We had an excellent lunch at 1919 today.

To drink, we started with a home-made sour plum (infinitely nicer than any other version I've tasted), were refreshed throughout by a mellow but flavourful tea from the big round pot, and finished off with Ipoh white coffee.

To eat, we chose several memorable dishes. The kerabu salad consists of green mango and cucumber in a spicy, tangy, faintly peanutty dressing. Excellent in itself, but even better because it comes in a yam basket (crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside). This makes for a really awesome blend of textures and flavours. We also ordered cencaluk squid. Cencaluk, according to my Malay dictionary, is preserved shrimp fermented in salt water. That doesn't sound fabulous, but this dish was actually great. Squid tossed with leaves and four-angle beans in a lightly curry-reminiscent sauce. And finally, we chose pandan chicken, all wrapped up in its leaves.

Every element was high-quality, and the tasteful surroundings were an additional pleasure. This restaurant gets good reviews, and it's easy to see why.



It seems the restaurant is not actually named after the year. But of course you can't help making the association, especially as 1919 was my mother's birth year.

In a kind of early-20th-century tie-up, I've just finished reading Roy Hattersley's The Edwardians. "Modern Britain was born in the opening years of the twentieth century. It is the legacy of the Edwardians": this is Hattersley's central thesis. It might not be entirely true or entirely new. But it makes for a resonant read.

So many of the books I enjoyed as a student turn out to be Edwardian; the "suffragette" campaign was both more violent and more riven than I had previously realized; the debates about welfare are a useful reminder of the ground that was laid in that direction well before World War 2 and its Cold War aftermath; early evidence of the British love affair with the "heroism of failure" (an ongoing and sometimes unfortunate predilection, I would argue) is interestingly explored in the accounts of Scott and Shackleton.

And fresh from watching a couple of series of The Newsroom (which I apparently enjoyed much more than the critics), it was ironic to discover the Edwardian era's "new journalism", one of whose variants condemned "lifeless" reports in favour of stories describing "the habits, the clothes or the home and social life" of the famous. Plus ca change...

By 1919, Edward had been dead nine years; the Great War was over. In January 1919, the Versailles Peace Conference opened; the League of Nations was founded; and 2.3 million gallons of molasses flooded Boston MA, killing 21... Imagine that: literally drowned in sweetness.

Turbulent times. A bit like our own.

Meanwhile, here's a bit of KL Edwardiana:



And I have no idea which era this Newark house dates back to, but it is an abiding tribute to the power of Howard's End that I will for ever associate wisteria with the age of Edward...