Orchids and mince

Dear Readers,

I hear that George W Bush is a bit discombobulated to discover that he now has to pick up his own dog shit – poor man.

The Thai Orchid…

Loose ended this evening and in need of some tasty nosh, Montaigne and I bombed down to the Thai Orchid in Falmouth, that well known haunt of Lesbian Fundamentalists and Estate Agents.  Nothing is like it was, mostly worse, but this restaurant gets better at every visit, except I have decided that, after drinking it on and off for years, Singa beer is actually filthy stuff after all.  Perhaps the bottles don’t travel well.  It seemed delicious in Chang Mai.

I sat opposite Montaigne with my back to the room.  I always choose this position because it allows M, or any other companion, to flirt with the other diners and I have no fear of attack from behind.  An uncle of mine had a friend who might have been a colonel in the SAS and he would never sit with his back to the door.  Such things are nothing to me, having once followed a postal course of Kung Fook. 

Should a band of Ninja Warriors be so reckless as to burst in and fling themselves upon me, I would simply bend forward, allowing them to fly over my shoulders and thud into the wall, directing their flight over the head of Montaigne by merely raising an arm, the right or left arm depending on the angle of attack.  Montaigne and I would calmly continue with our meal while the waiters removed the stunned assailants.

Alternatively, if a couple of armed Yakusa hit men, bent on the ritual assignation of Montaigne, who’s essays we all know are an anathema to the Japanese Mafia, should silently approach with weapons drawn; then, on a nod from M, I would instantly make my hogoshakimooshi, a reverse somersault from the sitting position, disarming them with my feet as I did so.  So far no such persons have been foolish enough to challenge my training.

M and I dined well on hooded cobra red curry, and sticky rice, without interruptions and in spite of the Singa beer.

Talking of things Oriental; you have probably already heard that China is taking up cricket in a serious way, like they do most things! I guess it won’t be many years before they thrash us at Lords.  In the mean time, Rangoon is celebrating the release of Aung San suu Kyi  (Born in 1945!).  For how long one wonders…  I was in Paris when it went wild with excitement at the election of Francois Mitterrand, but when it was revealed that he could'nt perform miracles after all the joy gave way to miserable disillusionment.  The euphoria in England when “New Labour” was elected on a landslide soon turned to bitter disappointment.

Food tip of the day:  Never eat mince.  If you must eat mince, if your wife has been conned into buying a bag of the stuff from a local farmer’s wife, or you actually buy some from a supermarket, get ordinary mince not the low fat stuff which is mostly heart, placenta, spleen, udder, and other less enticing bits of animal.  Low fat mince always smells like dog food. 

Fry lots of onions first with shredded streaky bacon, garlic, herbs, seasoning, and pot vegetables like peppers, celery and carrots, add any kind of booze (no not spirits!) and a tin of chopped tomatoes to disguise the taste, then cook it slow for at least three hours spooning off the fat.  The next day you can throw it all away or use it for simple dishes like cottage pie or an English style Tagliatelle Bolognaise, not spaghetti please!

Pip, pip,

The Leg.

Season of mud and mournful uselessness.

Absent mindedly wielding my strigel in the bathhouse this morning, I was totally underwhelmed by this week’s “In Our Time”(09:00 BBC Radio4). Two lady scientists were desperately trying to convince Melvin and us, that during the upsurge of modern science in the Enlightenment, the wives of famous scientists played a much larger role than hitherto expected. There may well be some truth in their argument but the lack of written evidence and the emphasis placed on tenuous deductions made the programme sound more like “woman’s Hour”. What next? Will we discover that Mrs Mozart composed most of the music and that Amadeus mimed while she played the piano off stage? Did the theory of relativity come to Mrs Einstein while she was changing the beds, who knows…?

This far flung corner of the Empire is in the grip of damp and darkness once again. Apart from the obvious disadvantages, one problem with the Cornish climate is that it makes people depressed. Old gits stare miserably into their flat pints of mild ale and can barely manage the lifting of a head to stare at a stranger. My favourite nurse at the surgery was so downcast yesterday that, as she delicately removed the fifteen staples from my knee, a tear moistened her sad eye.

Pip Pip,

the Leg.