Paul said the other day, “Simon; when I’m away in Rio, please put a post on my blog about the Teletubbies.

He did, really he did. You see, someone from Ragdoll Productions sent him an email about the Teletubbies 10th anniversary New York invasion, and knowing my son, Billy, is obsessed with them, he forwarded it to me. Sadly the email was corrupt and neither of us could make any sense of it. It seems if we’d been able to make it out, we could have met the actual Teletubbies with the original actors inside. I’m not sure how my son would have reacted to such a thing. He may have, a) been delighted and wet himself with glee or b) been utterly terrified by the size of the things and ran out of the room screaming.

I was so upset we’d (I’d) missed this fantastic opportunity, I wrote to the guy myself. I was hoping he could make time go backwards or perhaps tell me where the Tubbies were staying. We could have invited ourselves round for tubby custard. But no, we really had missed them; they had only been in New York for a few days and were now back in England. As a consolation though, he told us we should visit the Teletubbies pop-up shop at 350 Bleecker Street. The shop is open till April 7th at 10PM. Tonight in fact, so if you want to go you’d better get on a train sharpish.

Yesterday they were playing Teletubbies episodes all day and all night so we went and checked it out. In the end Billy did manage to get a bit closer to his heroes:

Here Billy worships at the alter of the Tubbies:

I know Paul is back, but I still have my login info and I thought I’d sneak one last Billy photo in before we get back to slagging off Galloway. Taken yesterday in Prospect Park.

Click to enlarge.

It’s just gone 12 and it sounds like the Blitz outside. I have the fireworks in my left ear and Mary J. Blige is singing some godawful song in the right. If I were an adventurous type I’d crane my head out of the window but I think I’ve had enough excitement for 2006 already.

This is the first year I’ve stayed home since I was a kid and I quite enjoyed it. We drank a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and watched Father Ted all night. Bliss.

Happy New Year all.

I’ve been reading a couple of local blogs today, A Brooklyn Life and Mona’s Apple, they both discuss food and they’ve inspired me to share my own opinions.

In this order these are the best foods in the world. No discussion or debate is necessary—I speak objectively.

1. Indian
2. Korean
3. English

1.
Indian Food is the best food because it has the most flavor and the flavor is the nicest. People used to kill each other for those spices. Enough said. I don’t go for subtlety with food. I’ve had delicately flavored elaborate gourmet dishes, and they have always been disappointing.

2.
Korean food tastes almost as good as Indian food but it is much, much healthier. I am constantly amazed that there are no good Korean restaurants in our part of Brooklyn (Park Slope). The closest place we’ve found is a hole in the wall outside the entrance of the Pratt campus. This ‘restaurant’ is miles better than any Thai, Chinese or Japanese rubbish anyplace around here. If I were only allowed to eat one kind of food for the rest of my life, I’d choose Korean.

3.
And I know my third choice is controversial so I’ll argue my case. Only last week a food snob colleague informed me: “I’m sorry, English food is really bad.”

Bitch.

I’ve encountered this attitude everywhere I’ve ever been. In Granada, in Spain (the worst food I’ve had in my life), my students loved telling me how crap English food was. I’d smile and say, “Yes, we have a bad reputation, but things aren’t what they were.” Now I believe that things were never that bad. People who say English food is bad are usually repeating what they heard someone else say or admitting they went to the wrong place to eat in England.

I don’t care about 100 euro saucy meals in chic Parisian restaurants; I’m never going to eat one, they are irrelevant to me. I don’t care about a great American sandwich with 3 inches of fake turkey inside it on my choice of one out of a hundred breads. I literally can’t eat the thing; it won’t fit in my mouth. I like 1 slice of real meat on two slices of fresh brown bread. Brown bread that lasts 3 days after the day it was purchased; not 30.

As I may have mentioned before (once or twice), I HATE cheese, so goodbye Italy, Switzerland, Germany etc. You had your chance but you’ve ruined it by covering all your food in fetid gunk.

Chips are 1000% better than fries. Meat pies are tastier than fruit pies. In England mashed potato is made out of potato, not white dust. Our sausages are the envy of the world and are integral to the finest breakfast in the world. Our biscuits, cakes and deserts are absolutely the best in the world. We plundered the furthest reaches of the globe refining our tastes for centuries and we know what we like.

Have you tried an American cup of tea?

Even in the smallest, plebbiest of towns in England the supermarkets have the widest selection I’ve seen anywhere in the world. The quality is also consistently better than stores over here.

To get the kind of meal you can buy cheaply in a good English pub would bankrupt you here, and wouldn’t even be an option in most countries.

Even our cheese is good (apparently).

English food comforts you and fills you up like no other, and isn’t that what food is for?

What’s happened to PD? Don’t tell me they don’t have the Internet in Denmark.