I’ve been quiet on here once again. This time I’ve had a decent excuse, however. All of my writing energies had been diverted into finishing the first draft of my dinosaur pirate novel. At the start of last month, an old friend from uni was scheduled to start working at my office. As he also hails from Brighton, it was likely that we would be commuting together, thus reducing my antisocial writing time, and so it was imperative that I finish the draft before he started the job!
In speaking to him, I discovered that he had also interviewed for my job last year. Although surprising, I would later find - while breakfasting, no less - that he was not my only comrade from Sussex Uni that had interviewed for the post.
Finding out that both he and Ben Meredith had interviewed for the position immediately validated the 5-or-so years I spent working in a hospital. I know for a fact that Ben is a skilled writer, having read various pieces of his work and heard him discuss texts and ideas with wit and dexterity in workshops. He is also yet another person who was a finalist in the Myriad Quick Fictions competition.
Ben has his fingers in a lot of creative pies at present, and so perhaps it is best he doesn’t have his creative energies sapped by the rigours of medical news writing. Oh, the rigours.
In terms of his creative output, Ben is currently working on an exciting-sounding comic, set in a world where the post-colonial influences of our own are inverted. In this world, airships that are powered by music play a prominent role, as do the people who fly them. Composers are needed to pen the music that is used to get the ships from point A to point B, while conductors are needed to pilot the performances of these pieces.
As you would expect, music will have a prominent role in this story, and even more exciting is the fact that a certain chap-hop legend may have some part to play, after Ben got talking to him about the project at an Iron Boot Scrapers EP launch.
Ben’s love for stories also has him busy in two other key areas of geekdom; video gaming and role playing. Alongside his comic, he is working on a computer game that will explore the idea of fate, and playing an ongoing role-playing game documented in the regular Rusty Quill podcast. This game utilizes the open-source Pathfinder system, and as someone who also enjoys dice-based role-playing games, it has been interesting seeing how people outside of my own circle of biscuit and pizza eaters approach it. If this kind of thing is your bag, I recommend giving them a listen.
Of course, being the arch-creative that he is, it wouldn’t be Ben to just sit back and play a game. Last weekend, he ran a game jam at Nine Worlds Geekfest in London. A game jam is where people come together to create games within a short period of time. In this jam, participants were tasked with creating their own pen and paper RPG on a side of A4 paper within an hour, and then building an expansion for someone else in another hour. I can only presume that Nine Worlds 2015 was bursting with rampant Ben-inspired creativity last weekend.
It was a pleasure hanging out with someone is driven to putting all of his creative ideas into practice. Ben is a man with a lot of exciting projects on his plate. Speaking of plates…
And so, the breakfast:
Veggie Breakfast
Grilled halloumi, wilted spinach, Heinz beans, tomato & field mushroom, free-range eggs (also includes toast)
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| Vegetarian Breakfast - £7.50 |
The Grand Central sits over the road from the Bystander Cafe in the same way that North sits over the other side of the compass from South. On the one hand is what appears to be a classic greasy spoon-style cafe (I shall investigate further) and on the other is a trendy bar. A fine illustration of two of Brighton’s many sides.
We opted for the quieter Grand Central. I had been in there the previous weekend and noted a sign advertising a “banging breakfast;” a challenge if ever I saw one. After a short wait with some coffee and juice, two beautifully vivid breakfasts were brought forth.
The most eye-catching component on the plate was the halloumi, a surprisingly underused veggie breakfast component. Here it was grilled well; not too firm and retaining a good level of moisture to give it a meaty texture. This consistency was shared by the mushroom, which was delightfully big but with a taste that lacked in depth. This field mushroom did not taste any different from smaller mushrooms gathered elsewhere.
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| Composer and conductor |
Green vegetables are not seen often in veggie breakfasts either, and here the spinach was another welcome addition. It had been cooked so that it still had a pleasing bit of crunch to it and it offered a great counterpoint to the baked beans (Heinz, don’t you know) which were sweet but not too overbearing.
What was disappointing about the spinach and mushroom was that these are two vegetables that are very easy to jazz up in the cooking process and give a little extra character to. Sadly, no extra risks were taken. These remained plain.
For the most part, however, all of the components had been cooked well. The poached eggs stayed together, even if the yolk could have been a bit thicker, and the toast (no pre-buttering) was nourishingly crunchy. Only the tomato felt underdone, whose core was just a little too firm.
The Grand Central have opted to season their food with adjectives rather than ingredients. I say this because each of the components here had simple and unsurprising tastes. There were no extra embellishments of flavour to give the food true character, and although it looked good and was perfectly functional, the meal did not stand out as a result.
One of the most repeated maxims you will here in creative writing is “show, don’t tell.” Rather than letting the food do the talking, all of the seasoning at the Grand Central takes place in the menu. Eating this breakfast felt a bit like reading the description of a character where the writer has just listed precisely what they look like and weighed them down under a mountain of adjectives and adverbs. Sure, the character might be a good one on paper, but in the act of writing there are certainly more exciting ways of doing it, and ways that readers are more likely to appreciate.
Function: not "banging" but not whimpering either - 3/5
Adherence to Canon: Yes
Taste: solid but unspectacular - 3/5
Value: a bit pricey for what it was - 2/5
Presentation: rich, vivid colours, nice plate - 4/5
Venue: a generic Brighton bar - 3/5
Overall: show, don't tell - 3/5
