There was a place in Brighton a few years back that used to do a drink called London Fog. If you’ve never come across it, it’s a sort of Earl Grey latte, really – tea with a lot of hot, foamy milk, and something else, some glittering flavour, that I struggled to identify. The place closed down just as I was getting into them, London Fogs. I looked up a range of unsatisfactory online recipes, and then bodged together a few London Fog concepts of my own, all of which were completely undrinkable in thrillingly different ways. Then I found this cookbook a few weeks ago – Destiny: The Official Cookbook. Page 171. London Fog. Honey and almond milk. It’s good. Actually, it’s great!
The London Fog is a favourite of Devrim Kay, who I once met in the European Dead Zone. I remember him crouched in the church, maybe in a sniper spot up in the tower, and I remember him talking about getting the kettle on once missions were done. He laid the Britishness on a bit thick, I had thought, and so does Destiny: The Official Cookbook in its own way. It’s a quantities thing – after following the recipe I had enough London Fog to see me through a week. But a good egg, Devrim. It was nice to think about him again.
Destiny is one of those mega-budget successes that I can still find it hard not to feel a bit of sympathy for. A gajillion-seller, sure, but it must have really sucked when the first thing that anybody got to see of the game was not concept art or a bit of story, but Activision’s cold-eyed business plan: release dates, Q4s and whatnot stretching out for a decade. Destiny came to us initially as a product rather than a work of planet-hopping imagination. To put it another way, we got the recipe rather than the taste. Except that’s unfair to recipes, which can often be brilliant bits of micro-literature by themselves, while business plans never are.
