100 YEARS OLD AND STILL APPRECIATES SMALL THINGS...

ADECADE or three ago, I recall hearing the slogan “Small is beautiful” touted around a great deal to promote a wide range of undersized, under-financed, under-designed products. I was not taken in but some recent experiences have suggested to me that it may have now a glimmer of truth behind it.

I have written before about Pop-up Opera (popupopera.co.uk) who are a small but highly talented company who pop up in small but delightfully intimate venues, usually performing cut-down (and thus small) versions of great operas in magnificent style. Their latest production of Hansel And Gretel is currently touring the pubs and small theatres of the land and this evening is popping in to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. If you’re passing, do take the chance of a small but exquisite performance.

I had thought that Pop-up was an exception to my general rule that small is not beautiful but last week I twice had cause to reflect on that matter.

The first time was a play, The Red Lion, at the Trafalgar Studios near to London’s Trafalgar Square. The play, by the rather brilliant Patrick Marber, is set in the small changing room of a small, non-league football team and the small cast comprised only three actors led by the wonderful Stephen Tompkinson (whom I had last seen in that wonderful TV comedy Drop The Dead Donkey). He plays the ambitious but somewhat dodgy manager of the team who has to cope with a retired player who now irons the team shirts and a young player with a dodgy knee who shows great promise.

The theatre, which was a sort of small brother of the main theatre at that location, was about the size of a small changing room itself, which added to the closeness and joy of the production. I gather that the play was first seen at the National Theatre, which must have been too big for such a small but beautiful play.

A couple of days later, I went to a small wine-tasting lunch at a big restaurant. The restaurant was Novikov in London’s Berkeley Street, which has always impressed me for its freshness and general quality, despite its huge size, and the wine came from the small Tuscan winery Podere La Villa.

Their wines are produced in small quantity and sell mainly to Japan, which makes them difficult to obtain in the UK, but to judge from the taste and smoothness of their Pargolo Chianti Classico 2013, which was served with red wine risotto, wild mushrooms, mint and young grouse, it’s well worth hunting for. Their other wines: white, another chianti and a sweet pudding wine, were highly quaffable too.

I found it all a little depressing, as it left another dent in my hopes of ever becoming a wine connoisseur. If small producers such as this are coming up with wines of such quality, there must be many of them, making my chances of sampling them all very small indeed.

Tonight, however, even if it does clash with Pop-up in Cambridge, I shall be eating some small crustaceans at a crab-fest at Wright Brothers in Soho. I do like crabs; they are so much smaller than lobsters, don’t you think?