Spent the weekend in London.
We indulged in a curry just off Chiswick High Street. The food was reasonably good. Each dish was actually distinctive in flavour and didn’t appear to have been made by using the “one pot” method of just adding cream/almonds/coconut/sundry spices to a ladleful of curry-ish sauce that forms the basis of all dishes. Maybe, however, that was because we chose the house “specials”, for which the cooks had to make a little more effort.
Our hors d’oeuvres were marred by a slightly posh middle-aged man demanding to know why he was still waiting for his take away when another customer who came into the restaurant after him had already received his order. “I mean”, he ranted, “Did I order something that’s particularly hard to cook?”. The put-upon waiter checked and explained that that particular customer had ordered over the phone quite a while ago. Ranting middle-aged man shut up at that point, but three minutes later rejoindered “Now wait a minute: that’s not true!”. So on it went, spoiling the enjoyment of my lamb tikka and K.’s prawn poori.
I know that there is a good book to be written about the peculiarly British ritual of the visit to the curry house.
Walking back to mum’s place through Chiswick, I was nudged and whispered at conspiratorially by K., who insisted that the small, bearded man carrying a takeway in a paper bag a few yards ahead of us was Robin Cook. I’m still not completely convinced but can’t deny that whoever he was, he did look remarkably similar to Tony Blair’s former Foreign Secretary. This put me in mind of the time I followed Kate Adie, the BBC foreign correspondent as she pushed a trolley around Chiswick’s Sainsbury’s. It’s hard to tell famous people from behind.
I have just remembered that blogs are supposed to have links to cool websites, so here’s a site I visit regularly:
Monnow Man 