This Sunday we’re hosting our neighbourhood version of the BIG LUNCH with a large outdoor banquet table collecting our latitudes together with the local community. We’ll dine in the sun in the rose garden at the back of St. Leonard’s, on the corner of Shoreditch High Street & Hackney Road, otherwise known as Shoreditch Church. The church was immortalised in that well-known hymn to food, the nursery rhyme Oranges & Lemons. Built next to England’s first purpose-built theatre (1576), its graveyard is peppered with The Theatre’s rotting hams; live hams still gyrate in Browns across the road. Further down the road next to another spot of fleshy sport (& spurt?: Ye Old Axe), our home’ll be the sheltered retreat in the unanticipated event it rains too hard.
http://www.thebiglunch.com

Longitude 199 East means we’re about to enter our third century of scans, and feels like we’re already racing back home to 0. The stream of local latitudinal fare’s still way non-mainstream; We start our cooking trail at the Cook Islands, 15 tiny volcanic islands and atolls covering 2.2million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. Mangaia is notable for its abundance of coconuts (zzz) and pupu (sic) – the snail shells painstakingly threaded into its famous ‘eis’ neckbands, while pukapuka, like our group, is renowned for its beautiful girls ;) No kidding: the US once claimed sovereignty over many of the islands under its 1857 guano act – paraphraseable, pre-Rumsfield, as ‘your shit is my shit.’

Further North Jarvis island was mined for just this poopoo prize. Its sole resident committed suicide in 1883 and the island is now uninhabited, “unincorporated and unorganised.” The adjacent Line Islands stretch over 2,000 km from the confetti of Kiribati (or Gilberts) in the West towards Hawaii. Kiribati has its own London & Poland on Christmas Island. Though one of the world’s poorest countries and dependent on exports of fish and coconut, the former has also been home to all sorts of hi-tech developments, from the laying of the Pacific cable to Japan’s current development of a Spaceport. J. Maarten Troost wrote the autobiographical “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” here. Smiling whilst dancing is generally considered vulgar.

And then, at last, as we alight on mainland Alaska, we find our 2nd US state: the nineteen moments of Hawaii (once Sandwich), where everyone greets each other with love and their traditional feast is called a luau. Like so many of these gorgeous Pacific islands, Hawaii seems to exemplify our Latitudinal travels, blending tourism and agriculture, its islands awash with macadamia, papaya, coffee beans and drinkers. Martha says she’ll join us with her hula later.

Avarua or Arorangi, Hanapepe or Honolulu, Kekaha or Kilauea, who’s hitching a Shoreditch ride with us?


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