Turning Japanese

This day was coming, it was writ large in the skies, but it was still unexpected when it happened. Let me explain.

I had plainly made a bad decision to go and have a meeting with a client in London at lunchtime without taking any kind of sustenance with me. I just feel it would look a little unprofessional to rock up with my own picnic hamper and start munching on Quails Eggs and Caviar, because of course that is what I usually eat. Doesn’t everyone? Well that and a bag of Hula Hoops.

It meant that by the time I got out mid-afternoon I was Hank Marvin as they would say in cockney rhyming slang, and this was apt as I was in East London at the time. Seriously, I could have eaten a horse but the little shop by the tube station didn’t have any. They did have a Curried Egg sandwich mind you but even in my famished state that didn’t look appealing.

So I headed back towards Kings Cross with a rumbling stomach that echoed all the way up through the tunnels of the Northern Line. I checked the time and realised that when I got back to civilisation I had to stop off for a conference call. I concluded that Kings Cross may not be the ideal place for this as, at the moment, it’s noisy and crowded due to the fact that they are re-building the place and, just for fun, penning everyone in with ticket barriers.

I decided to wander across to St Pancras to grab a sandwich and maybe sit down for the call. I staggered in clutching my stomach surprised that people couldn’t see that I was visibly wasting away. I wandered deliriously past Costa Coffee as I could see that it was rammed full of exchange students and pensioners, and then past a place called Paul, which I didn’t trust as it was too empty.

I could see a branch of Boots in the distance and for a moment I could almost taste a meal deal but by now I was almost on my knees dragging my empty husk of a body along the floor. Then I saw it, bright orange and shiny, with little plates of food which appeared to be gliding magnificently amongst the diners within. I was drawn in by this neon nirvana and I staggered closer for a better view, and then through my bleary eyes I could see that a young smiling woman had approached me. “Have you been to Yo! Sushi before?” she asked.

I hadn’t, and through my tears of hunger I explained how I, to my eternal shame, was a sushi virgin. You see I’ve seen them before, there’s one in Selfridges in Birmingham that’s always caught my eye, but I’ve never quite had the courage to join the young and hip punters in case I didn’t like what was on offer and ended up embarrassing myself by choking on a squid’s tentacle. That and the fact that the present Mrs Hayward believes that eating raw fish is “dirty”.

The young lady escorted me to a seat and explained to me how it all worked. I could just make out what she was saying above the increasingly deafening growls from my stomach but I understood that you took what you fancied, that the colour of the bowls the food was in indicated the price of the dish, and there was water available which I could drink until it was coming out of my ears. She handed me some type of catalogue that was supposed to identify the food that was shimmying around in front of me like prizes on The Generation Game and she left me alone to ponder.

I poured some water and contemplated the manual but gave up with this approach as once I’d seen something and worked out what it was the plate was half a mile away. So I used the more direct approach of choosing with my eyes and when I saw something that looked like chicken and salad I grabbed it. I glanced around for cutlery and found the idiot’s chopsticks, joined together at one end so that cack handed morons like me didn’t keep dropping either them or the food on the floor.

The cuisine was excellent and brought me back to life just in time for me to join the conference call. At this time of day it seemed to be a good venue for suited souls like me, a red faced man with a posher laptop than mine was calling another red faced man on his phone, insisting he joined him there for a meeting.

I participated in the call with ease and aplomb and hopefully no-one on the other end heard me tucking in to a Spicy Crab Cake. Once I’d finished the call I decided that I would grab one last thing before I headed off, this time a proper sushi looking thing, all rice and seaweed and raw fish, although it turned out to be crab again, but this one was sweet and lovely.

As working lunches go this one was marvellous. I was only there about half an hour but even with a call in the middle I felt really relaxed afterwards, the environment was really chilled out.

When I paid I explained to the guy at the till that I had just popped my sushi cherry. He asked if I was from London. I said I wasn’t, that I lived just north of Peterborough and we don’t have a Yo! Sushi there. He looked sad for me and said wistfully, “Maybe you will have one day”.

I can only dream as Yo Sushi has now become my new favourite place but given that Peterborough is only just getting a Nando’s, and I’m fairly giddy about that as I’ve not been there either, I think it’ll be a long time before the good people of Peterborough can enjoy the magical conveyor belt of delicious sweet and savoury treats of Yo! Sushi, and that’s a shame.

 

Vorsprung Berk Technik

I have realised that I know nothing useful about cars. I like to think that I know how to drive them although those who have been my passengers may disagree. As to what goes on underneath the bonnet I have no idea. For all I know, under the mass of metal that technical people call ‘the engine’ there could be monkeys on tricycles making it move, although I’ve not seen any mention of this in the adverts.

What made me think about this was an occurrence on the way to Southampton on Saturday. There I was, minding my own business, cruising down the A43 at a steady speed when suddenly I noticed a jolt on the accelerator pedal and my speed slowed. It’s then I noticed a little innocuous light on the dashboard. Illuminated was a little picture of a car next to a giant spanner. Even to the mechanically illiterate like me it suggested that all was not well.

The present Mrs Hayward, who up to this point had been sound asleep, was suddenly awake and sat up attentively like a Meerkat, as if some sixth sense had kicked in. I abandoned the A43 at the next junction while Mrs H rummaged around in the glove compartment for the manual to ascertain whether it was my fault so she could shout at me.

This little event has made me realise that, unlike men of yore, in the event of a car-related breakdown I am helpless and have no option but to put myself in the hands of the gentlemen from the Royal Automobile Club. Of course there may also be ladies in said club but I’ve yet to see one fixing cars, and I’ve been rescued by a few now.

So the sad fact is that I know absolutely nothing about how the car moves, apart from putting petrol in it. I have seen under the bonnet and am aware of some key areas, such as oil and water, although this is only as a result of a previous mechanical misdemeanour. This means that I can stare thoughtfully at the dipstick and declare, apropos of nothing, that we need more oil, or possibly water. I am also familiar with screen wash. In fact I would call that my specialist area after the actual driving part.

Other than that my knowledge of things such as tyres, carburettors, suspension, etc, is non-existent and I have to nod sagely and make what I think are appropriate sounding noises when the man from the garage flagrantly ignores Mrs H and discusses the vehicle’s woes directly with me.

I’m good in a crisis though. I know how to stop a car when the engine blows up whilst in the fast lane of a motorway (the A1(M) near Peterborugh on a cold December night – they deployed an RAC man to come and get us, but as he was in Durham he wasn’t a lot of use to us), or at a junction when the cam belt had been chewed off by the monkeys and snapped (A34 on another cold December night – we were towed out of the way by the police and I left the steering wheel locked so the WPC in our car had quite a surprising journey around the roundabout), or when the clutch broke (Danes Camp Way, Northampton – a passing motorist with a fag hanging out of his mouth arrived and investigated our hot engine without starting a fire, much to our relief), or when the handbrake snapped while I was trying to park on a very steep hill (City Road, Sheffield – I had to go and find a flat piece of land to park it on, which if you’ve been to Sheffield you’ll know is quite a challenge).

So, I should learn more about the motor vehicle as, whilst my driving style is sometimes flamboyant a la James Hunt or Lewis Hamilton, I don’t have a reassuring pit crew in easy distance to sort the problem out. Surely the very least I should know, as a man with a house and a wife, is to how to change a tyre.

In the end we solved our most recent problem by following the advice in the manual – by turning the car off and turning it on again. It seemed like a very 21^st century solution.

Maybe the monkeys just needed a rest.

Fit as a (large) Fiddle

I used my new Wii Fit Balance board for the first time yesterday. Anyone who has done likewise will have had the same experience as me. To get to the fun and games you seem to have to confess to being an overweight and unhealthy slob and set targets to improve your health. All of these shameful and embarrassing confessions are played out in front of a gurgling and chirruping machine that warns me that I am so unfit that I will probably die very soon, probably whilst I’m on my way to the fridge to check out that slab of Stilton that’s been demanding my attention and offending the nose of the present Mrs Hayward. It has even made me commit to losing some weight in a couple of months and, rather disappointingly, made my little Mii character slightly more portly than I’d designed him.

Don’t get me wrong, the Wii Fit Board is a marvellous little bit of kit and once it’s told me the sad news that I’m so hideously obese that I may have to take down a wall to get out of the house and that I lean to the left a bit (although that could be to the right as I had the board round the wrong way for a time) the games are fun, and this is the point of it. It’s a gaming device rather than a miracle weight losing machine for those of ample girth, despite what Helen Mirren says.

So for a real improvement to my fitness I’ve committed to a couple of New Year resolutions that will either be ‘kill or cure’. One is to do a fun run in Peterborough in October. I don’t like running unless it’s to the bar at last orders so I’m chalking this one up to a mid-life crisis in the same vein as last year’s plan to walk up Mount Snowdon.

Added to that list is learning to swim. Yes, I know, I should be able to do this at my age but I can’t and somewhere along the line I gained a fear of being more than waist deep in water. I particularly don’t like swimming pools because they’re slippery so heaven help the person who tries to teach me to swim.

I also have a secret resolution to watch less reality TV and go to the pub more, but I don’t think my Wii Fitness trainer will approve, so I won’t mention it, not just yet.

Toilet Humour

I do like a themed toilet. Toilets are all too often sterile and functional, although on the whole this is fine. The average visitor doesn’t usually hang around public toilets for prolonged periods of time unless feeling particularly unwell or looking for a bit of pervert-on-pervert action, if the graffiti on toilet walls is anything to go by.

I was once sat on the loo in a public toilet and was idly reading the graffiti to pass the time and realised that one scrawled missive was offering nefarious engagements at a specific date and time in my very location. It was so recent that I had to check my watch to make sure I wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thankfully I was a couple of days late but by this point I didn’t feel comfortable anymore so I left. But I digress.

I visited Chiquito today, a Mexican themed restaurant. Noting all the colourful trappings that came with a clichéd attempt at bringing a little piece of Mexico onto a business park in Peterborough, such as mis-matched colourful seating and non-specific lager bottles being used to create a lampshade, I decided that it would be a travesty if the toilets didn’t follow the same thematic path. I wasn’t disappointed.

Firstly I had to decide between two doors, one bearing the legend ‘Hombres’ and the other ‘Senoritas’. I liked the look of ‘Hombres’ as it bore the image of a comical skeleton wearing a Sombrero on its head. This was fortunate as it also turned out to be the ‘Gents’.

Inside there were what looked like old movie posters for Mexican films (in actual fact an elaborate wall covering, non-stain and non-graffiti I assume – no bandidos will be able to arrange secret trysts here). The doors to the cubicles had a distressed look as if they had been removed from a 19^th Century lavatory door in Guadalajara and flown all the way here.

But it’s the little details that count and despite all the novelty trimmings one lone cubicle had the door firmly shut and the obligatory piece of A4 paper stuck to the door to let the customer know it was ‘Out of Order’ in Times New Roman.

Presumably someone had suffered a misfortune at the hands of the Jalapeno Chilli Dog but this was not the point. There was a dull sign in a colourful committee designed chain restaurant which was spoiling my enjoyment. I considered that with a little imagination this boring and functional notice could have been written in Spanish with the English translation below, as if as an afterthought.

Surely even important Health and Safety messages can be dragged into this cavalcade of Mexican revelry? Alas the answer seemed to be no and I left feeling empty in more ways than one.

If you’re interested I recommend the Chilli Con Carne and the Chocolate Brownie Stack. Neither made me unwell.