My friend … ‘The Red Baron’ … has ‘tagged’ me. Fancy doing that to a ‘comrade’ ! … Anyway, as I’m a bit stuck at the moment for blog ideas, and out of respect for a man who scored so impressively on the … ‘are you an anarchist ? test’ … I have managed to come up with eight facts about myself, and apologise if I have bored the pants off you with them before…

1. I am a retired old git fast approaching my ‘three score years and ten’, living in ‘bungalowland’ with all the other miserable old farts. 
2. I am not a gregarious person and as an only child I am happy with my own company. Clubs, societies and any form of organised activity are most definitley ‘not my scene’.
3. I will eat almost anything except Indian food. I have tried it a few times in the distant past, but afterwards I found it very difficult to sleep whilst spending the night sitting on the toilet.
4. I enjoy a drink or three. My favourite tipple being a gin and tonic. I prefer ‘pure’ foreign beers to so called ‘real ale’, and regularly stock up with wine (mostly plonk) on my trips to France; which incidently is my favourite country, despite it being full of bloody foreigners.
5. I reluctantly served in the RAF as a national service conscript during the late 1950’s and never saw an aircraft during my two years service. However I did once go to sea in a Royal Air Force boat. 
6. I am an atheist who believes that everyone has a right to follow any religion they like as long as they do no harm to others and don’t come knocking on my door trying to ‘save’ me. 
7. Sports do not interest me, although I have been known to ruin a nice walk in the country by taking a little white ball and a bag of ‘sticks’ with me.
8. I am a republican and, ‘come the revolution’, I will turn out, for the first time in my life, to wave to the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha clan as they sail off into the sunset: and if I had been around in France in 1793 I expect that I would have been a big fan of  Monsieur Sanson.

OK, so those are my eight facts, and now, according to the rules, I am supposed to tag eight people, which means listing their names and then going to their blogs to tell them that they’ve been tagged, then going back and commenting on their list of eight facts.

Now I know that many of you hate this sort of thing (I’m not too keen on it myself) so I am not following ‘the rules’ by ‘tagging’ you, but instead would ask anyone who feels inclined to divulge eight interesting or amusing facts to consider themselves ‘tagged’, and let me know via a comment. …

… This is now a ‘You’re tagged’ meme free Zone ! 

Have you ever been surprised by food ?

You know, like when you order something from a foreign menu and a completely strange dish is placed before you, or when something that looks like meat turns out to be fish.

It’s happened to me a number of times: one of which was when I was in a restaurant in Germany and ordered a ‘local speciality’ starter consisting of cheese, mustard and bread. I expected some kind of ‘fondue’ or even something similar to our ‘Welsh Rabbit’. What I got was a slice of cheese, a packet of mustard and a piece of bread.

On another occasion I was in a food hall at Fulton Street Fish Market in New York City and decided to try sushi for the very first time. I thought that it was going to be my last; for I decided to start by eating the green paste in the middle of the dish. No one told me that it was ‘wasabi’ or Japanese horseradish. Just thinking about it still brings me out in a sweat.

I wonder how many people get a shock when they order ‘flan’ in Spain (and the US) and get ‘creme caramel’ instead of fruit tart, or order ‘creme anglais’ in France, expecting English cream, and are confronted with a dish of custard ?

In America I found out that ‘biscuits’ are not sweet little things that you have with tea, but small bread rolls (which sometimes come covered in gravy), and ‘corn bread’ is not a bread at all, but a sweet little cake.

On the whole I like the food that they serve in the USA, but I must admit that I have been served some strange things in those parts where they play banjos and diddle their sisters. …

…  “Excuse me, but what’s that on my plate next to the catfish?” 

…  “It’s grits, sir” …

…  “What’s a bloody grit?”

My daughter suffers from an egg allergy; so dining out was always a problem when she was a child, especially in a foreign country. My wife and I would scour the menues to try and find something ‘safe’ for her to eat, and on one occasion we selected onion soup after being assured by a Spanish waiter that it was just ‘plain onion’. It arrived at our table …

… with an egg floating in it !

It’s hardly the Garden of Eden, but I’ve just been picking large figs from a tree in my back yard.

Over the years I have planted a number of shrubs and other plants in my garden, but never a fig tree. This one just grew out of the middle of the hedge between my garden and that of my neighbour.

This year it has grown to about 12ft tall and has born ripe fruit. In the past it only produced small hard green ‘berries’.

I don’t know how common fig trees are in this country, but according to Wikipedia they are… ‘native to southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region (Greece east to Afghanistan)’.

I would have thought that figs needed plenty of sunshine to ripen, not the ‘monsoon’ weather we’ve been experiencing this summer, which would be better suited to growing rice.

Perhaps, like everything else at the moment, it’s all due to climate change, so maybe I should think about planting a tree to offset my ‘carbon footprint’ (whatever that is) or my frequent methane emissions.

If I do, I wonder how long it will be before … 

… a coconut lands on my head ?

My mind is a fog.
I don’t know what to blog.
At times it’s a slog.
It’s no ‘fall off a log’.
I could go for a jog,
 be chased by a dog,
and because of the smog,
run into a bog,
meet a one legged frog,
who asks for a snog,
and turns into King Zog,
wearing only one clog,
who then starts to flog,
an Albanian hog.
Must have been at the grog.
Brain shifts up a cog.
Still all agog,
and …

…  no clue what to blog.

(bigjohn 2007)