Food

Things I miss the simple items, chicken that doesn't taste like cardboard, trotters, jellied eels, the salt beef sandwiches you used to be able to buy for the price of a Mars bar and those battered cod fillets with flakes of fish the size of your thumb. My local chippy favours passing off Alaskan Pollack as cod and most of the punters don't notice. Pretty soon the supermarkets wont stock any cut of beef cheaper than Filet Mignon in their efforts to squeeze cash out of you. Then there's the TV chefs with their wonderful discoveries, now the price of lamb shanks has gone through the roof, at least you can still get them I suppose, which is more than you can say for trotters and hocks. I can't get liver in the town Sainsbury's either so I trekked to the out of town place, something of revelation to mix with the hoi polloi, does anyone still have a job? I wonder how the taxpayer feels about forking out for the overpriced food, wherever he is, way things are going he's going to be feeding me soon. I suppose you could always resort to a ready meal or a burger but feasting on Dobbin doesn't appeal to me. I Wouldn't mind a rabbit though but taking the air rifle down the common will get you arrested and interned as a terrorist these days, what a dump this place has become. Dad wasn't English by the way, he was a Catholic unionist who bolted his homeland in disgust. Didn't like English people much had a strong streak of Anglophobia -- and anti-Semitism that he picked up from the rag trade. That profession would have made him a stereotype I suppose, Irish taylor, except for his colourful ethnic background, god know where the Tojo in him came from but in his youthful passport photo he was the image of Hirohito, complete with wing collar and rimmed specs. I remember the first time I put on a pair of spec frames, the sight of the ghost in the mirror left me sleepless for three days. He used to pine for the food he knew in his youth too, only for him it was bread the colour of soot and pease pudding that smelled like a sailor's jock strap.