hate him or hate to love him. Mostly, it has to do with him being a right prat on occassion, which is pretty much in keeping with his act of being a 12-year old trapped in a 50-year-old 6′4″ body. He is also a bloody brilliant journalist. He is supposed to write about cars, but if you read his work, you will find that he does just about anything but. Most auto journalists follow a standard formula when writing an article – they describe the car, describe the features/options/prices, describe the drive, etc etc. It’s all very informative and very technical and chock full of information. In fact, it’s everything except entertaining. Clarkson on the other hand, couldn’t care less about any of the stuff the other journos get in a huff over. Sure, he might give a perfunctory description of the features in a car (usually in the context of something he finds silly), but what he mainly does is to write about the car against the backdrop of a larger, funnier metaphorical story. For instance, how could anybody relate poor eyesight to a Citroen C5? Clarkson can, nonsensical though it may be. We enjoy his humor (and studied insults) – take the following two paragraphs for example:

However, I could clearly see that the new C5 was a very handsome car. It sits among other four-door saloons – from BMW, Audi, Ford, Honda and so on – looking much like Angelina Jolie would while sitting in a Wakefield bus queue.

What’s more, we are told it’s no longer built by uninterested Algerians in a factory made from straw, and that as a result it is somehow German. Obviously there’s no way of knowing at this stage whether any of this is true, but I doubt that it is. The French have never been able to make a car that lasts, any more than the Germans have been able to make a soufflé.

In two short paragraphs, he manages to slag off an English town and diss three cultures while making (rather effectively) a point about the car’s shape and quality. No, Clarkson’s not Hemingway. His articles are by no means the height of intellectually stimulating or thought-provoking writing. In fact, Clarkson’s articles are sometimes downright silly. But they are always good for a light, entertaining read.

That “entertaining” quality is something that we are working hard to capture in our future posts. No, we don’t have the comedic writing talent of Clarkson, but that’s no reason not to try. If our attempts don’t come off well, the only people suffering will be you, our readers! No skin off our backs really. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won’t, but we’re sure going to give it a whirl. Watch this space…

Christina & ET