Culture lunch and weirdness

It is a matter of incredible coolness that one of London's finest museums also boasts one of its finest restaurants. Cool but strange, I suppose. It's not something that pops into the head when thinking of going to a museum: "Why don't we grab a bite at the V & A?" It just doesn't sound right. Well, "let's grab a bite at Tate Britain" has just entered into the growing lunch/dinner suggestions in my arsenal. I was meeting Andy, his mum and his bro (who runs the shop there) for lunch and to say ciao as he's off to the land of sheep and kiwis. The food was amazing and the wine list, for a geek like me, extraordinary. The restaurant itself is enclosed in a massive mural which we think was painted by an artist named Whistler, but not James McNeill Whistler. It depicted structures from various cultures (I liked the pagoda) in arcadian settings with the odd unicorn and nymph kicking about. As you do. It works as a dining room though, chilling one out while eliminating the risk of a rogue dollop of hollandaise sauce splatting onto an old master. Ruining art through appetite would be a terrible thing, not quite as bad as ruining it through untied shoelaces, but pretty bad nonetheless.

In any case, the food was amazing, though I wimped out in menu selection, choosing guinea fowl on herb tagliatelli. Don't get me wrong - it tasted amazing. But I'd promised myself I'd eat fish more frequently and had two great choices of ichthyoid but instead went for the haut cuisine version of Chicken Tonight. You see, I didn't always like good food. In fact, both my parents used to despair at my lack of taste. My menu was so limited that by the age of 9, I could prepare everything thing that I would eat myself. Sound impressive? It shouldn't. Because hot dogs, super noodles, toaster oven pizzas and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are pretty easy to make. Well. Warm up, really. Except for the peanut butter and jelly. Those you don't warm up. You can, though. My first year in university led to the discovery of peanut butter & jam toasties, which were a true treat. So I didn't like great food. I wasted a childhood with a Cordon Bleu trained mother, who for 3 years was writing a cook book and testing the recipes at home, eating hot dogs and super noodles. And boiled mince. Forgot about that one. Or tried to at least. Yuk. Actually, I don't feel so bad about the guinea fowl anymore. Still should have had the paoched smoked haddock though.

The half-a-dozen or so readers of this site might remember my twitch. Its remission has been a blessing. I try not to think about it, lest in trying to detect it I start it again. In lamenting its existence, I blamed evolution, claiming that the pinky was a better place for a twitch than the eye. *This is the weirdness referred to in the title, by the way.* So what's been happening in the last few days? Well, no, my pinky isn't twitching, that would be funny. And creepy. No, it's my nose. My nose is twitching. Like Samantha on Bewitched. Well, maybe not that extreme and certainly not as cute a nose, but it feels like it's doing the Samantha thing. Is it sinuses? Is it stress again (this is a possibility)? Is it just plain peculiar? Definitely the latter. As an affliction it's ridiculous. I can't go tell a doctor that my nose is twitching. He or she would think I was a moron. They may be right. It sounds like something a redneck grandpa sitting on a porch in rural Mississippi would use to predict the weather: "Ayup... mah nose's twitchin'... must be rain-a'-comin.. th'old honker's nevah wrong". So I don't know whether to blow my nose more often, to clear sinuses which could be causing it, or not blow my nose, because it could be aggravating it. Life's full of stupid decisions.

My dad wants me to stop deluding myself and get a job and resign writing once again to a hobby or pipe dream. Issues abound. Have a smoothie.