Friend: Mum and daughter red wine drinking at Vinopolis

So as I am desperately still clinging to it being Christmas goddamit, I am going to file this under gift ideas, even though regrettably I know most Christmas gifts will already have been given by now. But you know, just in case there is someone out there somewhere who is having a belated Christmas celebration, or indeed you have someone in your life with one of those pesky January birthdays so you have to rack your brain for presents twice in one month. Or indeed your family are still in town, then this could be a thought if you need something to do with your days which isn't playing charades and eating stilton (though why anyone would want to stop doing that I don't know).

If you know me or have read Loner. Lover. Friend before, you'll know I am a big fan of the experience present - taking someone somewhere wonderful, giving them a nice memory to keep, rather than a gift.

Normally, I am quite good at thinking of things people will enjoy, if I do say so myself, (very hard for me not to break into Jay Z Drunk in Love rapping here FYI) but when it came to my Mum's birthday at the end of September I had a little trouble.

Previously I've taken my mum to Afternoon teas, and silent cinemas and had some good, albeit generic, ideas. But I was all out, and although I can think of loads of weird and wonderful things a lot of people in my life might like I realised I didn't for my mum. My lovely mum. What did my mum like doing? It sounds really awful, but I was a bit stuck. I think my mum, as a mother, has spent so much of my life doing what the rest of the family wants to do that I have no idea what she likes doing? How terrible of me. How tricky to buy her a nice experience gift.

And then I suddenly thought, I know what my mum really loves, a full bodied French merlot. Or indeed any red wine really.

Hello Vinopolis London. Vinopolis is a "wine tasting" experience, where you can wander around and take your pick from trying over 100 different wines, including champagnes and then some spirits.

Strolling around under the arches (it's built beneath the trains), it sort of feels like a weird wine theme park. Or at least a fairground. You get a card topped up with the tokens you've bought, and you mooch around with your special tasting glass, choosing wines kept at their correct temperature in a fabulous wine tasting vending machine, paying for it on your card. How good it would be if they had one of them next to the coca cola one in my office.

Depending on the rareity and retail price of the wine, depends on how many tokens you can use, but most of them just take 1 or 2. Mum and I mainly tried the 1 token wines, but we saved them up and tried a 6 token wine at the end, so that was nice, and exciting to lift a £50+ wine to my lips.

Now I am not gonna lie, I wouldn't say I came out of Vinopolis a wine expert, but you do a little bit of learning about how to taste a wine, I got a bit more of an understanding about how different wines grow in different climates (like I've never thought about it before but there is a northern strip x above the equator which is good for wine eg - Southern France, California, Italy etc, and a southern strip x below the equator which is a good climate too - Argentina, South Africa, Northern Australia etc) and I learnt about which type of wine I like - via both a lot of wine tasting, but also these cute little interactive games like those you get at the science museum, but about wine.

Learning we are well bodied red girls. As if we needed a game to tell us...

The drawback with Vinopolis might be the cost. It is £27 for the wine tasting experience which includes the lesson and 7 tokens - so 7 lots of the lowest price wine, but this is not 7 glasses, this is 7 shots (each of the measurments from the machine is 25ml, ie a shot) and for £4 a shot, I'd expect to get a jaeger bomb. For another fiver you can get another 5 shots of wine, so a much better deal (less than £3) a shot, and makes it worth trying maybe one of the whites before moving on to red red red.

However, I think one of the best ways to experience Vinopolis, especially if you are buying it for an experience gift and want to make it all last a little longer. Vinopolis have a range of experiences on their site - from Burns' nights to chocolate tasting to nights with Oz Clarke, the wine man of the nineties.

I took my Mum to Vinopolis Sundays, which for £35 per person includes a two course roast lunch, a bloody mary, and 7 tokens for wine tasting. We then topped up those 7 with another, 4 tokens, which you can buy for £5 when you get there.

You eat in Vinopolis' restaurant, Cantina, which is actually pretty lovely. It is no Michelin starred silver service, but it is nice, more than Harvester nice, more than pizza express nice even, and actually a bloody good roast. (With bloody good salted caramel sticky toffee pudding for dessert).

Cantina, Vinopolis' restaurant

I don't mean to keep waffeling on, but also it is nice going on a Sunday as a) you don't have to queue for the clever wine vending machines like on a Saturday and b) it's totally respectable on a Sunday evening to go home and fall into a red wine induced slumber at 8:45pm.

So yeah, Vinopolis: wine and fun vending machines and finding out my mum and I both like "well bodied full reds". In the genes I guess.

My beautiful Mum, pleased as punch cos she is off to have a lot of red wine...

You can book on Vinopolis Sundays or any of their events here, and right now it is "buy one get one half price" on their wine tasting experiences, so more shots of wine per £.

Got something for your Mum, but need an idea for your Dad? I've taken him on a walking tour and a food tour and he was happy as larry, check out my post on them here: Friend: Go on a walking tour right where you live

Friend: Go on a walking tour right where you live

When my friends and I moved into our first flat in London, my friend’s parents were a little concerned on 2 counts.

Firstly, that I was living, in what I lovingly call “the den”. Ie, a double bed and a half sized cubby hole behind the bannisters on the landing, enclosed with walls only ¾ of the way round and no door.

And secondly the area. If you don’t know Bethnal Green or indeed East London, it is an odd place. A kind person might describe it as gritty, a more honest one might acknowledge it is impoverished in parts, but yet it is trendy, where 2 bedroom apartments regularly are sold for around a million pounds. My friend Steve describes it as “50% upper middle class white families, 50% ruthless gangsters” which gives you an idea, but actually Bethnal Green is much more of a fruit salad of cultures and bank balances than that. Even though our flat was super swish and modern, with big floor to ceiling windows, oak floors and all white and spotlights, search the postcode and marked on the map is "Kray twins lived here" (the 50s and 60s notorious east London gangsters) and "red light district" both about 100 yards from where we lived.  Whilst looking out the kitchen window you are treated to a view of the London skyline – the gherkin, Heron tower, later the Shard - look out the living room window and you can see into what is literally a crack den, with a burnt out roof. Walk 200 yards to the pub down the road to pay for your £5 “craft beer” pint, and you’ll pass a couple of prostitutes sipping on Sainsbury's basic lager on the way. 

But my Dad - or Popster, as I like to call him, to give him props for the Tu Pac listening to, anorak wearing, mathematician gangster that he is – truly is one in a million, and loved my new set up.

Firstly, he was very encouraging about the den, and agreed with me that paying £430 including bills a month for it was a bargain I couldn’t turn down. (And err FYI it totally was, look at all this fabulous sound and eye proofing - a screen, blackout curtains and a sari - which made it like a marvellous little cave bedroom: )

Of course, when Will wanted to stand up in the den we had to open the sky light, but for 5 foot 3 of me, it was fine!

But my Dad also bloomin loved the area. “I love this area” he announced once he had finished heaving my suitcase full to the brim of books up the four flights of stairs. “This is the real London, I would love to go on a walking tour around here”. So I thought: Ok Dad, walking tour ey, say hello to your Christmas and Birthday presents for the next 10 years. 

Now if you’ve read some of my posts before, you might remember I do quite enjoy an “experience” gift. I am a fan of when I give someone a present, manoeuvring the situation, so that I too get to stuff my face with cream cakes/ go to a spa/ go see a show etc too. Part of it is probably quite selfish, I basically can’t get someone else a present without buying myself one.  Part of it is maybe tinged with narcissism, in like a “ and for Christmas I am giving you the best gift of all, quality time with me!” sort of way. But actually, I do try and get experience gifts to be nice, and to share a really memorable extraordinary time with someone else, doing something they might not have even thought existed or would never bought tickets to themselves, but really love. And with my parents I think experience gifts are an especially a good idea: so many of the best, most interesting, most unique and most fun experiences in my life they have paid for me to have, and thought of and been with me for. So now that I live in London, and am constantly doing things they wouldn’t know to book, it is time for me to repay the favour.

I actually went on both of the walking tours I review here 2 years ago, and 7 months ago respectively, but as Christmas is coming up, I thought I’d dip back into my old photos and route around in the dustiest corners of my memory as I think, if you haven’t thought of something to get your one in a million Dad, or Mum, or brother, sister, boyfriend, Grandpa, then a walking tour is quite a neat little gift. 

The first walking tour has changed slightly, but I've found the same guide on a new website - East London Walking Tours, and the tour provider  London Walks has one that looks pretty similar.

Dad's Christmas present 2011 - Not another Jack the Ripper tour: an East London walking tour - taken October 2012

As someone who comes from a village that was a field 50 years ago, one of my favourite things about London is how when you walk down her streets, you can imagine the hundreds and thousands of people who have walked down those same streets – maybe without the same concrete slabbing and double yellow lines – but same streets just the same - literally hundreds of years ago. It makes you feel gloriously little and yet significant at the same time, like looking at the sea and stars. For me, I get this much more in the fairytale world of Chelsea and Mayfair than in east London where I live, in Kensington I can almost envisage bumping into J. M Barrie around the next corner. 

I wanted to get that same feeling right where I live, as, after all, the east end has some pretty wonderful history and some pretty incredible people who have lived there too, and walked those streets in the past. 

Hit horribly by the Blitz in World War 2, you might not be so steeped in old architecture in the east end as much as the west end, but people very much lived here. The infamous Jack the Ripper in the Victorian times and the infamous Krays after the war, are just the tip of the iceberg, the east end has always been teaming with life and a history worth knowing.

My Great Uncle Bernard, one of the funniest men I've ever met and who used to drive to from Brighton to Bethnal Green every day to work, has some great stories about the east end, including his own story about how the pub his office was above rigged a up a pipe so he could enjoy beer fresh from the pump at his desk. That is what being in East London was all about. 

For "not another Jack the Ripper" walking tour we met outside Whitechapel station, on a crisp and sunny October Sunday morning. Our tour guide David's grandmother was one of the Jewish immigrants from the Tsarist Russian empire who came to the east end at the beginning of the twentieth century, so he really knew, loved and in lived in the area. He didn’t just want to talk about Jack the Ripper, or the Krays, but every edge and every curve (yes I’ve quoted John Legend on purpose) the east end had to offer. 

I don’t want to give you a run down of everything in the walking tour, as you should just bloomin go on it, plus I don’t want to get sued or told off for giving away David's secrets. Plus, from a little routing around on the internet, it looks like the exact tour I went on, which was from London Walks has disappeared, but David's got his own company doing a range of east London walks the aptly named  "east London walks" so I am confident you can find one very similar, if not exactly the same. But here are some pictures, and some of the special stops David talks more about on the tour. (This is probably about 10% of the sites that are covered, I wouldn’t say these are the highlights by no means, but they are probably the best pictures!)

Marx wrote some of the Communist manifesto in the library above Aldgate East Station. This isn't the only spot of communism and revolution you come across on the tour.

The Blind Beggar where Ronnie Kray shot and killed George Cornell in 1966. David remarked it had changed quite a bit since then, except for the toilets, which maybe hadn't been cleaned since.

The place of St Mary's - "the White chapel" for which the area was named. The chapel was destroyed in the blitz, but a few remains still clonk around Altab Ali park, named after the Bangladeshi clothing worker, murdered on his way home from work in 1978.

The East London Mosque is one of the biggest in all of Europe - 35,000 people attend to worship here every week.

I thought this walking tour was great, and amazing value for money, and I wholeheartedly recommend both this tour if you live or are ever in the east end of London, but also more generally I recommend doing a walking tour of where you live. Part of the reason I probably remember this tour so well, is because I am reminded every time I pass these sites of how special they are and how lucky I am to live in such a wonderful place that has housed so many amazing people before me, and will house many more when I am gone.

You can book a tour with David on East London Walks here.

Or you can book a walking tour of the east end and other spots in London on London Walks here.

Dad's Christmas Present 2013 - Eat Your Way Around Brixton by Fox and Squirrel - enjoyed in March 2014

I love Brixton. It is where I first ate deep friend macaroni and cheese, a food which would definitely be part of my last meal, if I ever committed a serious crime in a country where they weirdly think it is ok to punish someone by killing them. (They serve it at Chicken Liquor (formerly Wishbone), alongside fantastic fried chicken). It is also where I received my first (and last) blackberry messenger, from a boy called Lavon, who I met in McDonalds and used the chat up line, “do princesses eat Big Macs?” (Yes Lavon, they do.) It is also where Hootananny’s is, where you can spend an evening eating burritos, shotting tequila slammers and dancing to live reggae, so that says it all really. And I figured, if my Dad like the east end for it’s “real Londoness” he would love Brixton. Enter last Christmas’ Christmas present.

Fox and Squirrel’s food walking tour really takes you to all the corners of Brixton. I’ve always associated it with Jamaican cuisine, as I know Brixton is damn good at that, and although Fox and Squirrel do take you for your share of ackee saltfish and goat roti (at Fish, Wings and Tings – one of the best) they also take you to all the places you didn’t realise even were in Brixton, and it makes you realise how much of a fabulous multicultural neck of the woods it really is. 

On my tour with Fox and Squirrel we enjoyed everything from Ethiopian in what appeared to be a kebab shop, to Lechona (a whole pig which is stuffed with rice, herbs and lots of delicious pork) at the back of a Columbian food market to self brewing Brixton beer.

The tour begins at an Ethiopian coffee ceremony in a covered market stall

Brixton's breweries beers are named after the area such as Effra Ale (named after the river which used to flow through Brixton) and Electric IPA (after Electric Avenue)

I am about to be a massive, unpleasable fuss monger, for which, Fox and Squirrel, I am sorry. The great thing about Fox and Squirrel is that they took you into places you would never normally go because you didn’t want that thing where everyone in the restaurants goes silent and looks at you to happen, and because some of the restaurants (tables at the back of supermarkets etc) didn’t look that good – there were plastic tables, plastic forks, in the Ethiopian shop for example there was a man passed out on the table next to us. (And not from eating too much). You get it, I am a bit of a snob and they weren’t places you would take someone on a first date, unless you wanted to come across super quirky. But my snobbery isn’t exactly the problem, as I really didn’t care that they weren’t that nice, as for all of my home counties up bringing I've spent enough time in a dirty student house and backpacking around Asia to be ok with that sort of thing.

The problem was for the cost of the ticket, the food and the places we were eating, to me personally, didn’t seem that great a value. My feeling is it is totally ok to take someone to a Columbian supermarket to try something weird, but don’t charge everyone £70 for it. Obviously a lot of the expense is Fox and Squirrel’s expertise, but I think I have been spoilt by a food tour in Rome for where the cost of 40 euros, and I was given more food to eat than I normally would in a week. And a fair bit of wine. And it was all delicious.

(If you are ever in Rome by the way, you should go on "eat like the Romans do".  I had coffee, canolo, caprese salad, melon and parma ham, 5 different cheeses, 3 slices of pizza, mozzarella parmagiana, 3 bowls of different pasta in a sit down restaurant that was nice, gelato and approx. a bottle of wine. Bargain).

So I guess my complaint, as someone who can be a tight arse about everything but glittery nail varnish, for me personally, Fox and Squirrel wasn’t the best value of money. But if you are visiting London, or new to the area, and you want to see a side of London you would normally never see then it will be a great food walking tour to go on. You can book here.

If you like old London buildings and things, then you should go for dinner up the St. Pancras clock tower. Read all about it in my post "How you can have the most magical and wonderful time up a clock tower, for £85 all in, which is actually a bargain honest"