Food, Glorious Food

This week I enjoyed the most expensive meal I’ve ever eaten, and I also know it’s the most expensive meal I will EVER eat in my life. Unless you count my wedding meal of course– I’ve been paying for that ever since.

Two very nice folk from Kilmarnock named Drew and Marie paid twenty thousand pounds to a kids’ charity to win Gordon Ramsay’s chef table at The Savoy Hotel for the evening, and they were kind enough to invite me along to the meal. Eight of us sat down to an eight course dinner in a small private room with one glass wall looking out on the kitchen. I’ve only just realised that is we could see them, they could see us. Oops. My weird faces pressed against the glass with my tongue hanging out were probably a bad idea.

For each of the eight courses, a different chef would come in to our little room and explain what he had made, followed by the sommelier who took us through the eight wines he had chosen, and as someone who only gets close to money by eating millionaire’s shortbread, I suddenly felt I knew how Simon Cowell lives. Without the Botox and smarm, obviously.

Our party of eight was made up of Drew and Marie, myself and five others consisting of the great and good - from MPs to a Baroness, from leading lights of entertainment through to heads of household name businesses, and we ended up laughing louder and longer than I can remember doing for a long time. We even sang rude songs when one of us (not me) suggested doing “the knob song”. This apparently involves going round the table substituting the word “knob” for “love”. So we had to sing The Beatles’ hits She Knobs You Yeah Yeah Yeah, Knob Knob Me Do, All You Need is Knob....... you get the idea. Childish, but fun.

One of the party told us she’s going to play Susan Boyle in a musical of her life next year and she passed on hilarious stories of the Britain’s Got Talent singer who panics her chauffeur by taking the bus instead. Susan is so modest she couldn’t understand why she had to make her first album. She knew she had lost the competition therefore she thought the dream was all over. Now, of course, she’s arguably one of the world’s wealthiest stars and the musical will be going to Australia, Japan, China and America.

I’m not sure Susan would have enjoyed the Savoy as it may have made her inhibited about asking for pie, chips and Irn Bru, but she would have liked the bit where we were all taken in to the kitchen to meet the chefs, given aprons, and asked to cook our own steak. It was hot in there and the chefs were much friendlier than the one I worked with when I was at University making some money at weekends as a waiter. Whenever anyone sent back their food because it was too cold or the steak wasn’t well done enough, he would throw it on the floor, stand on it, baste it in the bin and then grill it a bit more and send it back out.

The Savoy has been closed for years for a face lift and it looks magnificent, and the final course of melting chocolate sponge was as heavenly as you’d expect from a twenty thousand pound meal in a multi million pound hotel that’s famous the world over.

So, I know what you’re asking. Why, if all the guests were famous in politics, business or showbiz, was I invited? I hung around at the end expecting to be given a pair of rubber gloves and a sink to wash up the pots but I wasn’t called in to action. I can only guess they needed cover in case one of the waiters went sick.

Forget whoever else was at that meal. Drew and Marie were the stars. To generously give all that money to help kids in difficulty was a wonderful gesture, and they gave this big kid the evening of his life. Thank you.

I Go Ape

I sang a duet with multiple Grammy award winner Neil Sedaka this week.

As he has a new musical about his life story being premiered I was lucky enough to meet and interview him again and, as we chatted afterwards, I mentioned a favourite song of mine that he’d written years ago. Unfortunately it’s not a song he sings often and he’d forgotten the words, so I sang them for him and his eyes lit up as he joined in. Of course I should have told him to butt out, one singer one song and all that, but I figured “well if he’s enjoying it let him have his moment”. Having duetted with Elton John, Carole King and others, he probably saw this as something his career had been building towards.

Over the years many have fought to sing with me – at least I think they have as fighting usually breaks out when I sing - and I’ve lost count of the number of times folk have shouted at me the title of that classic Joe Dolce song “Shaddup Ya Face”, presumably expecting me to burst in to song with them. Simon Cowell even told me I could win the X Factor and he rated my voice. Actually, what he said was “your voice is X rated”, but I knew what he meant.

Whoever is behind the publicity for Cowell’s various money making projects is doing their job too well just now as I’m suffering from Cowell fatigue every time I look in the papers or on television. Even his partners in crime are so horribly over exposed that I find myself wishing Piers Morgan would join all the other great British piers and catch fire before falling in to the sea.

Then there’s Cheryl and Ashley, toughening it out in their Cole bunker and only coming out when there’s an emergency like an album to plug or a party to attend. As journalists try to unearth ever more dirt on them they make it impossible for me to go anywhere without wanting to scream for sanity, and I cannot bear Brat King Cole and his missus any more.

That’s why I was delighted this week to come across a web site called Happy News Dot Com. It sets out to show only the good news from around the world, and this week it featured the warming tale of Grace Groner, an American lady who died aged 100. She had lived all her life in a tiny house and bought all her clothes from car boot sales yet, in her will this week, she left her former college a surprise seven million dollars.

Then there was the story of two eight year old boys in Australia who saved a man from drowning, a diver who wrestled a Frisbee ring from around a suffocating shark’s throat, and the tale of a dog collar and lead, billed as “once belonging to Charles Dickens”, being auctioned off for twelve thousand dollars. I’m hoping that it actually belonged to Charles Dickens’s dog rather than to the writer himself.

But no matter how hard I looked amongst the good news stories, I couldn’t see any sign of my duet with Neil Sedaka. I should email them with the background and suggest an uplifting headline like “Old Man Made Very Happy”.

Or perhaps I’m being selfish. Maybe the headline should be about Sedaka instead of me.