Within a few
hours of returning from Nice I was back into the routines of home life. The
only thing I missed was the food - or I should say the food opportunities:
there were plenty of places offering pizza and cola for the gastronomically
unadventurous but also lots of traditional local fare - like the restaurant we "discovered"
in Vieux Nice where I lunched on poached chicken, a dish of black pasta shells
and mussels drenched with intensely flavoured liquor and a bottle of Provençale rosé of such a pale hue and such a dry,
nutty finish as would be impossible to come by outside of the region.
The flight
home was short but fell, inconveniently, at lunch time (one of the
characteristics of ageing is a tendency to favour fixed mealtimes) and although
food is available on easyJet we were not keen to try it. Instead we went to the
boulangerie around the corner from our hotel and bought a couple of baguettes
filled with ham and cheese for an on-board picnic. And while the lady sitting next
to us consumed her "meal deal" - a factory-made sandwich, a Twix and
a cup of warm water containing a tea bag - with no outward sign of relish or
enthusiasm, we feasted smugly on authentic French fare.
But now that
we are back in the fresh-produce-desert that is central Manchester we must make
the best of things. One consolation is the regular Sunday morning appearance of
a fishmonger who sets up a stall on the street opposite our window. He's not
your regular fishmonger offering neatly prepared fillets of cod and haddock: he
says he's a fisherman, the owner of two trawlers, and has been bringing his
catch here to Chinatown for 30 years. His display comprises crates of whole
fish, squid, crabs, lobsters and crawly things I am not familiar with, none of
which is labelled or priced. His customers are almost all Chinese and, from my
observations, their approach to buying fish is more enthusiastic and more knowledgeable
than ours. The early- comers,
restaurateurs and older regulars, are followed later in the morning by entire families
dressed in Sunday best on their way to or from dim-sum breakfasts. All of them,
men, women and children, seem quite comfortable picking up and examining slimy,
slippery fish and dangerous-looking live crustaceans.
Fascinated
by this spectacle we resolved to join in: each Sunday since we moved in we have
chosen a different fish for dinner. Along the way we bought some specialised
implements - a de-scaler, fish-scissors, a filleting knife and - for lobsters -
an extra large pot. Last Sunday it might have been the turn of blue-clawed
crabs but, having awoken with hangovers as a result of birthday celebrations
the previous night, we could only face the less threatening Dover sole.
But our relatively
adventurous approach to what we eat is not quite matched by flexibility as to
when we eat. When, at the suggestion of a friend, we went to the theatre last
evening, there was anxiety about the timing of dinner. The performance, with
its early start and four-hour duration, made no concessions to our feeding schedule
and I was half inclined to call it off on the flimsy excuse that I had seen the
film version of A Streetcar Named Desire
and surely no actors could better Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh? But I swallowed
a handful of peanuts, went grudgingly along and was duly gripped, from the
moment Blanche arrived until she was finally led away by the psychiatrist and
her sister's howl of anguish closed the drama.
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