7 July 2009: Waitrose

Away from Saints, we were in Chicago last weekend.

And while I don't have time to go into the whole Taste Of Chicago debacle (but let's just say if we'd have known that the 2008 event featured four people being shot, one fatally, we might have not gone and thus avoided the stampede when a Saints-like rumour of 'THEY'RE SHOOTING GUNS" was being loudly dispensed from the mouths of hundreds of people running full-pelt away from the event, combined with the police advising "get out of town now"), it was certainly a time of ups and downs.

Ups included seeing a show by the wonderful, and I mean fantastic, Improvised Shakespeare Company, who are based in Chicago and who improvise a Shakespeare-style play based on audience suggestions (and on any props that happen to break during the performance); seeing Moody Bible College campus; eating at Giordano's (of course!). Downs included having to wait for ages for the commuter train out of town after the Taste debacle, getting a little ill after eating too much Giordano's, and the frozen chicken they served me at IHOP.

But as the photo above shows, if you go to Borders in Michigan Avenue in central Chicago, you can get an interesting selection of magazines to peruse while enjoying your peppermint tea and Rice Krispie square. In particular, a wide-ranging selection of BBC magazines and several well-known UK football periodicals led to an extended stay, but the most interesting is the one almost clipped out of the photo above. Let me give you another photo:



Yes, it's Waitrose Food Illustrated. Included an article on a guy in China who made his own bacon (yes, it's going to happen in Kokomo as well, as soon as we source some decent organic pork). I had no idea it had any kind of circulation outside the UK. In fact, I had no idea it had any kind of circulation outside of Waitrose.

Interestingly, I have a cousin-in-law who's something of a somebody within Waitrose/John Lewis, and the two photos above have as a result now made their way within the Waitrose organisation, along with a suggestion that they should do a story on me making sausages. Sounds a little unexciting to me, but I'll happily trade them my story for a supply of those yellow corn-fed chickens and made a Gressingham duck.