Sober up

Beth and I went for lunch with the boys yesterday in celebration of GBBF (gay boy best friend) Richard's birthday.

We went to Roast in Borough Market where we dined on potted salt beef, scotch eggs, oysters, guinea fowl, partridge, pork belly, Goosnargh chicken, potatoes cooked in beef dripping, kale with garlic, spinach with pine nuts, English cheeses, damson Queen of puddings, chocolate banoffee pudding, apple and blackberry crumble, whisky and gin cocktails, champagne, English sparkling wine, bottles of Bordeaux, Sauternes, maraschino liqueur, port and sloe gin. It was seriously decadent!

Being an intelligent bunch - consisting of a psychiatrist, an operations manager, a lawyer, a journalist and a government policy adviser - the conversation flowed with the wine and led on to discussions about the X Factor, licking dogs, spotting the fellow gays in the restaurant, how St Paul's Cathedral looks like a big breast (we could see it from our table), how one of our set of parents are currently hob-nobbing with the lesbian sex shop owners down their local golf club, Dynasty, Dollywood, Lip Service, our individual voting records (why do I have so many friends who vote Tory when I am a die hard Labourite?), the Spending Review, siblings, the benefits of Valium on a flight, men visiting the club buffet after coming out of the dark room at XXL (urrrgh!), school days, how drinks and mixers are so much better served in the US (always crushed ice, never cubed), Oxford vs Cambridge university and can men and women ever really be friends, a la When Harry met Sally.

The answer to that last question is yes, if both the male and female in question are gay. Both Beth and I have GBBFs as do many of our Sapphic sisters. You see, in this situation the GBBFs don't need to deal with all that unrequited love which often occurs with fag hags and us gay girls don't have to deal with our heterosexual male 'dikey likeys' having secret lascivious thoughts about us. It can really fuck up a friendship if you subsequently find out that someone is harbouring romantic feelings and has some misguided belief that you would reciprocate and change sexuality if they just tried it on. It doesn't work like that, being gay is not a choice!

After lunch and two drinks in a pub by the Millennium Bridge, the lightweight boys went home, whilst Beth and I carried on down to the Retro Bar for a chaser and then on to the vigil against hate crime in Trafalgar Square. We heard the inspiring Stuart Milk speak (nephew of Harvey) and cried when they read out the names of LGBT people who have died as the result of hate crime in the past ten years. A sobering end to a not so sober day.

Excuse my hiatus

Yes, I know it has been nigh on a year and a half since Lezzie Lickin's taste buds were tapped and as the title says, you have to excuse my hiatus.

Busy times at work led to a need to put on my PJs as soon as I got in and throw myself on to our super duper comfy sofas along with a tumbler of whisky and episodes of Glee, anything with Mary Portas in or Coronation Street (especially now it has a gay girl storyline). Plus Beth was all blogged out with her work blog, MovieTalk.

Anyhoo, all that sofa surfing, plus some dramatic changes at work have resulted in me feeling somewhat creatively challenged, so hence Lezzie Lickin's is reborn!

Where do I start? Well we've been on annual leave this week and that has manifested itself in a series of culinary delights and disasters. On the delight side, being pampered by trainee chefs and waiting staff at the Vincent Rooms. Six courses for £24 cannot be sniffed at, and they are being trained in the Escoffier technique (Fanny's favourite apparently, Fanny Cradock that is). So, huge white plates dotted with tiny food with a bit of foam on top. But it was good and I would recommend it. On the mediocre site was Hix Oyster and Chop House. A gay girl never really knows what to do with a big meaty portion, and it left me feeling decidedly queer all evening....

Beth and I visited a rainy Oxford yesterday and she took me to one of her old student haunts, the Nosebag. Here, simplicity was key and she informed me that the menu and ambiance had not changed since the late 1980s. A trio of chopped cabbage salads in a Turkish style with fresh herbs and a chocolate brownie placated my temper seeing as it took two hours to drive into the city centre after a somewhat disappointing trip to the Roald Dahl museum in Great Missenden. Let's just say, why do adults have to pay more to enter when the whole museum was geared towards encouraging kids to run riot, as opposed to actually learning something about the great man and his books? Rant over.

Thursday involved some sloe picking in order to make sloe gin. We used to do this with my Nan when my parents lived in Essex. Beth and I took a trip down memory lane with my Mum by visiting Linders Field in Buckhurst Hill where the sloes used to be abundant. Imagine our horror to find that all our bushes had been trimmed! Sloe bushes I mean. Anyhoo, we found some and we now have some sloes gently marinading with sugar in a bottle of gin to be consumed during the festive season. We also made blackberry whiskey, which should be fun!

On a final note, we visited Gay's the Word on Monday where I stocked up on literature to help research the book I'm writing. Yes, I have finally got round to putting pen to paper to write that wartime lesbian love story that I've wanted to write for years. I have only written one passage so far, but if you want to see it to provide your critique, then message me. I also tried my hand at a sex scene, but keeping that under wraps right now...