Thanks for dropping in
So we all go to the polls tomorrow and some will be voting close to a chicken dinner. I see that this restaurant in Highbury is encouraging customers to be creative with the truth, so who’ll be surprised if the politicians will be also? £22-00 for a chicken seems to be a bit on the steep side too!
I just hope that we come out of the process without too much gravy and won’t be overcome by emulsion like this van nearby.
Not a lot of people know that Spiderman lives here right in the heart of England, but now I can reveal with this exclusive picture. Poor chap looked a bit down at heel and thin, could have benefitted from putting on a few pounds and perhaps a bit of a ‘work-out’. He was heading for this Pizza place so I’m hopeful that they will give him a nice filling snack, after all he is returning their sign to them by the look of it.
…and a hell of a lot of washing up.
I’m keen on cooking, and eating. This drawing was obviously about chefs or the like, but I cannot remember excactly. It covers a lot of things that I like and that I don’t. Cooking and the results thereof I am fond of, clearing up not.
I had a girlfriend many years ago who offered to cook for myself and my then flatmates in London. We were delighted that she’d offered her services and the result cannot have been all bad, but the thing that all of us remembered, even years afterwards, was the mess she made. There was not a single kitchen utensil she had not used, it truly looked like we’d been burgled by a kitchen maniac.
Then there’s eating out. Big square plate and small food sniffs of what the TV pundits call ‘fine dining’. I like it but would generally like them to use more plate.
Visitors to this remote and historic ex-hostelry, far up in the hills where rivers rise, always used to enjoy looking at the old photographs on the wall. These reflected a bygone age when the local produce show was held here, customers formed football and darts teams and turned up in Toyota pick-ups.
Those were the days, my friends, when the pub was the social sine qua non of a scattered rural community. The community is still scattered but if anybody wants a pint now it has to be a widget tin from the supermarket down the valley; no pints have been sold at Ye Tomatoe for a twelvemonth.
Yes, in that short time Signor Pomodoro Lambretta, front of house, and Darren ‘Sharon’ Maclaren, chef, transformed the place. Before, you could only get bitter, lager, Guinness and two sorts of sandwich: cheese and pickle, or cheese. Under Pommy and Sharon, you could have Saltimbocca Siciliano, Fegato alla Milanese, Pavarotti alla Mariolanza and various fusion dishes, including Szechuan Ostrich Stroganoff and Thai Broken Harbour Soup with Wild Orkney Octopus. You washed these down with 35 different sorts of Bardolino and 27 of Frascati. If you got too merry you could have bed and full Italian breakfast for the price of a farm labourer’s week’s wages.
It was not long before the two proprietors discovered that Upper Weirdale was no place for a gastropub. Their loan was called in and they had to sell the place as a private house, so that was that.
Another of the drawings featured in the book. Words by Mr Thorburn of course.
It’s that time of year when all the stats come out for the blogs and I note with some disappointment tinged with hope that the most popular blog was the one about my holidays in Crete
and the next best was one announcing an exhibition of my wife’s paintings.
Cartoons came a poor third! That aside I intend to persist. This site and the other one: unexpecteditems.com will hopefully develop over the coming year.
I have a number of followers in Brazil, they seem to drop in every time I post so for them I have put this next paragraph through a translation sausage machine and hope that it works. Many thanks to our followers there.
Olá Brasil
parece que tenho seguidores no seu país e estou tendo esta oportunidade para agradecer-lhe para largar no site.Sinta-se livre para me acompanhar e passar no meu endereço do site aos seus compatriotas e mulheres. Saúdo-te para o seu senso de humor!
Que se refere ao
Paul Davies
This is a quick sketch of one of the waitresses at Zedel a really great restaurant that I tried out recently in Soho, a mere walk two minutes from tacky Piccadilly Circus. You can get a meal with a glass of not band wine for less than 20 quid which I thought was not bad and in surroundings that, although recently built, have all the feeling and atmosphere of a Parisian Restaurant. I might have made her look severe, which she was not.
