Quick! It's 14 degrees, get out the Barbecue!

You can guarantee very little in life, that is just how things are. What you can guarantee though, every Spring, is the return of British barbecue season. Once the painfully depressing laden skies and eternal drizzle start to dissipate and the skies open up just a little. And once the thermometer gage starts to increase just a tad, you can guarantee that somewhere around the British Isles, a group of dedicated souls have disembarked on that quintessential game of patience, to light the disposable barbecue. We are positive souls us Brits, never in the field of human food preparation has so much been owed by so many to so few warm days. Any hint of that fabled high Pressure and we find ourselves in the local Asda car park stacking up on too many burgers, sausages and of course the delightful invention that is the disposable barbecue.

It is the ultimate love affair, the chance on one of the few occasions throughout the year to get out of the kitchen and out onto the garden or local park and do exactly what you would have done indoors. If we were visited suddenly by a batch of ET's imagine the report they would compile 'they may be killing themselves with rising sea waters, wars and famine but man they can cook, anywhere, all with a foil box filled with coal and mesh!', intriguing.

Barbecue's are fantastic though. Anything that can be cooked on one instantaneously tastes better. Barbecues are the ultimate response to good weather, they are the embodiment of enjoyment, they make us all feel better because they remind us of the days when we were having fun. And of course all of the good days that we remember were filled with sunshine.

Portsmouth: The food lovers lost city?

For a city of its size you cannot deny that Portsmouth packs a punch. In equivalent measures, Portsmouth as a city has the equivalent land mass to say that of... Woking, but what it delivers surely can't be ignored. For many, think Portsmouth and you instantly think ships, the Royal Navy, a beleaguered football team or scruffy tenement blocks but to a Southsea resident such as myself, those things, to all intents and purposes, may as well be 100 miles away.

As a Southsea-ite, here on a five-year-long stopover from university (like so many others!), the rest of the city, never mind the rest of the country, seems to be cut adrift. What this has succeeded in achieving though is a kind of culinary twilight. Surely there are no other places in the country that packs so much in to such a small area. Amazingly, within an area covering one third the size of Portsmouth there are no less than 71 eating establishments, seventy-one! To put that into some perspective, Southampton, a city eight times bigger than the town of Southsea can only muster an ordinary 150. In terms of a ratio between population and number of restaurants there would be a restaurant for every 357 people, or just enough people to start a semi-ferocious revolution.

Some establishments are Southsea institutions. Soprano's, on Palmerston Road, serves up home cooked contemporary Italian that both looks and tastes as if care and attention has gone into it's creation. Agora, a Turkish eatery on Osbourne Road embodies the atmosphere of the restaurant in it's food by being both warm and comforting. Midnight, one of the 21 Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants in Southsea alone, manages to conjure delightfully thoughtful and delectably tasty dishes in contemporary surroundings.

Not all of Southsea's eateries conquer the taste buds as much as the aforementioned but you'd be hard pressed to find an area of the UK with so little publicity with so many gastronomical delights...