Sun 4th Jan 2009

Visited my Mom and we had our first Sunday pub lunch of the year. For starters I had the soup of the day which was Chateau Tomato flavour (there was plenty of tomato chunks in the bowl, but I failed to find a single castle bobbing about). Then the main course arrived - a massive chicken dinner with veg & gravy (I know - I'm sure this revealing journey to the pit of my soul is enrapturing you no end; the saddest thing being that it's only the 4th day of my blog and I'm already resorting to entries which list my eating habits. What personal revelations will I be stunning you with by, say, September? Detailed analysis of my stools? I don't know. Maybe this is a good sign for the future, and the blog will find its place as a mundane, soothing textual opiate for the masses. Or perhaps it's a painfully slow charting of a man's public mental breakdown. Only time will tell.)

It felt like ages since I last had a proper roast. I suppose the Christmas day meal I went out for was a kind of a pub roast, just with the addition of sprouts and pigs in blankets, and a noticeably heavy price tag per head. This Christmas I'd also decided to be daringly cosmopolitan, breaking sacrilegious traditions by opting for duck rather than turkey. The other peripheral vegetable contents of this alternative were essentially the same, but I strongly suspected the kitchen was so short staffed, they needed the desert chef to assist in the preparation of my meal. It wasn't the morello cherries placed on the duck which aroused my suspicions - in fact duck and cherries seem to go surprising well. However, I suspect the chef must have picked the wrong receptacle up when he was looking for the gravy, as he seemed to have poured cherry sauce over my vegetables.

I'm sure it must have just been an accident. I can't think of any other explanation. Usually if someone cooked you a roast meal and then purposely drenched your mash with Cherryade, you have probably entered into a dare - you know, the sort which involves eating a bizarre concoction of incongruous ingredients. There's probably five other friends around the table, with normal gravy dinners, goading you. But don't get me wrong, it's not the sort of thing you'd agree to eating just for laugh. It would be vile, and you do have your pride. I suspect you'd have been tempted by money. Because for some reason, the room has an unhealthy perverse pleasure in seeing your retching face as it attempts the ingestion of ill-fitting flavours. Which actually turns to be a fortunate circumstance to be in, as you happen to be short of cash at the time, and to entice you into this torment, they've whipped-round a tenner each. Come on, we've all been in that position at some point, surely?

Thankfully for me, such times are all in the past now. Rest assured, it's been a long while since I last found it necessary to prostitute myself with any stomach-churning dares. Just goes to show how much things have changed. Who'd have thought that one Xmas day, I'd actually end up paying fifty quid out of my own pocket for the privilege. Funny how things work out.