Welcome to my website. I am the author of ‘Vietnamese – Simple Vietnamese Food To Cook At Home’. I am a photographer and film maker. You can book into my supper club, Vietnamese cooking classes, buy my book, check out my photography and lots more here.
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Food Photographer
The supper club is held in my home in London Fields, Hackney. It is like a dinner party in the tradition of a Vietnamese feast with homemade Vietnamese food.
Vietnamese food is about the balance of flavours, of sweet, salty and sour – there is no measuring device that can ever match your own taste buds.
I followed the news and a few twitter streams because I heard the riots were coming to Hackney and indeed they did. The footage were live on BBC News and it was all just a stones throw from my home. I decided to move my car which was parked right in front of The Carhart outlet because I had a feeling that this was where these kids would want to loot. This is where you can get over sized jeans and hoodies innit!
Just as the helicopter went to get fuel and we can no longer see the live images, the rioters came running down my street.
The noise was so intense, they were all yelling and laughing at the same time, they were smashing cars – jumping on cars and kicking the windscreens in with their feet and laughing.
I was shaking, my body didn’t make sense to me anymore, it was like a tree in the wind and my only company was Twitter. I tweeted my first hand experiences, I couldn’t get hold of my mum and I made sure my dogs were locked in a room in case the looters would try to enter.
I was so scared. It was like my life was so under threat. It felt like a war.
Immediately, I picked up the phone to call the police but they said they wouldn’t be able to come, that there wasn’t enough resources.
A couple of guys laughed in hysterics as he was jumping up and down on an old convertible MG and eventually set the car alight.
The street eventually turned black and this made the boys hang back and clear the street because the fumes were strong – The fire brigade (when I figured it was 999) asked me in detail what was happening – they told me to go and have a look! I said, I don’t think so – I am not stepping outside, they are literally outside!
The fire brigade never turned up.
After about a long long hour or hour and half, about 6 riot police turned up and stood afar at the top of the road to make sure no one else was entering. They couldn’t do anything, there were too few of them! And there were spectators – we were all spectators just looking in complete horror – police intervention would have made it completely worse.
They walked around as if they were themselves spectators. There were a couple of guys on bikes, ordering people to leave or to move on.
And eventually they did – they stood on one side of the fire and the riot police stood on the other. My neighbours and I were in between with the British press. After 2 hours, our ordeal was over.
This was nothing compared to what happened later to the rest of London – homes and buildings set alight and so many people have lost many things, while these boys go home with some new jeans, laughing with the price tag hanging off their necks.
