don't confuse the narrator

drinks invitation

The festive card in the photo was on the table at a restaurant where I had lunch the other day, offering a number of ‘drinks bundles’ for diners.

I don’t know much about beer prices, but I do know that if a house wine costs £15, getting four for the price of three does make it a much better deal.

Mind you, four bottles of wine is quite a lot, which is presumably why the restaurant felt it necessary to add the rider:

Enjoy alcohol responsibly

Why they felt it appropriate to display the card on a table clearly designed for a maximum of two people, I’m not sure. Suffice it to say, I did not take them up on their offer.

photos of food

Clearly the world is too much with me as this is the first post in a week and, like the last one, it is based on reality.

I’ve been wondering what has prompted this recent fixation with taking pictures of a meal before eating it.

Why, once a meal is on the table – particularly a special meal, where extra effort has been put into the preparation and a delay may have a more than usually detrimental effect – would anyone decide to dash off and find a camera to immortalise the moment?

I’ve seen it happen on a number of occasions recently, and each time the focus of the photograph has been the food rather than the people present.

When I cook, I’d rather the guests sat down and ate while the meal was hot and fresh, than spent so long admiring the visual effect that it all got cold. Maybe I’m just more of a gourmand than a gourmet.

Christmas: first blood

In a rare fit of truthfulness on the blog, I will admit that I am visiting my elderly mother for Christmas.

Having offered to cook Christmas lunch for whichever of the very limited family choose to attend, I decided that it was about time I stopped complaining about the inadequacies of the maternal kitchen and bought some kitchen knives that suit me.

of pigs and poetry

I took a new poem-in-progress into the writers’ group on Tuesday. Its title is La Matanza – the Spanish word for slaughter or massacre.

It’s a piece that I’ve been intending to write ever since we bought the house in the village and were told the guy couldn’t come to prune the trees on the long December puente as he’d be busy with la matanza.

In most parts of Spain, a cada cerdo le llega su San Martín – pigs get what’s coming to them on November 11th – but it seems that in our village it’s more traditional for the pig slaughter to take place on the feast of la Inmaculada.

That juxtaposition of the innocence and virginal white of the immaculate conception with the sheer red-blooded traditional country ritual of pig slaughter seems to be crying out for a poem to be written.
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TIL, bcc and other TLAs

I know that many of us grew up before email existed and we never had to worry about accidentally revealing other people’s email addresses, but I get very cross with people who forward and re-forward messages and don’t use the bcc field.

There was one message sent to me last year that particularly annoyed me. It came from a ‘friend’ who had previously laughed when I’d commented on his lack of professionalism. I think there were around a hundred people on the distribution list, including information contacts for ski-resorts and children’s schools, as well as a number of names I recognised.

The message – and the number of ‘reply to all’ follow ups – caught me at a bad moment and I wrote an irate reply to the sender, demanding to be removed from his contacts list.
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