Favourite Restaurants: #2, Memories of India, London

After I bought my flat (apartment) in London, in 1997, for several years I was spending most weekdays on my own in London, returning home to France for the weekends. Cooking for one is no fun, and nor is eating alone in fancy restaurants. So friendly neighbourhood restaurants, where I could go with a book and eat a pleasant meal quietly in a corner, were highly sought after.

England is of course full of Indian restaurants. I doubt that there's a town that doesn't have one. In London there are literally thousands. The menu is pretty much the same in all of them, and with luckily rare exceptions the food is good too. But of course some are better than others. When I explored the ones in the area round my flat, I quickly found one that was head-and-shoulders above the others. Memories of India is an absolutely typical London Indian restaurant, that just happens to serve exceptionally good Indian cuisine.

When I lived just across the street, I would go there at least once a week, and when my willpower was feeble (often), more than that. Settling down at a corner table with a good book, a few poppadoms, a beer or two, a Shah Gostaba and a few side dishes was just as good as sitting down at home to a meal - with the added distraction of people-watching. This is a popular tourist area, with many mid-priced hotels and a handful of big ones. Every few minutes a couple or small group would pause outside the window to study the menu. And each time, the owner would rush outside to give them his sales spiel. About half the time it worked - to their good fortune, since they could easily have ended up in the nowhere-near-so-good place a few doors down. The other customers were a complete mixture, everything from noisy groups of caricatural American tourists to earnest young couples from the provinces, identified by their accents such as Geordies (from the Newcastle area) or from Northern Ireland.

"Eeh bah gum lass, even London 'as Indian restaurants, just like back 'oom in Bradford", they'd murmur softly to each other, holding hands discreetly across the table on their once-in-a-lifetime-treat outing to London. Or so I imagined, anyway.

Watching the owner makes you realise just what a treadmill it is to run a restaurant. Every single night he's there, keeping an eye on the place, trying to attract customers, greeting the regulars. The place can run without him - once when I went there he was on holiday. But still, there's not much of a break.

It's ten years now since I moved to California and let my flat. But when I stay in London it's usually in this area, often at the Royal Garden round the corner on Kensington High Street. And in that case, a meal at Memories of India is mandatory. Amazingly, even after ten years the owner still remembers me on the one or two occasions a year when I visit.

After I moved to the US I harboured a little fantasy of opening an Indian restaurant locally, just so I could call it "Memories of Memories of India". Surprisingly, here in Silicon Valley where half the population seems to be Indian, there are very few good (as good as Memories of India) Indian restaurants. So Memories of Memories of India, or M2I for short, would I'm sure be a great success, and soon I could open another branch - called, of course, Memories of Memories of Memories of India, or M3I. Eventually I could be the owner of a nationwide chain of excellent local Indian restaurant, its size limited only by the breadth of shopfronts to accommodate the ever-increasing names.

Well, it was a nice idea. My bubble was burst when I discovered that there are already several restaurants in the US called Memories of India. In fact, there's at least one more in London, too. But not as good as mine, I'm sure.

Update, July 2024: The restaurant is still there in Gloucester Road, but some time since Covid it has changed hands. The owner who would recognise me even after years of absence is no longer to be found encouraging passing tourists to stop for a meal. It's still a decent neighbourhood Indian restaurant, but it is no longer the same, for me at least.

Moving my Linux system to an SSD

Phew, done it! I decided to put a solid-state disk (SSD) on my new Linux system, to get some experience of using them. I expected to run into a few obstacles, but as usual with Linux I also expected to figure them out with a judiciously worded Google query. (Open-source would not work without Google).

It wasn't that easy. My goal was to move my existing system. A re-install from scratch would have been easier but then I'd have to try and remember all the hundred or so packages I've installed since, remember how I configured things like Apache and MySQL...

With Windows of course this is impossible. Thanks to that brilliant invention (not), the registry, you have to reinstall from scratch every time, then spend hours locating the CDs and babysitting the installation process. Been there, done that, and it's one of the main things I dislike about Windows.

I googled around and found a few descriptions of what to do, and indeed it seemed easy. So I physically installed my brand new 64GB SSD, which worked fine, and copied everything on my 1TB hard drive (not that much) to it. The of course I just needed to make it into a bootable system... and that is where the fuin started.

Ubuntu uses a boot system called Grub. I'd found clear instructions how to run that. Unfortunately for me, I just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 ("NattyNarwhal"), which uses Grub2, not Grub. And of course, they are completely incompatible - they don't seem to have a single command in common. (This seems to be a fairly widespread disease in the open-source world, deciding to reinvent some well-known piece of the system and make it gratuitously different. The most egregious example is Python 3, though bjam, the build system for Boost, runs a close second).

And I just could not find how to make Grub2 make changes to anything other than the currently running system. I could install it on the SSD, but trying to boot from it was a failure. Ubuntu finds file systems by their unique ID (UUID), and the SSD system was looking for the old hard drive's UUID. If both drives were plugged in, the SSD would boot Grub which then cheerfully booted from the hard drive. But if not... not so good.

I tried creating a "Super Grub 2" boot CD, hoping I could use this to make the changes. This however deserves some kind of award for unhelpful software. There is no "help" command and as far as I can tell no documentation either. So that was out.

By now I'd spent (wasted) two whole evenings on this project. Only my intense natural reluctance to give up on things kept me going, since I didn't actually need this to work. Then I tried a slightly reworded Google query and found this article. If you're an experienced Linux sysadmin you're probably thinking, "What an idiot, everybody knows that's how you do it". But I didn't know...

The key to success, once the files have been copied and /etc/fstab edited, is the following:

sudo -s
for f in sys dev proc ; do mount --bind /$f /ssd/$f ; done
chroot /ssd
grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub

The magic here lies in the chroot command, which is what gets Grub to work on a different drive from the current one. Now I know about it, I'm sure I'll find all sorts of other places to use it.

That done, the SSD booted perfectly by itself, and with a bit of juggling of SATA connections, I got it to boot with the hard drive as well. Problem solved.

By the time I finished this, I was ready for a glass of wine and dinner. So I can't yet say whether the SSD has indeed given me the expected boost in system performance. But at least I've got it working.

The Joy of Country Codes

The creation of South Sudan as a distinct national entity implies a huge number of practical problems. Little things like creating a viable government, a functional police force and army, a national infrastructure, and all the rest. For the sake of the people there, who have already suffered much more than enough, I hope that it works, although one newspaper article has already referred to it as a "pre-failed state".

Among all these things, one that has to happen is the creation of country codes which are used for all kinds of things. In particular, there is the two-letter code that appears at the end of a URL (like '.uk'), and the international dialling code. Alphabetic country codes are designated by a standard called ISO 3166, administered by the International Organisation for Standardisation, or ISO for short - the acronym carefully chosen since it is actually not an acronym at all, standing for neither the official French nor English names of the organisation. International dialling codes are designated in a standard called E.164, administered by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The ITU grants an E.164 code to a country within 30 days of it being recognised by the United Nations. These codes are mostly two digits long (e.g. 44, the United Kingdom) or three digits (e.g. 351, Portugal). There are two exceptions: 1 and 7. 1 isn't actually a country code at all, since it designates the geographical area of North America including Canada, the USA, and various Caribbean islands. 7 used to be the USSR. Here be politics. It may seem simple enough to assign codes to countries, but actually it's a political and diplomatic minefield. When the codes were assigned, the Cold War was at its height and the USSR could not accept that the US could have a single digit (even though it didn't) and they didn't. Or so I suppose - I wasn't there, at the meeting of CCITT (former name of ITU-T) Study Group 2 where all this must have been hammered out. So now 7 is Russia, except that it's also used by Kazakhstan, and despite the fact that these two countries between them probably have fewer telephone numbers than some countries with three-digit codes.

Reading lists isn't everybody's cup of tea, but they often contain little gems of curiosity. Anyone who's had to call Taiwan knows that its country code is 886. But you won't find this in E.164. Rather, what you'll find is the entry for China, 86, with a footnote saying "within country code 86, 866 is used to designate the Chinese Province of Taiwan." But don't try dialling 866, because it won't work. Looking further, you'll find an entry for 886 with the text, "886 is reserved for assignment by the United States". In other words, China was not prepared to permit any reference to Taiwan as an independent country (their long standing position) but wasn't going to stand in the way of a practical arrangement that would let everybody get on with things.

Two-letter country codes, which are by far the best known, are in fairly short supply. In theory there are 676 (26*26) of them, but they try to have some mnemonic significance, and for well over 200 countries and other territories this makes it difficult to fit everything. For some reason, 'M' is a very common initial, and nearly all of the m's are used up. When I wanted to add Molvania (along with Elbonia and the Wallis and Grommet Islands) to the list of countries in our in-house database app, the best I could do was MJ. (Incidentally the same is true for state names in the US - M is the most-used first letter of the two-letter state codes). But luckily for South Sudan, even though 'S' is also a common initial, SS is still free. Perfect, n'est-ce pas?

Well, except that "ss" has, ahem, unfortunate connotations. Opinions differ as to whether the ISO Secretariat will allow this or not. And if not, all the other likely possibilities are already taken. About the best that I can think of would be to use a possible French version of the country name, "Sudan Meridional" (a word for "southerly" in French, along with "austral"). That would give SM. Of course that has connotations too, and very favourable they could be too for the fledgling country. Think how much money tiny Tuvalu has made from the happenstance of getting TV. There must surely be any number of kinky websites that would pay for as SM domain name... or there again, maybe the ISO Secretariat wouldn't be too keen on that either.

ISO 3166 is full interesting little tidbits. You know, of course, that FR is France. Well almost. Actually, it's "France including Clipperton Island". Where is that? I hear you ask. You mean you didn't know that it's a (usually) unpopulated atoll in the middle of the Pacific, 1000 kilometres from the nearest other land (Mexico)? And why on earth is it considered to be part of France? Thus begins a lengthy distraction on Wikipedia. Oh, Clipperton Island also has its very own code, CP, although according to Google there is not a single site that uses it.

And you know the code for my country, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island (to give it its full title)... everyone knows that it is UK. Well, except it isn't. Actually it's GB. For some reason when they starting assigning URLs they decided to use UK instead. So UK is covered under a handful of oddball codes (along with CP incidentally) with the text "Reserved on request of the United Kingdom lest UK be used for any other country".

ISO 3166 has its share of odd diplomatic compromises and oddities, too. I bet you didn't know that BO is "Bolivia, Plurinational State of".

And you thought all this stuff was easy.

(Update, 16th August: they did get SS, read about it here. And the dialing code is +211.)

Favourite Restaurants: #1, Bar Oceanic, Hossegor

[Update 19/10/2023 - sadly the Bar Océanic is no longer with us. If you look for it, you'll find a place called La Nord. The owners of L'Océanic sold out about three years ago, after a short period of trying to manage without their star cook who had passed away. There have been at least two other attempts at revival in the meantime. Running a successful restaurant is hard. I can't make any comment about La Nord either way - we tried it once out of nostalgia, it was OK but not stellar.]

To me, a "favourite" restaurant is one that I go to every time I'm in the vicinity - a place that's part of my personal tradition. When I think of the place, I think of the restaurant. The food has to be excellent, of course, but it's about more than just that, it's about a feeling.
This week I'm in Hossegor, so it seems fitting to choose Bar Océanic as the first one. Hossegor has been a family tradition for over 20 years now, and a lot longer than that for my wife, who used to come here for her childhood holidays. We'll gloss over exactly when that was, but the house where I'm sitting typing this came into the family 21 years ago. The location is perfect, a two minute walk from the beach, a ten minute walk from the town, and close to the beachfront restaurants.

Hossegor is most famous now as a surf place. The annual world championship has an event here every summer, taking advantage of the giant Atlantic waves as they crash into the beach. Or not - there can be some really impressive surf here, but it's the exception rather than the rule. We've watched the championships take place in a millpond-flat sea, the surfers desperately seeking even the smallest wave.

Before the surf, Hossegor was - and still is - a family town for holidays. It has wonderful beaches, part of the vast expanse of of perfect, clean sand which runs from the Spanish border for a couple of hundred kilometres nearly to Bordeaux. It's the combination of families and surfers that makes Hossegor unique - it's a very lively place, with bars open until the small hours and beach parties, mixed with grandparents and their progeny and everything in between.

The beachfront, a two minute walk from our house, has a bunch of restaurants of different styles, from Dick's Sand Bar (not advised if over 25) to restaurants catering rather more to the family crowd. And of these, our long-term favourite is le Bar Océanic. Their menu is a range of south western French staples. And the king of such dishes is confit de canard, duck cooked slowly in its own fat for hours and hours until it becomes tender yet moist. Yum, especially when it's grilled at the last minute to make the skin crispy, then served with fried potatoes, either French fries or sliced thinly then fried slowly in more duck fat. Needless to say, this is on the menu. It may not be quite literally true to say it's the only main course I've ever eaten there, but it's close. Served with a bottle (or two or three, depending on the number of people) of excellent local wine, it's just irresistible.

The really surprising thing about le Bar Océanic, though, isn't so much the food as the proprietor. Or more specifically, his astounding memory. We've been regulars in Hossegor for 20 years, and I think we ate there the very first time we came, but that means just once or twice every year. And there was a period when we didn't come here in the summer, for about six years, just a couple of out-of-season visits in that whole period.

Yet every time we go there, he not only remembers us but even our favourite dishes. Can you imagine? You have thousands of customers who you see at most a couple of times a year, and you remember their menu choices individually? I just don't know how he does it.

When we moved to the US, there was a period of about three years before I managed to get back to Hossegor. The day I arrived, I was walking past le Bar Océanic. The proprietor happened to be standing outside. "Bonjour Monsieur," he said, as if I had just been in there the night before.