Not blogged for a while due to a combination of circumstances - pressure of various work commitments mainly. I've been working for both the Evening Standard, as a reporter and the Guardian, as commissioning editor on a supplement about, ahem, sensible drinking. The supplement is out tomorrow, when I will talk about it further then.
Other notable occurrences over the past few weeks include my older son's 16th birthday - celebrated with Batman and pizza, my birthday, celebrated with bodyboarding and steak in Cornwall and then Leo's GCSE results, just good enough to get him into the 6th form, cue much relief all round and a another movies'n'pizza celebration. (Hellboy 11 as it happens - mostly terrific fun and I'm confident del Toro will make a fantastic job of the Hobbit, although I suspect it will be more ghoulish and scary than the book or the Jackson films)
In the middle of all this work came a week in Cornwall - all the family in isolated rented cottage, perpetual rain, moody teenagers, blocked toilets, get the idea?. Despite the rain, Cornwall was as wonderful as ever; we couldnt go on the beach very much, so we went to see some standing stones, fished at Porthleven (with almost no success, apart from one small fish for leo and some crabs) went to the fabulous Roskillys farm and Trevarno gardens and generally pottered around. The weather eventually cancelled our much anticipated but daily delayed mackerel fishing trip, but we did manage to buy some terrific sole, crab and brill from the Quayside Fish shop in Porthleven, one of the foodie destinations I recommended in a piece I've written for the British Airways magazine, High Life, which is due out any day now.

The only proper sunny day happened to fall on my birthday, when we had breakfast in the garden and went to Sennen cove, near Lands End, where we ate Cornish pasties on the beach and I donned a wetsuit for the first time and learnt to body board - much to the amusement of my sons.
Anyway, and this is the point of this posting, I wanted to go for a meal in the evening to celebrate my birthday and there were a couple of places I had in mind, Cornwall now being one of the best areas for decent food in the UK. But a mile up the road we had discovered a promising, very new organic farm shop, Kernow Organics which stocked a good range of mostly local fruit and vegetables, cheeses and a range of other organic produce. It was clearly modelling itself on the fantastic Gear Farm shop a few miles away on the Lizard, which sets the benchmark for farm shops anywhere - fabulous produce from local organic farms, fish from Helford River, home made pasties and other goodies. But Kernow Organics has clearly decided to go a little further and open a restaurant, where we decided to eat that evening. I was a little wary because the menu was a bit limited, but they did promise organic Aberdeen Angus steak, so we decided to give it a go. But while it was not an unmitigated disaster, it was a bit of a disappointment: there was only one portion left of the chicken dish my sons wanted (why? it was only essentially grilled chicken with a sauce; there should have been more in the fridge) the steak may have been prime Aberdeen Angus, but it was bland, the vegetables may have been organic, but they were too plain, presented with little care and dumped on the plates, rather than served separately. And my heart sank when I saw the chef chopping avocados (for our dip starter) and peeling potatoes (for the saute potatoes to go with the steak)- simple stuff that could have been prepared well in advance, rather than lead to our meal dragging on for hours. I could not understand why was there no fish on the menu? This is Cornwall!!!!
The service was a bit amateurish and the stripped pine ambiance akin to a vegetarian restaurant in about 1985. And the wine, considering the vast variety of organic wines now available, was dire:limited to a choice or red or white; the former being indifferent. It was a shame because the owner-chef was very welcoming and it was a place clearly full of good intentions. Some of the food -the home baked bread, the Stilton/broccoli soup, was very good. I really hope that, since it had only been open a few weeks, these were just teething troubles. I wish it well - but I think the lesson is that it's no good to just open a place to capitalise both on the boom in Cornish eating and on the organic movement and hope for the best. It has to work as a decent place to eat as well.