Grumble alert!
Today I missed the bus - and, it being Sunday service, there was a two-hour interval.
The Catholic church where I used to worship on Saturday evenings is now a Wetherspoons. The church itself is the bar, and the property next door is a "family area" and restaurant. I have often studied its menu and rejected it as dreary. For some inexplicable reason, perhaps partly owing to heat and exasperation, I decided today to have lunch there.
Salmon and lime fishcakes with salad turned out to be two very flat cakes, mostly potato (except each having two just visible chunks of salmon), a very small wedge of lime, about a table spoon of lettuce, two cherry tomatoes and two one-inch sticks of cucumber.
In former days this would have been an excellent starter - except that the fishcakes would have been pinkly stuffed throughout with salmon, there would have been a whole segmented lime,and the salad would have been twice the size, and included things like orange slices and strawberries.
What was worse was that it was too dark to read, so I had to leave earlier than I'd planned - and by then the heat had given way to rain - so I spent the rest of the time wandering round Marks and Sparks.
Cheerful point - I found an excellent cotton rich unwired bra size 36 A - usually unobtainable anywhere else and seldom obtainable there.
The day improves further as I watch on TV an old friend being welcomed to the Eisteddfodd. Rowan Williams doesn't look a day older than he looked when he was giving me a tutorial in 1988, and I still can't really believe that he's the Archbishop of Canterbury. By all accounts, he also has some difficulty about this.
The Catholic church where I used to worship on Saturday evenings is now a Wetherspoons. The church itself is the bar, and the property next door is a "family area" and restaurant. I have often studied its menu and rejected it as dreary. For some inexplicable reason, perhaps partly owing to heat and exasperation, I decided today to have lunch there.
Salmon and lime fishcakes with salad turned out to be two very flat cakes, mostly potato (except each having two just visible chunks of salmon), a very small wedge of lime, about a table spoon of lettuce, two cherry tomatoes and two one-inch sticks of cucumber.
In former days this would have been an excellent starter - except that the fishcakes would have been pinkly stuffed throughout with salmon, there would have been a whole segmented lime,and the salad would have been twice the size, and included things like orange slices and strawberries.
What was worse was that it was too dark to read, so I had to leave earlier than I'd planned - and by then the heat had given way to rain - so I spent the rest of the time wandering round Marks and Sparks.
Cheerful point - I found an excellent cotton rich unwired bra size 36 A - usually unobtainable anywhere else and seldom obtainable there.
The day improves further as I watch on TV an old friend being welcomed to the Eisteddfodd. Rowan Williams doesn't look a day older than he looked when he was giving me a tutorial in 1988, and I still can't really believe that he's the Archbishop of Canterbury. By all accounts, he also has some difficulty about this.