Tunnock's caramel wafers

Regular readers - are there any? - will know that Tunnock's caramel wafers are something of a fetish in this household. We almost never eat them during the year, but never go on holiday without them, and they have saved us on many a cheap package holiday, when we arrived at our destination in the small hours and they provided the only sustenance until shops and cafes opened again with daylight.

So, imagine my delight when I found in Morrisons this morning:

!!Tunnock's caramel wafers in dark chocolate!!

Truly God is good.

Chinese

We went out for a Chinese meal last night. I was surprised when Husband suggested the local Chinese restaurant, as we'd eaten there before and although the food is really quite good, it isn't a great dining experience. Like many such places, it concentrates mostly on the take-away trade. However, it is close and convenient so I didn't protest. A meal out is a meal out, after all, and it was an opportunity to wear my new boots on a short walk.

As soon as we walked in it was clear that they had more or less abandoned the restaurant side of the business. There were just a couple of tables set up at the back, one of which we took, and noone else came in all evening. We were given menus and shortly afterwards the waitress came back to take the drinks order, apologising that there wasn't a wine list at the moment. We ordered a bottle of the house white, notwithstanding. Off she went, to come back a couple of minutes later to apologise that there was only one bottle of white wine, that had already been opened. We could have a couple of glasses out of it, or all of what was left - which did we want? She was very sorry. The wine delivery was expected tomorrow. So that was the first set-back - we had managed to find a restaurant without any wine. The restaurant is next door to a wine merchant, for goodness' sake! (Although it had closed for the evening by the time we needed it). We ordered two glasses, and the vegetarian set menu for two.

Some consternation arose and our poor waitress came back to ask, did we eat prawn crackers? We said that yes, we did. (We're not very strict vegetarians and anyway, are there any prawns in prawn crackers?)

Take-away and delivery trade was fairly brisk, while we sat alone in the back. The back door (which led goodness knows where - to the toilets or the bins, presumably) didn't shut tight, so banged every time the front door was opened.

The food was excellent and there was masses of it, lots of courses and, as always, more than we could eat. Given its limitations - I don't think our waitress was really a waitress, though she was very sweet and polite and helpful - service was fine and we weren't hurried. This became something of a problem because the restaurant was glacial. Husband was sat back to the wall with a radiator beside him, but he said it was dead cold. Each time the front door opened a blast of cold air came in, and rolled down the room, where a very small part of it dissipated through the crack in the banging back door, and the rest of it washed over us and settled round our feet. I thought about putting my coat back on and wished I had worn a vest.

I find it hard to be cross with places like this. After all, the food was good, hot and well-made. I've no idea how they make a living, and I'm sure they barely make one at all, so it would be churlish to expect that a Chinese take-away out in the suburbs is going to be able to provide a dining experience like the Dorchester. But I did wonder what the newspaper restaurant critics would have made of it.

Taxidermy

You have very little choice, on a busy commuter train, about where to sit, but you have absolutely no choice about who sits next to you, which is how I found myself sitting next to a couple of young chaps on the way home last night - one next to me, and one opposite. I never did get a good look at the one next to me, because it would be inexcusably rude to turn your head that far round to stare, but he and his friend were in their twenties, at a guess, clean and well-spoken, obviously well-off and, as it turned out from their conversation, on their way to spend the weekend together in St Albans. Whether they had been at school together, or at university together, or what, I don't know, but they had a large circle of mutual friends, plus families, and they were busy catching up on what they had all been doing.

Their conversation was the problem. It wasn't loud, or foul-mouthed, or anything like that, but it is quite unusual for people to have such long conversations and it is very difficult indeed not to listen when they do. Noone else was talking, there were no other distractions, I didn't have a book (I doubt if I could have concentrated on it if I had) - and the conversation became increasingly bizarre. It reached a culmination like this.

"So, is he still into that taxidermy thing, then?"

"Yes. He's just bought two golden eagles. Shot in 1910. And they're in these huge cases. Six foot square. He's had to have the doors taken off the house to get them in. One of them has got its claws in a badger."

Cisterns

I had lunch today with some friends in a vegetarian restaurant north of the Barbican, a rather odd place, as it had very plain pine tables and chairs, like a caff, but linen napkins and a bread basket. Anyway, the food was good and the house wine was organic, but none of that is the point of this post.
After the meal I went to use the toilet and it was amazing. A tiny room, more like a corridor, no more than three feet wide and very long, with one wall being an old blackened brick wall which gave it something of the air of a grotto, the effect being heightened by a dark basin and white flowers. What spoiled it was the plastic low-level cistern, when what the room needed was an old cast-iron high-level one with a chain.
I can't remember the last time I saw a high-level cistern with a chain (or even with a length of string, which I recall as being quite common in public toilets where I suppose the chains had been stolen). Is this another piece of my childhood that has disappeared into history? Would modern day children look askance at being asked, as my mother never failed to ask me, "Did you pull the chain?"

Keeping my arms warm in bed

These thoughts were prompted by a friend's email gleefully announcing that she had bought herself a long-sleeved brushed cotton nightgown (half-price in M&S). My first thought was that this was a bit sad. After all, while we are none of us getting any younger, I associate brushed cotton nightgowns of any kind, let alone long-sleeved ones, with my mother and grandmother.

And then I started to think about it.

After all, how many ways are there to keep my arms warm? They always get bitterly cold when I am reading in bed - there's nothing like newsprint to make your hands cold, so why tramps sleep under newspapers to keep warm I can't imagine. I like a cold bedroom - a hot bed but a cold bedroom - because although the rest of me is tucked up snug I do like my nose outside breathing cold fresh air. I can never sleep in hotels and places where the heating is on all night. And this is just as well, as our central heating is always timed to go off a while before our normal bedtime. Polar bears on diminishing ice floes may be glad of this, but I am not. Anyway, by the time I am sitting up in bed with my magazine or review section of Saturday's Guardian (and I have a heap of these going back years as bedtime reading), no matter how warm the rest of me may be, my hands and arms are bitterly cold.

Husband suggested I wear a cardigan, but a cardigan in bed is really only a bed-jacket and if I'm not old enough for nightgowns I am certainly not old enough for bed-jackets. I am not going to go down the road of shampoos and sets, and boudoir caps [go look it up, those readers who don't know what I am talking about] and Teasmades, and those wheeled tables that pull over the bed.

I used to have a shawl, which someone crocheted for me at the time when it was fashionable to have crocheted shawls, and which I used to wear in bed. Goodness knows where it is now - I doubt I ever got rid of it, so it is probably in a suitcase in the loft. But shawls aren't really the thing any more, and now that I am older, I would look like Red Riding Hood's grandma if I sat up in bed wrapped in a shawl, and a wolf in drag isn't a good look.

Perhaps it is time to think about a long-sleeved brushed cotton nightgown.

Ruddles has a bad day

It started badly when he slipped on the side of the sink and fell into the (very hot, very soapy) washing-up.

It got worse when he was fossicking about in the hall, and climbed into a plastic carrier bag with his head through the handle. When he stood up, it rustled behind him and spooked him, so off he went, 100 mph, to go out into the garden but didn't notice the back door was shut and so CRUNCH. One cut nose.

Life must be so exciting - and so dangerous - when everything is new and for the first time.