City of Schnitzel and Schicklgruber (part 1 - grub.)

So, Vienna. I feel very serious and grown-up heading to this hub of European culture and catastrophe, anticipating the strains of sedate waltzes from every window, grand statuary on every corner, and nicotine-yellowed cafes where the only sound is the rustle of an occasional page as another volume of Freud is lovingly thumbed by some bearded intellectual or other. And that's not so far from the reality, except modern Vienna just about manages to push through the cracks in the city's potentially suffocating historical past. For all the weight of antiquity that could condemn it to becoming a living museum, this city has a vibrancy and quirkiness that's already calling me back. I barely scratched it's gracious, granite surface in the time I was there. So let me give you a suitably potted version of Kolley Kibber's Best Bits of Vienna (so far).

1. The Beisl. You can get your hands on pretty much anything you want to eat in Vienna - it has a surprisingly cosmopolitan take on grub, despite its landlocked Mittel-European situation and reputation. But though there must be a hundred sushi joints around town, and as many varieties of pasta from over the mountains in Italy, what you come to Vienna for is Austrian food. Meaty, beefy big and bouncy Austrian food, such as may have helped the young Arnold Schwartzenegger to develop into the superb human being he remains to this day. So get yourself along to a Beisl. These are the most traditional restaurants the country has to offer, and are beloved to an almost fetishistic degree by the native Viennese. If you're vegetarian, you may struggle a little with the aggressively carnivorous head-to-toe-eating on offer in these little wood-pannelled, darkened palaces, but you'll almost always be able to fill up on apple and potato dumplings (one should do it) or a thick potato soup (Carb Warning!).

We started off here at Glacis on our first night, and ran straight into our most pronounced taste of variable Viennese standards of hospitality right on entry. The maitre d', a small, beetroot-faced man driven almost cross-eyed from thirty years of glaring at his customers, made it agonisingly obvious to us that we were there on sufferance, making a huge, theatrical show of scanning the two-thirds empty restaurant furiously before reluctantly conceding one of the spare tables to us with a look of such pure hatred that it would have curdled the cream cheese in your strudel. By contrast, though, the waiter he sent to kill us/take our order couldn't have been nicer, a laughing, friendly young dude who offered advice and recommendations which turned out just fine, and who made us feel more than welcome and more than gluttonous within moments. The freshest, richest blood sausage, deep crimson gulash (better than the Hungarian goulash in my book) and, er, dumplings, all vanished from our plates with a good glass of Gruner veltliner and not much talking. When we left we made a point of saying goodnight to the maitre d', who stared back at us and completely ignored us. So don't be put off by him, but do give the place a go, especially if you're around and about the Museum Quarter anyway, which you are bound to be at some point.

Others we tried and loved were Figlmuller (booking advised at weekends, especially if you want to eat at the small one in the alleyway which has a little conservatory area; much nicer) for the plate-defying (pork) schnitzels and potato salad (carb warning!), and the oldest inn in Vienna, the Griechenbeisl, where previous patrons included Beethoven, Motzart and Mark Twain (though not all at the same time - their autographs are on one of the walls.). Staffed by some serious older men who look like they mean business but who on approach turned out to be friendly and funny (and the free schnapps was a welcome if unwise gesture), we had a fine time here on our last night, listening to the zither player in the next room and wondering if Harry Lime was going to materialise from the darkened doorway opposite (he didn't. Poor Harry.). Anyway, there are loads more of these and I intend to go to most of them before I turn up my boots.

2. Sturm, with an umlaut. Only available for a few weeks from early September each year, this is partly-fermented grape juice with a mild kick and a strongly moreish quality. You drink it by the tumbler, though I could have drunk it by the gallon. Delicious. Vienna, all you geography spods out there, is the only capital city in Europe to have productive vineyards situated within its city limits. And if we'd been out there this coming weekend, we'd have hit the annual Wine Hike, when normally closed-off private routes around the wine areas are opened up to the public, with tasting stops along the way. A reason to go back, perhaps?

3. The Nachtsmarkt. Another one of these brilliant Northern European outdoor markets, packed to the gills with everything a glutton could need. Eat your plunder right there at one of the hundreds of food stalls, or take it home if you can wait. If you only buy one thing to bring back, make it a jar of Austrian horseradish; it will clear your sinuses in seconds and enhance your steak like nothing else.

4. Cake. So they tell me. I lost my sweet tooth years ago, so apart from one custard croissant (very good) I didn't eat any. And I don't much care for coffee, so that was lost on me too. But the Viennese scarf away the strudel like it's going out of fashion, and are freakier about their coffee than even New Yorkers, so I assume it's all good if you like it.

5. Beer, wine and spirits. Austrian wine used to be famous for it's high anti-freeze content. But now it's rather respectable. You can get a good glass of Riesling, Gruner Veltliner or Weiss Burgunder almost anywhere. All the beer is crisp, dry and flavourful. And a little schnapps can be fun.

That's the stomach taken care of. Next, I will turn to matters of culture. Back later.

Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this....

I'm taking my insomnia on a short Rest Cure. Where? Can you guess? Would you like a clue? No, it's not Covent Garden.

Where lies sleep

I was always a champion sleeper. Put me on a rock-hard camp bed or a hammocky relic in a cheap B&B, and I'd be sparked out in seconds, no matter how inadequate the pillow or musty the blanket. I slept right through the famous Hurricane of 1987, which doubled my amazement on rising to an unrestricted view across a devastated garden which had previously held a dozen leafy trees. I once fell asleep at an REM gig, which may be easier to understand given the soporific qualities of Michael Stipe's whiny voice. I've slept soundly on sea-tossed cross Channel ferries, while all around me heaved into sick bags.

A couple of years ago, though, and completely without my conscious bidding, I became strangely reluctant to tumble so easily into the arms of Morpheus. It started gently enough; I continued to to wake up at 'work time' (6.30 am) over the weekend, when for decades I had given myself permission to snooze through till 9.00 - so I was downstairs with the newspapers, tea, and the early morning weather forecast while Himself, untroubled by my new wakefulness, snored on without me. It was irksome, but caused little enough damage. Sometimes I even used the time constructively.

However with the unstoppable force of an incoming tide, my sleep time has continued to be swept away in waves of sudden unbidden nocturnal alertness. These days it's an automatic 4am reveille every day of the week, month, year, regardless of what time I got to bed the night before, what I ate or drank, and where I happened to lay my head. Not a panicky, frantic, worried jolt into a stream of anxious thought or gripping rumination, just a simple, total, irresistible physical awakening as though the internal alarm has gone off and commanded my body to get on with the day. Very occasionally, if I lie still enough and completely empty my head, I will fall back into a very heavy, dream-laden sleep after about an hour, which ends an hour after that when the alarm goes off and leaves me disorientated and exhausted for the entire day. That's my worst kind of day. The best I get is the kind I'm having now, where I can register the residual ache behind my eyes and vague physical groan of my unrested muscles if I stop and scan myself, and where I'm typing slowly because I'm making lots of mistakes (six in that sentence alone, I've just corrected them. Seven...). My motor skills are constantly affected, and where I've always had a fantastic memory for detail without trying, I'm having to concentrate on concentrating with my patients - though fortunately I haven't made any big mistakes there (yet. The fear persists, and keeps me nervously on my toes.). It may not be a surprise that I haven't felt much like blogging for a while.

I tried various 'natural remedies' - melatonin worked for a while but made me feel miserable, Valerian worked for a while but then needed upping and combining with 5HTP, which also worked for a while but is now failing me too unless I take three of each, which will get me some sleep but leaves me thick-headed all the next day. Over-the-counter antihistamine based meds bought me a few hours, but made my eyes so puffy that the chorus of "ooh you do look tired are you ok" from friends and patients became embarrassing. My GP prescribed me a respite dose of fourteen Zopiclone pills which bought me a fortnight's medicated sleep; great while it lasted but strictly unrepeatable due to the addictive nature of Zopiclone (I personally felt it was the sleep and not the medication I was more addicted to, but hey, she's not giving me any more.). I've changed my pillow, my bedding, I've opened windows and doors, catnapped, resisted catnapping, cut out coffee, cut back carbohydrate, done everything but turn my bed to face east (someone I know swears by it but that's just too far up the Barmy Old New Age Cack road for me.). It seems I am stuck with wakefulness. And I am half mad with lack of sleep.

I continue to get to the gym three or four times a week, even when I feel I could spark out and start snoring on the cross-trainer, in the hope that physical tiredness of the good kind will prompt an eventual  joining-in from the bit of my brain that won't turn off, but so far my 4am automatic call persists, as regular and reliable as the Shipping Forecast. I imagine I'm now part of the Great Insomniac Community, and I must admit to drawing a tiny amount of comfort from knowing I'm not the only one lying there at 4.14...15...16 with stinging eyes and a heavy heart, that there are probably one or two other souls within a hundred yards of me who are doing just the same, separated by walls and united in desperate desire for sleep. It's a club I never expected to be part of, and one I don't seem able to resign from.

Sexually enlightened by 'Cosmopolitan'...

A little late to the party (no time to blog -August is usually my quietest time of year, professionally, but this is the busiest I've ever been; all those months of rain seem to have had direct bearing on melancholia levels in this corner of the UK; I'm relying on the Olympic Effect to put me out of business, however), I noticed that Helen Gurley-Brown turned up her toes and her breast implants last week.

Only a few days previously, I'd hooked up with my old BF from primary school and she'd reminded me about one of the chief bonuses to be gained from spending an afternoon Chez Kibber in the school holidays of the mid1970s. "Your sisters had copies of Cosmopolitan", she said wistfully, presumably drawing a retrospective contrast between the reading material at my house, and the crinkly copies of the Catholic Messenger, Hotspur, and the Irish Post that graced her own (devout parents and younger brothers; both quite useless as sources of the titillating read.).

My four grown-up sisters and their host of glamorous friends were a handy conduit into the mysteries of Adult Female Life for an insatiably curious pubescent with sebaceously-overactive chums such as me and my little gang. By listening at doors we could hear snatches of gossip that we could only guess the true meaning of ("a BLOW job? You mean you're supposed to BLOW down it??"), and which could be used by me in blackmail attempts later on ("let me try a Silk Cut or I'll tell Mum where you REALLY were last weekend"). And then my sisters would pass on their copies of Cosmo, after this Holy Grail of sophisticated naughtiness had been thoroughly plundered by them for ways to look more like Jerry Hall and tips on how to get any man to fall in love with you without compromising in the least or sacrificing your career.

We would snatch them and scamper off to my room, to pore over articles on how to arrive from your holiday flight looking cool as a breeze in a crisp white linen trouser suit (travel First Class, sip mineral water throughout the fight and spritz your face with same regularly, eat only a little fresh pineapple, elevate your fabulously long and coltish legs for the duration, and basically be Britt Ekland if at all possible.).  Oh, and why not join the Mile High club, if the co-pilot's handsome enough? But you must demand at least one massive and unforgettable orgasm from him, and for that matter from any man who is fortunate enough to arouse your incredible female desire. Orgasms - shuddering, screaming, writhing, bucking, clawing, gasping, grinding orgasms - were Cosmo's raison d'etre, and we were all ENTITLED to as many as we wanted, whenever we wanted them. We would avidly answer quizzes like "Have You Unleashed Your Inner Sexual Goddess", ticking off options like "on top of the Arc de Triomphe", "In a gondola" or "On a moving rollercoaster" despite being a pair of spotty twelve-year old virgins. We could always store these ideas up for later, and then DEMAND them. Oh yes.

It was all so wonderfully at odds with the life that was actually going on around us, where "holidays" meant a week in an asbestos chalet in a Minehead holiday camp if you were 'normal', or a passage to third-degree sunburn and food that would be "swimming in grease" via a package to Lloret de Mar if your parents had ideas above their station (usually identifiable by one of those Spanish spouted wine flasks proudly on display on top of the new 26" colour TV.). And where sexual experimentation was the domain of certain few sluttish girls a few years above us, who would deliberately let us overhear their talk of carpet burns and 'fingering', while cracking gum on their back teeth and liberally spraying their 70s flicks with Harmony Hairspray (Firm Hold.). Some of them were so worldly they even knew all the words to 'Radar Love'.

We much preferred the world version presented to us by Cosmo, where we could be successful and smart and sexy, and go small-breastedly braless under our fabulous watered-silk wing-collared blouses in the knowledge that we'd still be taken seriously by the yearning, respectful admiring males around us. We learned to be cool with  concepts like 'bisexuality' (I still remember being fascinated by an interview with Gore Vidal from about 1978), got to know names like Erin Pizzey and Sheila Kitzinger, and, finding a long piece about a disease called 'Anorexia Nervosa', wondered if we should tell someone about our friend Theresa who had spent the last month living on apples and frozen black coffee. For all the flash and trash, we did learn a bit.

Cosmo could be smug, strident and silly, and for me it always lacked a bit of humour (in my heart of hearts I preferred 'Honey', which had a softer edge and most importantly, featured the cartoons of my heroine Claire Bretécher), but like an old friendship I persevered with it for several year, until it began to give itself over to the banal hyper-sexualisation of the contemporary women's magazine market. Now I never read women's magazines at all, and rites of discovery for the average spotty 12-year old virgin seem far more brutal and unrefined than my own. My old friend and I, now heading towards the arse end of our forties, agreed that we definitely had the very best of it where that particular publication was concerned, and for that we will always remember it affectionately. Any men we've been involved with may, of course, beg to differ. Handsome co-pilots excepted, of course.

Anti-cynic

I've had to take a bit of a break from blogging for a variety of reasons, both good and bad - though not irrelevant among them being the amount of time I've been spending watching the Olympics. Which has been a bit of a surprise, as despite my best efforts I was unable to get any warmer than 'mild to moderate cynicism' in the build-up to the games. When the Olympic torch rolled past the end of my road three weeks ago, I hurried off in the opposite direction, not wanting to be part of a crowd which seemed content to stand and applaud a procession of Coca-Cola trucks and clamour for McDonalds baseball caps. It was hard to see any further than the revolting commercial dominance at that point (and also, it WAS raining really hard that day), so any notions of athletic achievement and mass human bonhomie seemed a watery, distant dream.

 Even on the night of the opening ceremony, I sat down to watch it as did many of my friends, with my face set to 'smirk' and a headful of plans for how I would resume my evening after twenty minutes, having been bored to tears by some terrible hybrid of 'It's a Knockout' and the Last Night of the Proms. And yet there I was at 1am, off to bed with a silly grin on my face and feeling vaguely apologetic for having slagged Danny Boyle's films off in the past (though I maintain that Slumdog Millionaire WAS a pile of emotionally manipulative crap.). Sure, the 'yoof' section was five minutes too long and the multiculturalism was overstated, the bucolic idyll on fields of butcher's grass was kitch beyond the point of decency and Macca's embarrassing rendition of that dreary dirge 'Hey Jude' was just horrible, but in among it all was Isombard Kingdom Brunel (who apparently confused a few Yanks who couldn't understand why 'Abe Lincoln' was being featured), the Brookside lesbian kiss (censor THAT, Saudi!), younger women who impressed without being sexualised, older women who impressed without being ridiculed, the intro to 'Tiger Feet', a collective finger to the Government for their treatment of the NHS, Bowie's 'Heroes' and best of all, Bradley Wiggins as (in his own Tweeted words) "Bell Boy!BELL BOY!" (by the way, this will be my last mention of Bradley as he now belongs to the world, which I think you'll agree is gracious of me. As I said to a chum, it's a bit like when Elbow became huge after I'd been going to see them in tiny venues for years. Not mine any more!).

 There are still cynics remaining, who've maintained their stance and conspicuously refuse to have "anything to do with the Olympics", but they're looking increasingly daft, particularly after this weekend when you would have had to be made of balsa wood not to feel a rush of happiness for Jessica Ennis or  Mo Farah in their respective triumphs. McDonalds, Coca Cola and David Cameron have faded into the background for now and it really does feel like it's all about the sport and all about the occasion, though of course in a week or so life will have returned to normal and we'll have to listen to the politicians all creep forward again, to claim credit for things that were not of their making. But for now I'll stick with the romance, and the experience I had on Friday afternoon of walking through a London West End where people were smiling WAY more than usual, engaging with one another, and sharing the experience through a thousand big screens in parks and pubs all over the city (a special mention at this point to the two women sharing a particular strand of Olympic bonhomie by engaging in vigorous sex in the toilet cubicle next to me in Pimlico. A gold medal for audacity, especially as it was only 6.30 in the evening.).

More follows.

Diamond Geezer

So what if it was the one year in ages that I wasn't in Paris for the finish...the TV coverage was fantastic, and I grinned my head off as the skinny man in yellow began his victory speech with the immortal words "ladies and gentlemen, we're just going to draw the raffle"... I'm not a great one for heroes but if I was going to take one, he'd tick most of the boxes. Chapeau, Brad.

Shhhh

I may be a little premature....but this is REALLY exciting. In fact, watching the live coverage from France is eating up my blogging time. Forgive me, and try not to judge me. It's Bradley. Back soon.