This tiny food stand is a must if youre anywhere near Charing Cross Road or Cambridge Circus.

This stall doesnt do simple straight-up orange juice or apple juice. It offers you a wide range of interesting mixes, at 2.50 for a small one or 3 for a large juice. (Smoothies are 50p more.)

Robust mixes carrot, beetroot, celery and ginger; the Apple zing mixed carrot, apple and ginger, and the cool and spicy option is orange, pear and ginger. All rather different and if youre thinking ginger is a bit of leitmotif here, youd be right. These juices pack a special extra punch!

There’s also wheatgrass if you happen to be a believer in this. (I’m not. I also hate root beer. Ginger beer, on the other hand, is one of my loves - particularly the excellent Fentiman’s ginger beer, a fiery experience for your taste buds!)

The stall is open Monday to Saturday, all day. One of the unsung heroes of London street food!

Picture credit: Gaetan Lee on Flickr

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It’s nearly Christmas, and what could be nicer than to celebrate with a pint of Brodies’ Hoppy Ho Ho Ho?

That’s just one of over a hundred beers available at the Pig’s Ear Beer Festival, which opens tomorrow at Ocean in Hackney.

It’s the twenty-fifth Pig’s Ear - organised by the East London and City branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), and devoted to showcasing the best of real ale.

Winter ales always make a strong showing here with a good selection of porters, stouts, and old ales - a rare but lovely English beer style. There’ll be a few spiced beers too; Hoppy Ho Ho Ho is flavoured with cinnamon and ginger, a real Christmas pudding in a glass.

By the way, if you like your Cockney Rhyming Slang, you might be interested to know that the apparently strange ‘Pig’s Ear’ name of the festival has a very simple explanation.

For a Cockney, Pig’s Ear = Beer.

When: 2-6 December: TuesThur: 12002230. Fri:Sat: 1200 2300

Where: OCEAN, 270 Mare Street, Hackney (Hackney Downs or Hackney Central rail)

Picture credit: Gordon Joly on flickr

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I rather like those histories of everyday things - ‘Latitude’, the story of spice, the history of salt. Exhibitions of locks and keys from the middle ages, or the furniture exhibitions at the Geffrye Museum, fascinate me.

So an exhibition of desks is a must! As a writer I spend most of each day at one, and it isn’t beautiful.

When I daydream, I imagine myself sitting at a fine Louis XIV desk with curvy gilt legs, or a lovely Restoration bureau…

“8 Desks” is a bit more modern but equally stylish. Jean Prouv and Jean Royre’s almost minimalist, strikingly modern desks represent the practical, functional side of the modern style. (We’ve already seen Jean Prouv’s architecture in London recently - here’s another chance to catch up with this intriguing designer.) Mass production techniques enabled the French designers to create cheap, useful furniture while still achieving beauty, albeit a rather austere beauty. Metal and formica create slick, shiny surfaces and defined, geometrical shapes.

If you don’t go for modernist, though, you can have your desks more curvy, and if you don’t like formica, wood provides a warmer, less clinical feel. George Nakashima, for instance, seems to have been influenced by arts-and-crafts style or perhaps the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. This American designer creates a more sensual work, using the feel and look of natural wood. Charlotte Perriand, too, uses wood and traditional joinery techniques to make desks you want to caress rather than abuse.

Would you ever have believed a desk could be so interesting?

If your answer is ‘no’ and I haven’t managed to convince you, forget it.

But if you’re a design nerd, or a furniture nerd, or you’d just like to see something a bit unusual, go and take a look at these desks when the exhibition opens up in January.

When: 15 Janury - 14 March 2009, 10-6 Mon-Fri and 11-1 Saturdays

Where: Sebastian + Barquet London, 19 Bruton Place, W1

How much: free

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With an hour to kill before we saw a play, we were stuck at the British Library and wondering where we could get a pint of beer. Euston Station actually has quite a good pub, but we didn’t fancy that, so instead we headed north off the Euston Road to the Somers Town Coffee House.

The whole area reminds me of Arts & Crafts with its neat little houses, and this pub is no exception. A really delightful exterior, and an unspoiled interior with wood panelling, a nice wooden bar, and four handpumps serving up real ale. At less than 3 a pint, prices aren’t bad for London - and in the bar you can get a selection of filled baguettes in real French style, again at realistic prices.

Though it was early in the evening, the pub was bustling already. I had Youngs Special, my friend had a pint of Bombardier, we sat down at one of the tables and relaxed. Not at all bad for a place that looked like a gastropub. It certainly does have a restaurant attached, but this part of the pub was a great place just to hang out with a pint of beer.

There are a number of other pubs around the area - Mabel’s Tavern, just south of King’s Cross, is mentioned in the Good Beer Guide I believe and serves Shepherd Neame - but I like the understated, civilised vibe of this one. I’ll definitely be visiting again.

Photo credit: EwanMunro on flickr

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I enjoyed a free lecture at the National Gallery a couple of days ago.

If you read the arts columns in the papers you might know that the National Gallery, together with the National Gallery of Scotland, is appealing for money to buy a rather lovely Titian - Diana and Actaeon. To support the campaign, the gallery has organised a number of little mini-lectures that show you Titian’s paintings.

The Diana and Actaeon is displayed in Room 1 of the gallery, just off the main staircase, together with another Titian painting which already belongs to the gallery, painted later in the artist’s life. They both show different episodes from the story of Actaeon, the Greek hunter who saw the goddess Diana bathing naked in the forest, and was turned into a deer and hunted down by his own dogs for this blasphemy.

The first painting is a real piece of Renaissance porn - all the nymphs are bathing naked, splashing around in the fountain or trying to hide as they spot the interloper. But Titian has done more than just show naked ladies - this is also a lovely nature painting, showing the forest in high summer.

There are wonderful little clues to the story everywhere, too. A deer’s skull, with antlers, hangs in the background - we’re meant to read the hunter’s fate into it.

The second painting shows Actaeon’s death, and it’s an autumnal scene, glowing with russets, browns, reds. Actaeon, his head already branching forth antlers, is pulled down by his own dogs. It’s a powerful painting - perhaps more so than the earlier one.

What’s particularly significant about these two paintings is the relationship between spring and summer, life and death. It’s as if Titian was trying to paint the life of the artist; he looks at beauty, but in the end he dies. There’s a lovely logic to the narrative.

The exhibition continues till December 14th, and if you’re anywhere near the National Gallery I’d urge you to go and see it. You might not get the chance again.

By the way, I was intrigued to find that the competition no longer comes from American museums and galleries - they can’t afford over 50m for a painting. If the galleries can’t raise the money, the painting is most likely to be bought by one of the wealthy Russian art collectors who have started to move the market. And so it’s unlikely to be on public display - here or elsewhere.

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