Time And Travel (Again)

Where does the time go? My life seems to be speeding up at an alarming rate, as if I am sitting in a car with no brakes hurtling down the side of Mount Everest. It seems that I have not sat down to have a cup of tea with a biscuit and it’s over month since Christmas. I blinked and we’re already more than halfway through January. I coughed and it was a new decade. By this rate, I’ll go to the shops for some groceries, return home and it’ll be time to pick up my pension.

If I allow myself to think about it too much, I can become obsessed with time. This time last year, I had just received a shipment of my cookbook, dinner. Little did I know at that point that the series which it represents would go on to win several prestigious awards a few months after that. In fact, as I sift through the last year’s blogs, the photographs of me pulling silly faces animating like in a child’s flick book, I’m reminded that the delectable Miss Moneypenny from the Financial Times labelled me the “Northern Irish Martha Stewart”. It’s a soundbite I still drop into conversation when appropriate – and occasionally when it is not appropriate.

Meanwhile, last April, I travelled from New York to Miami to Jamaica to do some work for my company Whisk, and once again found myself mulling over the elastic nature of time. I’m reminded of why I do the job I do: I often feel that I have finite time to do what I want to do, a limited number of sand grains in the jar to achieve what I want to achieve. I guess I have always felt this way. You could call it ambition or a black dog or whatever, but it’s the reason that I work myself into the ground. The reason that I knock every door and then push it if it doesn’t open. The reason that I spend my weeks constantly on the hop. I’m terrified of being caught doing nothing, of time slowing to a standstill.

Looking ahead to my schedule for February, it looks as if life is just going to get faster. I have to visit no less than seven countries next month, from the Middle East to North America to Europe. Thinking about it makes my head swirl: you can’t just walk into a high street bookstore and buy a travel guide that encompasses every continent in the world. Hmmm… perhaps that’s an idea for my next book.

I’ve recently been doing more filming. It’s funny to think how gawky I felt when I first started doing that, how unnatural it seemed to have someone pointing a camera, a boom and a lighting rig at you and counting you down to when you start speaking. Now it’s relatively straightforward and much less painful. In fact, I’ve probably started speaking before the director even counts me in.

I’ve been filming range style cookers for a client – or rather, me explaining how to get the most out of these household products for your home, talking through the main features of the hobs, timers, settings etc. Hey, don’t mock. Sure, it’s not the most glamorous of pursuits – it’s not as if I can boast that I moonlight as a dancer in a Girls Aloud video – but it pays my way and keeps me out of trouble.  I love it.

Other than that, I’ve been as busy as usual. I would like to tell you that it’s been a wild string of parties and celebrity engagements since the start of the year. I would like to tell you that, but it wouldn’t be true. At the moment, my Saturday nights are spent at home slogging through paperwork, and drafting up a new concept which I’m pretty excited about. I’ll tell you all about that in due course, but for now I’m going to hold my cards to my chest, keep mum and any other metaphor you can think of.

I’ve just looked at the clock and around two hours have passed since I started writing this blog. Seriously, where does the time go?

Chat soon!

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James McIntosh

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A New Decade

So, it’s that time of year again, when everybody pauses to reflect upon the months gone by and mainly think about two things:

1. How quickly the year has passed and how quickly the resolutions I made in January were broken. 

2. The Christmas holidays are all but over and it’s time to go back to work.

Neither of these is the most cheering of thoughts, so it’s probably best avoiding those topics for now, particularly as this evening most people the length and breadth of the United Kingdom will be heading out for some intensive partying.

 As I gird my loins for celebrating the bringing in of the New Year, not to mention the New Decade, I’m feeling more pensive than usual. Maybe it’s because I’m just back from visiting family in Northern Ireland and feeling a little fragile after another stint of early morning travel. I’m listening to my iPod, scrolling through the songs and albums who have been close companions to me these past twelve months. It’s amazing how, after just a few opening beats or strums of a particular track, the special memories I have accumulated come flooding back. It can be overwhelming, as images, aromas, sensations, flow from my brain throughout my body, tickling endorphins, making the hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck prick up. I might be physically sitting in my room as I type, but emotionally I am peering over the edge of the Great Wall Of China, its hot brickwork beneath my feet; I’m standing on the 106^th floor of the Empire State Building, taking in the panorama circling around me; I’m drinking in the smell of a Jamaican sugar plantation; I’m standing face to face with the Terracotta Army in China, the gap between us closing centuries of history and two completely alien cultures.

On the downside, I’ve eaten dog, jellyfish, camel, maggots, snake and donkey. Every silver lining has a cloud.

You see, I have a particularly addictive vice: travelling. I love it. I can’t get enough of it. I’ve been back in London less than twenty-four hours and already I’m twitching to go somewhere new. This year I’ve travelled to more countries than I ever thought I would experience in my lifetime – eighteen, to be exact. If I split the space time continuum, meet my much younger self, and tell me that in years to come I would be driving from New York to South Beach, Miami, and set foot at The Whitehouse and Buckingham Palace, Kenedy and the Chinese Space Centers, clamber to the pinnacle of Victoria Peak, Hong Kong, and swan about casinos in Atlantic City and Macau, I would probably have told my older self to stop wasting my time on such pipe dreams.

(While I was there I would also have told my younger self to stop wearing ill-fitting, woollen jumpers.)

But I have done each and every one of those things – and more. Much more. And here’s the bit I can’t quite believe: I get to do all of this in the name of gainful employment. As another new song kicks into life, and I squint backwards along the winding, rocky path which has led me to this point, I consider some of the milestones which led me through the 2000’s. I think about starting up my own business, and what a unique form of physical, mental and emotional torture that was at the time. I think about how I was first struck by the idea of writing my own series of cookbooks, as if a meteor suddenly fell out of the sky and clonked me in the head. I think about how that series was so long in the making yet this year won me the kind of awards and acclaim I never, ever believed would be placed at my door.  Thank you Mr Cointreau.   I think about how, should I feel so vain, multiple videos featuring myself are only a mouse click away.

Please don’t misconstrue my intentions here. I don’t want to become a bore and prattle on about what a wonderful year – a wonderful ten years – it has been. I don’t want to come across as a braggart. Rather, it’s important for me to continually acknowledge how blessed I am. There are two reasons why I have been able to arrive at this point, after many thousand air miles, many sleepless nights and a lot of heartache.

Firstly, I have a great team headed up by Hilary, without whom none of the above would have been possible. That sounds like a glib Oscar acceptance speech, but it’s true. My team are essential and invaluable – they keep me going, and, most importantly, they’re not afraid to tell me which of my crazy ideas are good and which are plain crazy.

Secondly, I have a great network of family and friends who support me in anything and everything I do. In the past year I’ve met people who most would consider to be superstars or celebrities. I’ve dined with the rich, the good and the not so good. I’ve chinked glasses and bumped canapé trays with millionaire businessmen who carry more money in their wallet than I will ever see in my bank account. But – and it’s a big but – I remembered to fly home to visit my mum on fifteen occasions. She keeps me grounded. And whilst I love travelling, it can often be a lonely pastime. An empty hotel room for one will never compare to the home in which you grew up.

I could go on. I could talk about each and every one of the experiences that I have stored up this year. They each appear fresh to me as their accompanying melody starts to play through my headphones. But I don’t want to take advantage. I’m sure you have better things to do: memories of your own to consider, or perhaps a party to attend.

And I don’t want to think about my carbon footprint. I know those planes would have flown without me as a passenger, but still…

So, here’s to 2010 and what it may bring. I do hope that you will keep checking the site, keep reading these blogs, keep sharing in my journey. To my family, friends and followers, I extend my best wishes for a happy and fruitful New Year.

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James McIntosh

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Something’s Cooking In The Aga Kitchen

Those who are curious about what I get up in my day-to-day job, or what exactly I mean when I talk about a “demo”, should pop on over to the Aga Cooking channel on YouTube. It is currently host to a clatter of videos with me knocking up seasonal treats and talking about Aga appliances, all the while trying to hide the rough edges of my Northern Irish accent.
 
There’s one each for turkey (yes another one), vegetables, stuffing and all the trimmings. One of my goals is to present techniques and recipes that can be mastered by even the most amateur of home cooks, so hopefully these clips will be useful for those who are trying their hand at tackling Christmas dinner this year.

 

If you have any queries on your christmas dinner, message me!

Happy cooking!

//

James McIntosh

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Turkeys and Jetlag

I can live with a lot of things (cold snaps in December, congestion charges in London, traffic in London – for that matter, anything related to driving through London), but jetlag is not one of them.
 
I am feeling jetlagged as I write this, so the simple act of typing has transformed into an unfeasibly difficult task, like trying to unknot a tie whilst wearing oven gloves. When I raise my head from the keyboard to the screen, or turn it from the screen to the clock on the wall, vapour trails blur my line of sight. My thoughts are little helium-filled balloons which gently bob up somewhere to the top of my mind where I can’t reach them.
 
I’m just back from The AGA shop Shrewsbury, you see. It’s that time of year again, when I squeeze a turkey into a bucket of ice, squeeze the bucket into my passenger seat, cover it in the seatbelt and whip up and down the length and breadth of England doing Christmas demos for Aga. If you need a refresher course in just how far past the limits of my sanity this pushes me, read last year’s blog here.
 
But James, you may ask, how can you get jetlagged travelling from Shrewsbury? Well, I neglected to tell you that right before I made that drive I had just arrived back from Toronto. Yes, you read that correctly: I flew home from Toronto in the morning, then got in my car late afternoon and trekked up to Shrewsbury. Before flying to Toronto I was in New York, and before that in Northern Ireland, and before that I was in… well, to be honest, I lost track of where I was. During the past year I’ve flown through so many time zones and clocked up so many air miles it would be cheaper and less hassle to set up my own travel company. Whisk Air, I like the sound of that.  You know you fly too much when, after you sit down and buckle yourself in, the BA air hostesses smiles sweetly and says, “Your usual, sir?”
 
Let me explain. First off, I was in Northern Ireland to visit family and present at the Aga Shop, Belfast. I always look forward to going there. The team strike the right balance between friendly and professional, and I know that I can always rely upon them to pick up the right ingredients for the recipes I am deming. A good home economist should never blame his spatula, but there is nothing quite as embarrassing as cooking in front of the people when you don’t have the correct condiments.
 
However, this occasion was slightly special: it was a charity event tied in with Children In Need. They had even provided transport for me. No, not a helicopter or a limousine, but a donkey and cart. You wouldn’t catch Kanye West doing that.

James, Pudsey and the staff of the AGA Shop Belfast with Dennis the Donkey and his driver Robert

 
Secondly, I had to fly to Toronto for a meeting in Aga’s Canadian HQ for their coverage of North America. I can’t go into the specifics about what this meeting entailed, other than it was both stressful and exciting in equal measures. Meetings such as this one can mean the opening of new doors for me, or the flowering of fresh opportunities, so they are always filled with emotional, intellectual and physical pressure. Fortunately, I thrive under these conditions. I always have. But it’s getting to the stage of the year where I could do with a day or two without meetings like this. I am, to use the vernacular, blootered. And jetlagged. And when I get like that I moan a lot. It’s not an attractive quality, I know, so for my own sake – and the sake of my nearest and dearest – I am very much looking forward to the Christmas break when I can unplug my laptop – and my brain – and unwind for a few days.

But Christmas, of course, means demos. And dozens of turkeys. And journeys up and down all the motorways England has to offer.
 
Now, where’s that bucket?

//

James McIntosh

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The Eye Of The Storm

At the moment, life is just like a huge wave. Some days, when I am full of pep, have enjoyed a good sleep, and stress is not jangling my nerve endings like a set of jailer’s keys, I feel as if I am right top of that wave, coasting on the surf, outwards from the beach, as far as it will take me. At others, it feels as if I am flailing beneath it, floundering under the water as it crashes and booms in my eardrums.

The reason for this strange mixture of emotions, and for my absence from blogging over the past while, is that I am currently caught up in a whirlwind of busyness. Old and new projects are speeding headlong towards the station on which I stand at a rapid rate, and I’m trying to decide which one to get on – or else I’m the controller trying to stop them all from derailing.

I realise that I am speaking mostly in metaphors here – and I have quite probably mixed a few – but I am trying my hardest not to say anything I shouldn’t. These are exciting times, friends, but they are also anxious times. I’ve been working so hard on my brand for so long now that I find it difficult to accept that it is almost coming to fruition. It’s odd to think of myself as a “brand” – to look at my name and realise that it is now just as associated with my cookbooks, cookery demos and website as it is with my childhood, my school days or my time at university. My name no longer belongs to just me.

Again, the cause of this soul-searching is that there is, to be vague, a lot going on. And it’s all very exciting. I can’t really elaborate on that – which is akin to giving somebody a brightly-coloured cracker and then telling not allowing them to pull it – but I can tell you that that I’ve been working hard and keeping myself out of trouble. I’ve been doing demos and filming videos and working on some promotion and thinking up new ideas for concepts and books. And, if you would allow me to blow my own trumpet – or rather, play my own entire orchestra – it’s been going pretty well. I’ll be revealing more about what exactly has been shaking in casa McIntosh in the New Year, but until then I’ll be blogging more regularly.

I have to go. The wave is surging again.

//

James McIntosh

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