I cannot finish their enormous portions
Widdecombe
WHEN I was a child and queued up for lunch at my primary school, I had to ask for a small, medium or large portion. Once, staring at chocolate pudding with hot chocolate sauce, I asked for an enormous and was told I could have it if I could spell the word (I could). I am now beginning to wish that waiters in the grown-up world would, as did those cheerful dinner ladies of the 1950s, ask me “small, medium or large?”
Junk food is so often blamed for the obesity epidemic but it seems to me that too many restaurants are now following the American model of ginormous portions, whatever the quality of the food.
Of course that does not apply to the upmarket establishments where you pay a week’s wages for a solitary carrot, fancily peeled and served up in some grandly named jus, but it now seems to apply to so many normal eating houses.
Last week I went with my sister-inlaw to a pleasant pub near her home in Bristol for Sunday lunch. The food was excellently cooked but, ye gods!, it was heaped on the plates and topped off with a vast Yorkshire pudding which obscured everything else.
Simultaneously we put the Yorkshires on our side plates and left them, despite both of us liking them and wanting them. Even then, we could not clear our plates. An offer of dessert reduced us to helpless laughter.
I glanced round the pub and, yes, too many of the clients were fat. I do not mean a bit overweight but noticeably fat. A burger and fries would not have matched that meal for nutrition but nor would it have matched it for calories.
Wise after the event, we realised that we should have asked for a child’s portion. But why should normal adults with healthy appetites have to do that? It is time eateries in general offered two sizes of meal: normal and large.
My only fear is that what most of us would call large would be categorised as normal.
It has been widely reported that the country’s crematoria have had to increase the size of their furnaces to cope with the increased size of corpses. What will it take to give a wake-up call to Britain? CONGRATULATIONS to Margaret, Mary and Georgina, the triplets who have just celebrated their 80th birthday.
Apparently when their mother was expecting them in 1937, the doctor did not tell her there were three in case it scared her. Nowadays that would lead to a lawsuit and demands for compensation but indeed if she had known she was having triplets the mother might have been terrified.
It was still an age when women dying in childbirth was not yet rare and multiple births were risky. So perhaps the doctor showed wisdom in sparing her a lot of anxiety which would have turned out to be unfounded.
I have been watching the box THE chap who cuts my lawn has been away for a couple of weeks and the garden has looked like a meadow, full of daisies and buttercups. I can remember my father cursing these flowers as they sprang up all over the lawn when I was about four, but I ran among them happy and excited.
I had the same attitude to the cherry blossom which fell each year all over the paths. To the grown-ups it was work, to me it was fairytale beauty.
I am afraid it still is. I have loved the white and yellow among the green and almost mourn the restoration of order.
Two ewes and three lambs appeared in my back garden a few days ago, doubtless thinking here was a new, munchy meadow. I am not certain how they got over the fence from the neighbouring field but I rather enjoyed having them as well. WELL done Melania Trump for appearing in Saudi Arabia with hair uncovered and in a quiet, modest dress but which reached the knee rather than the ankles. However it works both ways. If we can go to Muslim countries dressed modestly but not according to their laws, then they can come to ours covered from head to toe in a burka.
OLD-FASHIONED DOCTORS SHOWED A BIT OF COMMON SENSE
set of Dr Finlay’s Casebook, set in Scotland between the wars. The doctors did not mince their words when dealing with malingerers and moaners.
Perhaps occasionally the old ways were better.