Blog Archives
A London Art-U-Cation with Le Meridien at Frieze
A luxury hotel, lashings of fine dining and a whirlwind of contemporary art? Chez Epicurienne, that’s what I call a killer combination that I’d be happy to dive into on any day of the week. Courtesy of the Le Méridien hotel group, I was recently invited to partake of just such a tantalising synthesis of sensory stimulants during an arts-focussed stay-cation, based at their landmark hotel in London’s Piccadilly. I’m still recovering, in a good way.
A top hotel’s relationship to food is a no-brainer; the two go hand-in-hand, but where does art enter the equation? In this case, Le Méridien, the forty-year old international hotel chain, has incorporated art into its properties so that wherever guests look, art will meet their eyes – be it on arrival, on relaxing, even on using their key card. Steering Le Méridien’s artistic intentions is Jérôme Sans, the French art curator and critic, in his capacity as the LM Cultural Curator. What’s more, for the past five years Le Méridien has been a principle partner and supporter of an arts initiative called OFT – the Outset/ Frieze Art Fair Fund to Benefit the Tate Collection. Through OFT, the Tate is able to bypass purchasing bureaucracy to acquire work by emerging artists featured at the annual London fair for contemporary art: Frieze.
Over two days, our small group of bloggers along with various members of hotel management and Le Meridien’s PR company, Fleishman Hillard, managed to experience one art discussion panel, several types of unforgettable hors d’oeuvre, one unusual afternoon tea, six delicious meals, one international art fair, three world-famous art galleries, exhibitions various, two nights of sumptuous sleep, meetings with key art experts and personalities, a lesson in Le Méridien’s history and brand and various forms of London transport – including the water kind. For obvious reasons, I will not attempt to squeeze everything listed above into one post, lest it resemble a hefty artistic monograph. Instead, I invite you to join me on a multi-post tour of Le Méridien’s London art-u-cation. It’ll be an inspiration – for locals and visitors alike.
Photo above courtesy of the Le Meridien website, http://www.lemeridienpiccadilly.co.uk
London to Honfleur in Ten Sleepy Hours
Boring is definitely not a word in my vocabulary and, for better or worse, it certainly doesn’t apply to my travels with Monsieur. Invariably, be it on the first day of our time away or the last, something will go wrong. For instance, on honeymoon I got food poisoning, on our way to Venice we got diverted to Rome thanks to a transport strike. I swear I’m the only person I know who has been stuck on a train going nowhere, in the middle of nowhere in Germany, which is usually über-efficient (except for during my visits), and at one point in time, Monsieur’s suitcase was so frequently delayed or misplaced that the lost luggage people at Heathrow knew his name.
So when Monsieur and I set off for France recently, we were prepared for our usual dose of misadventure, but not necessarily with immediate effect.
Traffic in London was diabolical. It took hours plural to get out of town, which meant, naturally, that we missed our ferry, but not before a maniac in a metallic orange car tried to run us off the road by overtaking us on the hard shoulder. Moral: never trust a man who drives a metallic orange car. Orange cars should be reserved for advertising purposes only.
So we finally reached Dover and checking the time I worked out that our ferry was about to dock in France. Darnit, we could have been there by now! We changed our tickets to a berth on the next available ferry, but it didn’t leave for hours plural and we had to pay £26.00 for the privilege of twiddling our thumbs. Moral: pay the extra for a flexible ticket OR take P&O, who allow passengers a three-hour window around their booking time so they can change to earlier or later ferries if required. But did we take our own advice? Hell, no. We showed allegiance to the tricolore and booked Seafrance. And Seafrance made us pay.
The fun part was yet to come. By the time we drove off the ferry in France, it was well past midnight local time and we were tired. But we had to drive. A long way. A very long way to the little Norman town of Honfleur.
2.5 hours isn’t that long when you say it out loud, unless you’re dog tired behind the wheel of a car, like Monsieur was. As designated navigator, I couldn’t doze off because (a) I had to read the map. In the dark. And (b) I felt obligated to make sure that Monsieur didn’t doze off and crash us both into oncoming traffic. Not that there was any oncoming traffic. It was too late for oncoming traffic. Oncoming traffic had sensibly gone home to bed.
After an hour of driving on blessedly empty roads we passed the turn off for the Baie de Somme. I sighed. If only the sweet little hotel I’d found there hadn’t been fully booked, we could be veering towards a warm bed right now. But it had been fully booked, so we still had a ninety-minute drive ahead of us. And at two in the morning, ninety minutes is a very, very long time. By now I was all but convinced that Monsieur and I would end up in a ditch before the drive was through. I hoped the air bags would work. Oh, me of little faith.
As we approached Le Havre, my attention switched from air bags to the sky; it was lit in the strangest of ways. In my dopey state I started to wonder why the Northern Lights were here. Shouldn’t they be in Scotland or somewhere further north? Above and around us the sky glowed a strange, flickering terracotta. It was far too early for dawn. Had a bomb gone off somewhere, perhaps? (Things always seem more apocalyptic to me at night and on checking my watch I could see that it was definitely still night.) Would we pass over yonder rise to find a big round spaceship like the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? No. There would be no entente cordiale between the Frenchman, the Pacific Chick and a bunch of inter-galactic joy-riding extra-terrestrials. Not tonight, anyway. We passed over yonder rise to find Le Havre. And for anyone who hasn’t seen Le Havre in the wee morning hours, I’ll try to describe it.
Le Havre is a massive port, the second largest in France, and among other things, a large proportion of the country’s oil deliveries arrive here in gigantic tankers. It glows thanks to all the lights from the port and warehouses and giant flames from multiple refineries. Driving through Le Havre was like driving through a Lego town lit with bright white fairy lights and fire. What’s more, there was no one on the road and we didn’t see a single human as we passed through, so where was everyone? Were they dozing off on the late shift? Keeping an eye on their safety meters? Or were they at home asleep while secret armies of Oompa Loompas fanned the flames? All I could see around us was industry, concrete, lights, fire and wire fencing. It was so bright, it could have been day. But, no. It was just before 3am.
Leaving Le Havre behind us we had the stunning stretch of the Pont de Normandie to ourselves as we crossed the dark River Seine to reach Honfleur and our motel. Most importantly, a comfy bed with our names on it was now close. In spite of all the delays in getting here, we’d done it and in spite of my fears would not be spending the night in a ditch by the side of the A29. A well-deserved rest was imminent, and there was the motel, but where on earth was the entrance? Would Epic and Monsieur ever get some rest? Would their travel adventures ever disappear? Hmmm. You’ll just have to tune in soon to find out.
The Punch Bunch
(Image courtesy of Toonpool)
London’s Hammersmith, where I work, is full of what some might call ‘colourful’ characters. There’s the evangelist who shouts “are you a SINNER or are you a WINNER?” through a loudspeaker at lunchtime, the He-She who bums cigarettes off anyone who hasn’t yet encountered him/her, scoring a big, fat FAIL from those who have, plenty of teenagers with prams and pushchairs (they’re not babysitting), and your fair share of people of working age who do everything but between the hours of 9 and 5.
Most of the time, it’s okay working around here, but sometimes I really do wish I could transport my entire office to a quieter part of town. Take last week, for instance. I was having a typically busy time at work so I popped down to a local deli to pick up a salad box to munch at my desk. “Back in five!” I called to my boss. Little did I realise how optimistic that was.
As I was chatting away to the deli girls, a couple of cars screeched to a halt in true Dukes of Hazzard style across from the shop, their occupants jumping out and breaking into immediate violence. Shouting ensued, attracting our attention away from food (not so easy) and onto a couple of women laying punches into a third who’d been pushed off her feet. Had speech bubbles been hanging in the air around the trio, they would have read “Kapow!” “Whallop!” “Bang!” “Crack!”. Please note: these were NOT teenagers in some petty brawl, rather grown women of some proportion who were apparently quite skilled in the art of beating each other to a pulp.
As one of the deli girls called the police, we locked ourselves in, just in case the thugs ended up punching each other so hard that they landed on our side of the street. They didn’t, thankfully, but we stood, mouths agape, as a valiant passerby attempted to stop the fight, only to have the girl with the strong left upper cut round on him. The poor chap backed off from an unrelenting torrent of verbal abuse until the three women went back in the ring, so to speak, hurling one practised punch after another.
Next, the burly men from the two cars joined the dispute, punching each other, trying to drag the women off each other, then punching the women. That wasn’t enough for one of the guys, who marched up to his chief opponent’s car, punching the windscreen so hard that it shattered. Meanwhile, the singled-out woman was being dragged along the ground by her hair by the two other women, so hard that her trousers were pulled down by her weight. A flash of wobbly, white butt later, she was back on her feet, pulling up her trousers with one hand as she jabbed the air with the other in a continuation of her display of temper at all the others, both men and women.
At this point community officers had appeared in force, encouraging the men to retreat to their cars in an attempt to drive away, but the officers stood in front of the cars to stop them, in spite of the fact that they could easily have become road kill. Then the real police arrived, cuffing the men, one of whom had had his wife-beater vest ripped apart at the shoulder, revealing a very unattractive whale of a belly. These fighting folk were definitely not English; Albanian sprang to mind, as their reputation for domestic and other violence is renowned throughout Europe, but I couldn’t be certain. All I knew was that whatever it was they were shouting sounded Eastern European and one of the deli girls who’s Polish said it definitely wasn’t a language with which she was familiar.
In the deli, we stood glued to the scene outside. Had teeth flown across the street and struck the window, we’d hardly have been surprised, such was the violence playing out before us. In spite of police intervention, the woman who’d been dragged along the footpath was now trying to punch one of the men, the police struggling to hold her back. Sirens wailed, announcing the arrival of yet more uniforms. Before long, the group was under control. Ish. But still I hung back for a couple of minutes, just in case it all kicked off again.
Once back outside I could see that crowds had gathered to watch the unfolding of this real-life drama. Overhearing one bystander tell another that the argument concerned a watch, I hesitated, keen to find out more.
“Yeah, the guys were all shouting something about a watch,” he explained, eyes wide.
“A watch? What, in English?” Now I was confused.
“ No, not in English. Someone over there understood what they were shouting about and said it was a watch.”
Ah, a classic case of Chinese whispers. Unconvinced, I turned away.
“This is what happens when we open our doors to other nationalities,” said another man, stood in my path, nodding wildly,
“You wouldn’t see this on the streets of London if it weren’t for filthy immigrants like that!” he continued, gesturing at The Punch Bunch now being cuffed by police, forgetting that plenty of local crime is committed by born-and-bred Londoners. Just a couple of years back, a sixteen year old was stabbed to death in broad daylight, just down the street from our office, his youngest killers a mere 13 years old. They were Londoners. So were the Krays. Oh, yes, this Ranting Ronnie was doubtless a living, breathing member of the BNP, physical proof that such right-wing opinion is growing in this country. Lips firmly sealed, lest he twig my accent and tell me to go back to wherever it was I came from, I slunk away from the man, leaving two police cars, one police van and a lot of uniforms to get Mr BNP’s so-called filth off to the clink.
The whole episode made me shaky. Back in the safety of the office, I recounted the drama to my colleagues.
“Could’ve been Albanian,” commented one, “I knew a woman who was married to an Albanian once. He used to beat her all the time. Her kids were taken into care and then, years later, I bumped into her. ‘How’s your husband?’ I asked, wondering if she’d seen the light and moved on. ‘In a word? Dead,’she told me, ‘His uncle shot him.’ “
Oh my.
As it turns out, The Punch Bunch were all related, so what we’d witnessed on the streets of Sunny Hammersmith was the latest episode of a long-standing family feud. I can only imagine the amount of polyfilla stuffed into cracks in their walls at home, or how many gummy gaps they display when smiling. For a few days after the brawl, I found myself checking the footpath for leftover clumps of torn-out hair. After all, it’s not every day that you see a woman being dragged along the street by her long, black tresses. I’m only grateful to have escaped being born into a family like that, if you can call it a family…







































