Let's Eat!

          Celebratory meals: I love them. Mind you, these days they are complicated as never before, what with the rise in popularity of non-meat diets and the seeming epidemic of allergic reactions to foodstuffs, not to mention the requirements of diverse religious cultures: from my omnivorous perspective, I can’t help but have sympathy for long-suffering caterers. Last week, I enjoyed three very different celebratory meals and got to compare the ways in which chefs cope.

          The first was at a local community centre, where the vibe was all about connecting neighbours and building social networks. The catering team, as well as serving up food for functions, does a lot of voluntary work, feeding homeless people. Their solution to satisfying a diversity of palates was to give us vegan food. I suppose, even within that range of edibles, there might be something that someone can’t eat – slimy aubergines, perhaps – but they got around that by offering a choice of main dishes. Their cheap-and-cheerful, canteen-style, bring-your-own-booze dinner set us all in a good mood and ready for the entertainment that followed – poetry, an informative talk and live music by a band severely depleted by Covid, but undaunted, nevertheless.

          Next up was my delayed birthday meal, ‘a deux’, at a favourite local restaurant. Here, the chef has devised a clever way of coping with picky diners. The fixed-price, “trust the chef” menu allows you to choose vegetarian, fish or meat for each of your individual courses and then see what turns up. And though you might make the same choices as your partner, you may not be presented with the same dish. At a stroke, the chef has toned down the stress of choosing and added a dash of excited anticipation to the evening, notwithstanding ‘trust’ being an essential ingredient.

          But my birthday euphoria was knocked into perspective a few days later by another of life’s landmark events: a funeral, that of 94-year-old Derrick, who was in good health until, suddenly, he wasn’t. The sadness of his death was mitigated by the fact that he suffered little in the process and so his passing was tearful rather than tragic, which was reflected in the affectionate, personal, non-religious ceremony preceding his cremation. Derrick was my brother-in-law’s dad, so I got to know and like him, over time, at family gatherings. Being, therefore, in a state of semi-detachment, I had the capacity during the ceremony to ponder certain things, such as the small number of future birthday meals I could reasonably expect to enjoy. I hope I don’t develop any allergies in the meantime.

          It was then I noticed a ladybird crawling up the leg of the chair in front of me. Sluggishly, as if just awakened by the winter sun, it reached the top of the backrest and paused to consider its options, one of which was to make its way into the coiffure of the chair’s occupant, one of Derrick’s granddaughters. I was thinking about how to avert an incident by somehow distracting the creature when, suddenly, it took flight and landed lightly on the granddaughter’s head. She hadn’t noticed but I felt compelled to act, leaned forward and whispered, “Don’t be alarmed, but there’s a bug on your hair. I’m going to knock it off.” She jumped. The bug flew onto my head whereupon my neighbour, who must have observed all this without letting on, adroitly scooped it from my hair and deposited it, gently, into the aisle. I’m not sure how many celebrants observed this mini-drama, but I like to think it was a sort of parable about how life goes on.

          Which it does. The third celebratory meal was at the wake in the pub, where a tasty buffet was laid on. It was a little meat-heavy (we were in deepest rural Lincolnshire, after all), but a buffet equals choice – unless you’re one of those who piles their plate high with a bit of everything. A wake is an uplifting conclusion to a funeral, giving everyone an opportunity to take heart in being alive. Still, it’s sad to think that one will never be present at one’s own, final celebratory meal.

Happy Birthdays

          It was my birthday on Wednesday but, having seen that the forecast for Tuesday was better – blue sky from dawn to dusk – I brought it forward a day. Who relishes their birthday on a wet Wednesday in February? Especially when you consider that, at some point in life, birthdays cease to be occasions for celebrating progress towards coming-of-age and become, instead, markers in a countdown to the end; and, since I’m in the late stage of the latter, it’s best I put a positive spin on mine.

          On Monday, things were not looking too good. I had been kept awake most of the previous night by a stingingly sore throat, the prelude to a common cold that my Other Half had succeeded at last in passing on to me. Feeling wrung-out, I went to bed in the afternoon with a box of tissues and a hope that the worst would soon be over, as the plan for the next day involved a lengthy coastal walk and I wanted to feel up to it. As it turned out, I did awake refreshed and we (my OH and I) set off as planned, provisioned with sandwiches, tissues and de-congestant tablets. The thing about coastal walks is their linearity so, if you don’t want to retrace your steps, logistical planning is required. For our walk, there is a bus route that is not only convenient but also scintillating, especially viewed from the seats at the front of the top deck. Two children could not have been more excited than we were to bag the best seats on the bus and to arrive at our destination, the Clifftop Café, in perfect time for coffee. Sometimes, it’s just small triumphs that make a day special.

           The walk itself, a not especially arduous eight miles, has points of interest – such as a community of ad-hoc chalets nestling in niches along the sloping cliffs, a herd of wild horses that has the right to roam and the absence of urban settlements from the view – that makes it feel more remote than it is. We made easy, enjoyable progress and concluded that hiking in fine weather may not be a cure for a streaming nose but is a welcome distraction from its disagreeable manifestations.

          We arrived home to find another small pile of greetings cards behind the door. Not all my friends are sure of my date of birth: several seemingly conflate me with St. Valentine and others write confidently on their envelopes, “To be opened on the… [wrong date inserted]”. I’ve had calls and messages before, on and after the actual day, and I really don’t mind. It kind of prolongs the love and makes me feel as though I’m getting more than my share. When I think about it cynically, the tradition of celebrating people’s dates of birth is a nice earner for the industry of cards and gifts, but the more general upside is that we all get to be prompted or reminded that we have friends and relatives with whom we intend to stay close yet don’t always match our intensions with deeds. Besides, some of the cards are works of art, so fine that I don’t want to discard them. Others are apposite or funny in ways that only closeness allows. Then there are e-cards, resource-efficient and with the advantage of not taking up space in your drawers when they’ve passed their “display-by” date.

          I wouldn’t change a thing. Except for the emphasis on that one day. I lived in Africa for a while and I recall my native friends wishing me well on my birthday with the salutation “Happy New Year!”, which is so much more generous than “Have a good day!” So, in the interest of prolonging the celebration, we’re booked for dinner at our favourite restaurant several days after it’s supposedly all over.

Need to Know?

          “Going for a spin in the car” used to be a sort of leisure activity. I don’t know anyone who does it now, but a rush of nostalgia for it came over me the other day. The sky was blue, the ground was covered in hoar frost and we were bowling along a ‘B’ road through the New Forest (a landscape that is neither new nor a forest, in case you thought otherwise). We were not driving aimlessly but, nevertheless, were sufficiently ‘in the moment’ to appreciate the pretty landscape, with its the freely-grazing animals chomping their way through what remains of its foliage. The heritage of the place is cherished to the extent that I noticed the crash barriers at a bend in the road, though made of bog-standard galvanised steel, had been clad in logs sawn in half down their length, creating an olde rustic effect in keeping with the character of the place.

          I didn’t choose the route. I’m in the habit of allowing Google Maps to navigate for me these days. Ye olde paper maps may have their uses, but balancing one on your lap while finding your way around England’s byways is no longer one of them. However, impressive as Google is, I hear that it is about to meet its nemesis in the form of a chatbot called ChatGPT, a product of artificial intelligence (AI) that can process all the knowledge available on the internet in an instant. That’s one thing that differentiates it from a person. Another is that, despite its ability to impersonate a human response to any query or question, it lacks curiosity on its own account. Leave it to its own devices and it will just hover, awaiting instructions. I mean, a question that occurred to me recently was, “Who first discovered that everyone’s fingerprints are unique?” I don’t need to know – I could summon the answer in seconds, if I did – but I choose simply to be curious and, when I feel like finding out, I will take some time to savour the process and the answer.

          There’s enjoyment to be had in being nosey just for the sake of it. You never know what you might find. The journey through the New Forest was partly aimed at getting to Southampton, where I was at liberty for a day to look around. It’s not a beautiful city – though it was at its best in the bright, winter sun – and it lacks structural coherence but, to be fair, its focus has always been the deep seaport, the no-nonsense trading complex it serves. Still, treasures may be found in any vibrant metropolis and this one has its share – such as the wall that was built around the medieval city after the French tried to take it, parts of which survive, though only just. Not all of Southampton’s messy infrastructure can be blamed on medieval street layouts and subsequent waves of insensitive, profit-hungry development: the Nazis peppered the place with bombs during WW II. Fortunately, they didn’t hit the magnificent Civic Centre that had just been built. Here, I lingered in elegant modernist galleries admiring art of a quality I had not expected to see in the provinces, thanks to individual beneficiaries and the Contemporary Art Fund.

          And it was in these galleries that I learned something that surprised me: the famous Geographers’ A to Z of London was researched, designed and produced in 1936 by an artist called Phyllis Pearsall, who claimed to have walked all the streets in the process. (I had always assumed it to be the product of a large company employing a team of cartographers.) My question is, to what extent was she able to recall them to order, as in, “Hey Phyllis, can you get me from Acacia Avenue, NW3 to the nearest pub.”? By all accounts, ChatGPT could give me an answer for each year since 1936, though it wouldn’t care to know why I’m asking. Phyllis might.