As you will be aware, if you are a regular reader that food plays quite a starring role in this Blog. Christine and I have very different views on what a decent meal should consist of Christine being into healthy foods and me being more of a stodge type person.


I think I have always been a pie and sausage roll person. I cannot ever remember preferring a nice healthy Tuna Salad to Fish and Chips but the whole thing escalated when I started working away from home and living in hotels for maybe the last ten years or so of my working life.


It wasn’t even just the breakfasts although they didn’t help. Juice, fruit, flakes followed by maybe a poached egg with some bacon and perhaps a sausage on the side with croissants and marmalade to finish made a very good start to the day but everything has its downside. There was no place for the McDonalds sausage and egg McMuffin.


Then it was lunch. Most days there were meetings where somebody provided a buffet usually consisting of sandwiches, sausage rolls, pork pies, savoury fried things that you had no idea what they were but they tasted OK, chips, crisps and always juice and fresh fruit. The apples were always left but never a sausage roll, does that surprise me? No.


A problem with the buffets was that you were never sure how much buffet would be provided or how much everyone would eat so if I needed to organise a buffet for five people I always added an extra two to ensure there was enough. As I normally estimated that everyone ate as much as Richard and myself, coupled with the extra two portions ordered it was not unusual for a substantial amount of food to be left.


This in itself would not have been too much of a problem, a waste maybe but the main issue here is that both Richard and myself considered it our duty to eat everything that was provided. 'There are people starving all over the world' you know. Not sure how me eating until I’m pogged can help them but that’s what my old mother used to say. The downside of this was of course that I was never ready for the afternoon tea and biscuits.


And back to the hotel for dinner, three courses none of which featured a salad, followed by coffee and chocolates in the lounge. Then off to bed to recover sufficiently for breakfast the next day. Probably not surprisingly the downside of all this was that I got a little heavier, some of my colleagues may say FAT but I think they would be exaggerating.


Anyway following a sustained period on the Atkins diet I lost three stone and then started to eat a more balanced diet. In fact all I stopped doing was eating every thing left on the lunchtime buffet and I managed to maintain a reasonable weight. The downside of this was that I was constantly mistaken for a young Steve McQueen but what the hell I could live with that.


But to get back to the point I started with, Christine likes healthy food and I still try to eat a lot of stodge when Christine isn’t looking. I have now got used to wall paper paste for breakfast and large doses of vegetables with grilled fish for tea and have begun to accept that as normal. But what happens next





Christine goes of to do the weekly shop at Tescos and comes back and puts the food away. The next time I go in the kitchen a series of jars have appeared containing something that looks better suited to the bottom of a budgies cage. “What are these” I ask with a concerned look. “Pulses” says Christine “good for you”. She explains there are haricot beans, lentils, soya beans and chicpeas and starts to tell me how these are now to be used in our diet.


I explain my theory that if it looks like budgie droppings and smells like budgie droppings it probably is budgie droppings and wonder why we are trying to be even more healthy. Christine explains it’s so that we can have a long and happy retirement together! I go off to see if the fish and chip shops open.