Columnist: Small plates

My local paper, the Reading Post, has invited me back for the second instalment of RG1 EAT, my column about food and eating out. My friends, by and large, are very happy for me - mainly because they think I'm going to get offered lots of free meals and they'll get to accompany me to restaurants for nothing. Wendy, for instance, read my column in delight on the funbus and said "You're going to be the Carrie Bradshaw of food!"

"No, I'm going to be more like Gil Chesterton." I said, because I know my limitations if nothing else.

Later on, one of my favourite local restaurants told me on Twitter that they were nervous when I went in for dinner shortly before my column was due in the paper. "It's like having Giles Coren in" they said, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that that felt like a compliment, although I keep telling myself that I'm not quite as much of a cock as he is. Anyway, the piece below appeared in the Reading Post on Wednesday and is written by someone who is approximately 25% Carrie Bradshaw, 25% Giles Coren and 50% Gil Chesterton. I hope you like it.


The London Street Brasserie used to have something on its menu which I found really odd. Not a dish, a suggestion: at the top of the list of starters was this sentence, in italics - Two starters makes an ideal light lunch. I remember thinking it was the silliest thing I’d ever read, but it turns out that they were ahead of their time; small plates were the next big thing in London a couple of years ago, and now they are coming to a chain restaurant near you.

For most countries, this idea of eating lots of little dishes with friends or family is second nature. Tapas is the one we’re most used to (and good tapas, even if it’s something as straightforward as slabs of manchego and slivers of jamon, is a wonderful thing) but there are many others, from sushi to mezze. On location, it makes sense; watching the Turks eat out in Istanbul for instance - a good-natured hubbub of shouting, gesticulation and passing plates around - it’s difficult to imagine a better way of eating.

You don’t see anything remotely like that in restaurants here; it seems a British fetish to lock ourselves in the three-stage cage of starters, main courses and desserts. There are tasting menus, I suppose, but they’re high-end stuff and even then it’s one dish at a time, a conveyor belt of miniature delights like a culinary Generation Game.

Besides, I have a sneaking feeling that sharing food just isn’t in our nature. My meal is my meal, we seem to say, you can have a forkful if you must, but if you want any more you should have ordered it yourself (unless my meal is disappointing, in which case you can have as much as you like). The main exception is curry, but I reckon that’s because everyone always orders more than they can physically eat, so letting other people have some is no great loss.

I’d like to see small plates catch on. I liken them to my iPod (bear with me) - I have a playlist on there of songs I love which are less than three minutes long. I listen to that playlist when I’m in a rush and it’s perfect; every track is bite-sized and if I’m not in the mood for one it doesn’t matter, because I know another will be along in no time.

Will they catch on, though? I’m not sure. So far, they’ve mainly been picked up by the Italian chains; Zizzi, Strada and Carluccios are all experimenting with them on their menus, calling them Cicheti, Antipastini and Stuzzichini respectively. The thing is, it feels like lip service; they are at the beginning of the menu before the starters, and the suggestion is that you have them too, just a middle-class way of going large for people too posh to go to Burger King (only Zizzi, in fact, seems to have grasped the idea that you might want these instead of a pizza).

Meanwhile, if you want to try small plates as they should be I recommend you go to Kyrenia in Caversham. It’s their tenth birthday this year and their mezze is still as perfect as it was on day one, whether it’s smoky houmous or squeaky halloumi. Best of all, for me at least, is the octopus - marinated in red wine and oregano and simply grilled, it’s one of my favourite dishes in the whole of Reading. It proves my other theory about small plates right, too – when you really love a dish, the plate is always too small.

Holidays in bed

My wife is away with work this week, and whenever she does this I go on a little holiday of my own, by which I mean that I sleep on her side of the bed.

It’s strange how such a small alteration makes the world so different a place. It’s funny, too, how couples do this; we have our set sides of the bed, of the sofa, we divide our little lives into halves and segments. Both flats we have lived in I have slept on the right, closest to the window, furthest from the bathroom. On every sofa I have sat on the left. Maybe all married couples become their very own versions of Ant and Dec, just in case people have difficulty telling the difference.

Spending time in someone else’s segment, the shape of the bedroom feels altered in a subtle but perceptible way. I can leap to the bathroom without having to wander round the perimeter of the bed, usually a precarious voyage embarked upon in greyscale darkness in the middle of the night. The alarm clock, and the power of deciding by how long to postpone the inevitable, is within my reach. There is twice as much of everything – two piles of books to perch my glasses on, two coasters to gather empty glasses and cups. It’s as if my normal world has been reflected in a mirror, one of those odd composite images of someone where both sides of their face are completely symmetrical.

Like those pictures, it doesn’t ring true – too perfect, not real. Besides, I wouldn’t want to live in a space that only reflected me. Down my side of the bed are discarded newspapers, books I haven’t put back on the shelf, the occasional empty tray from a packet of chocolates, t-shirts discarded in the middle of the night when I’m hot and half asleep. Her side of the bed is almost clear, just a box of tissues and a tube of moisturiser, nothing to hurdle when I walk through the wide open space to the bathroom.

Holidaying on my wife’s side of the bed, I wonder how this room looks to her. No clear view of the window because it’s blocked by my slumbering frame every morning. Nobody to set and snooze the alarm and control when things happen. No excuse not to go to the bathroom, or to send someone else down the long hall in search of hot beverages. She is in a hotel room I will never see, a different shape again, all huge, all hers. And yet I hope that when she settles down for sleep that she notices a me-shaped hole. Perhaps she sleeps on my side of the bed, out there.

Holidays are like Goldilocks and the three bears - some are too short, some are too long, and some are just right. There comes a point in most holidays for me, ideally close to the end but sometimes far too far from that, when I want to return to my life and see familiar things, to have that same old walk to work through the posh shopping arcade and to see the faded grandeur of the old department store on the corner, to be asked in the café if I want “the usual” and to see faces I recognise on the bus. After the first night of this particular holiday the novelty has vanished, and I know that if I sent her a postcard it would just say: Having a lovely time. Wish you were here.

On my last night alone, I go through the flat tidying up and restoring the bed to her side and my side. I fill the dishwasher and put clothes in drawers. I put the washing machine on, and at just past midnight I hang my underpants on the clothes airer while Fred Astaire sings Puttin’ On The Ritz on my iPod. I love the irony of that, and I know she would too. By the time I’m done, you would almost think she had never been away. Just one more thing, and it will all be fixed.

Snagging

[Blue Italics Of Housekeeping: I'm pleased to confirm that I've had an essay published in the new edition of Hippocampus Magazine. You can find it here, though longstanding readers may have seen it before. I do hope you go across and check it out and leave a comment if you liked it. Hippocampus is a great magazine, and coming up to its first birthday. I'm very proud that they've published me three times and asked me to join their reading panel. There's also at least one other superb piece in this month's issue, and it's well worth a look.]

There’s an upturned lampshade in the bath. It sits there, like a spaceship which has crash landed on the surface of a smooth alien planet, all jagged points and angles. When we first bought it, years ago, it took ages to put together, popping bits of plastic out of a sheet, folding them and locking them together. My wife masterminded it, as she does all logistical efforts, and I just did as I was told and slowly it became something more beautiful than the sum of its parts under her expert direction. Now, replaced, it sits forlornly in the bathtub waiting to be cleaned up and reinstalled in another room. It will be sprinkled under the shower, scrubbed and dried and at some point carried down the hall to its new home. It’s an unenviable task – every crease, every fold is dusty, marked with a shade of grey that wasn’t there the day we hung it for the first time, flicked the switch and looked on in wonder.

If we didn’t have a guest coming to stay in May I would put money on the lampshade still being in the bath come summer.

All around the flat are other things we mean to get round to. If you came to visit, perhaps to point and gawp at my upturned lampshade, you wouldn’t be able to do it in guaranteed privacy because the lock on the bathroom door hasn’t worked for years. At one stage the knob fell out, dropping with a thud on to the carpet in the hallway, leaving my friend Dave stuck in the bathroom with no means of escape at half-six in the morning. We had to retrieve the knob, reinsert it and unlock the door from outside, which only happened because Dave has big lungs and wasn’t embarrassed enough to knock on the internal wall separating the bathroom from our bedroom. The other thing that ensured his liberty was that Kelly is a far lighter sleeper than I am.

After that mortifying incident, we decided it was preferable not to have a lock at all than to risk imprisoning any more guests. All the plush towels in the world, mints on the pillow and interesting magazines on the bedside table are no consolation for an overnight stay where the bathroom doubles as the Hotel California. We started to look at getting a replacement lock, but that quest was abandoned for the same reason that many are; it was just too difficult. So now when guests are over the unspoken rule is that if the door’s shut you don’t go in. It seems to work well enough, and most of the time I don’t even worry about what they must think.

I’m sure we will eventually fix the bathroom door, probably around the same time that, one day, we put the flat on the market.

Of course, we tell ourselves, if it was the lock on the en suite we would have fixed it by now, if only because the lock on the main bathroom plays an important part in the dynamics of marriage. Before I moved in with Kelly I didn’t realise the unspoken rules of bathroom etiquette for cohabiting couples: if you’re in the bathroom but not using the toilet, the door is left ajar. If you’re using the toilet for a number one, the door is shut but not locked. For anything more scatological, the door must be shut and locked. If the door is shut, even if it’s not locked, you are not to open it on any account. A broken lock on the door to the ensuite would definitely be fixed, because the consequences of not doing so are too horrific even to imagine.

Incidentally if you did see our main bathroom, you would also see the towels still on the rail from the last guests we had to stay, a couple of weeks ago. At some point, we must get round to washing them.

The list of unfinished jobs goes on and on. In the airing cupboard, the socket housing the switch for the heated electric towel rail hangs slightly off the wall, unscrewed but otherwise intact. An unsightly criss-cross of bright blue masking tape holds it crudely in place. We kept meaning to fit a timer for the winter months so we would have lovely warm towels first thing in the morning, but Kelly bought one and looked at it and again it proved too difficult so it never got done. We still maintain that at some point we will find a decent electrician and one of us will work from home one day and it will all be sorted, but there always seems to be something more important to do.

Similarly, the cold tap in the ensuite bathroom doesn’t work any more. It started out constantly dripping, and when that got too irritating we turned off the water supply to it. Kelly took the tap apart hoping to fix it, but it was clogged up with scale and impossible to repair, so another job got consigned to the growing list marked Just Too Hard. Now washing our hands is a high-octane race against time, rinsing away all the lather before the water gets so hot that it takes your skin off with it. We promise ourselves that at some point we will buy new taps, find a decent plumber, one of us will work from home one day and it will all be sorted – and maybe one day we will. Nobody who knows us would bet on it.

In the bedroom outside, the wall above the bed has three splodges of paint on it in a variety of shades of pale blues and greens. Their names are written next to them in pencil in my wife’s angular handwriting. We decided we liked the light blue at the top and bought two tins. They sit under the bed in the spare room, unopened, admonishing us in silence for our slothfulness.

When we bought this flat we were the first people to move in and it was the first place I had ever owned. As a result I was introduced to snagging, previously a concept completely alien to me. I remember going round the flat with Kelly finding all the things that weren’t quite right and making a list. The heater in the living room wasn’t big enough. The work surfaces in the kitchen weren’t finished as they should be. It would be nice to have a shelf put up in the airing cupboard so we’d have somewhere to stack the clean towels we would always have ready for guests. There were dozens more, all added to the list and handed to the developer, a wide boy called Andy with a pencil behind one ear which he conspicuously never used. Some of the jobs on the list got done, some were done so badly that we wished we hadn’t asked. Some we gave up on, because after a while you can’t keep asking.

I imagine that Andy meant to get round to them eventually, an attitude which exasperated me back then but which I completely understand now.

“That list is very important.” I said pompously at the time. “If we don’t get it all fixed while it’s fresh in our minds it will just become part of the furniture and we’ll wind up living with it.” I can almost hear myself saying it even now, and I want to heckle myself and say Yes, you’re right, but you’re missing the point. Because some things don’t get fixed, and you do end up living with them, and you realise just how insignificant they really are.

I used to think that signs of neglect were sad and that disrepair was something to be pitied. Years ago, I would have been depressed by visiting a home like mine. I would have considered it evidence that people settle and make do, say things like “I keep meaning to get that fixed” and making excuses. But now I realise that things don’t always make sense in isolation and perhaps part of being an adult is understanding that. Some things get worn or worn out because they are loved, and that is what gives them their beauty. With some, it’s more that they never get sorted out because other things are more loved, and in a strange way that is their beauty too. So even if the black filing cabinet in the corner of the living room can’t be opened for fear that its contents – the paraphernalia of procrastination, precariously balanced bank statements and envelopes and boxes and instruction manuals, things we have no use for and have hidden away – will fall out and engulf me in a tidal wave of paper, I’m not so sure that’s a problem after all.

I used to want everything to be perfect. I wouldn’t buy a book with a creased spine or a dented cover, and if I lent something to a friend I would rather not have seen it again than have got it back in anything less than pristine condition. I still feel like that about many things, but when I look at my flat I wonder whether I might have grown up, even if only a little. Now, when I look at the piles of paperwork on the dining table (a table which would be more accurately described as “the paperwork table”), or think about the socket hanging off the wall in the airing cupboard I can see them for what they are – physical proof that we have better things to do. Every time we’ve gone out for dinner because we can’t be bothered to cook, every time we’ve walked to the pub to play a companionable game of cards with a pint, or spent the evening chatting or surfing in silence on our respective ends of the sofa, those are the real evidence of what we’ve built together, even if it’s a little less obvious to visitors.

Besides, sometimes I visit houses that are nothing like mine and I realise that a life without obvious defects is not necessarily a life without defects. When I first met her Kelly had plenty of married friends with this kind of house. They are immaculate, to the extent where everything looks new long after it has stopped being new. There’s enough storage for everything, so everything is tidied away. It’s all so calculated; anything which is visible is visible on purpose. These are houses with space to display objects (how I would love spaces to display objects, or objects to display for that matter). If a book is out on the table, it’s because it’s the sort of book which is meant to be on a table, and the angle it is placed at has been deliberately chosen too. You never know where to put anything, you wouldn’t dare make yourself a cup of tea and the occupants rarely look happy. And I don’t know if it’s physical or psychological, but every time I’ve been to a house like that I spent most of the time there wishing they would turn the heating up. Maybe they just haven’t fixed their electric towel rails yet, but somehow I doubt it.

I used to want everything to be perfect and now I know that almost nothing is. More to the point, I think I am beginning to know that perfection is overrated. Anyway, if you find one thing that’s pretty close to perfect – and it only has to be one thing - it’s remarkable how sometimes you stop being so bothered by the rest. So come over if you like, stand in my bathroom with no lock and look at my remarkable upside-down lampshade in the bath, you’ll be more than welcome. I just can’t promise I’ll tidy up first.

Eight years on

I was woken by the sound of the alarm – an unfamiliar noise – coming from my wife’s new phone. The day oozed in slowly through the gap in the hotel room curtains, backlighting the slumbering six foot figure next to me. Nine a.m. on one of the saddest kinds of mornings, the mornings where you have to check out. I stayed almost motionless for as long as I could, taking in the stillness of everything and then the things that weren’t quite as still – the rise and fall of her breathing, the occasional thud of feet in the hallway beyond the door. This was the nearly peaceful moment before the lights are flicked on and the shower splutters into action, before clothes are crammed into suitcases, before the scratching sound of a suitcase being zipped up, like a guiro.

It was my wedding anniversary.

Eight years ago we had woken up in a different hotel in this city, unmarried for the last time. We’d had breakfast in the hotel, unmarried for the last time, and walked through the Lanes to the train station to pick up my friend Laura, one of our two witnesses that day. I think we may have had a pair of cheese straws from the café on Kensington Gardens which has closed down and been replaced by another café looking much the same, but without the memories attached. The rooftop bar where we bought pitchers of cocktails later that day and toasted our low-key, reckless marriage had also closed down, but some memories are too strong for that kind of thing to be important. Besides, you can’t expect everything to stay the same for eight years.

Next to me, she could tell that I was awake – the kind of proper wakefulness where the cogs are whirring and cannot be slowed again until a different bedtime. She can always tell, without opening her eyes – a sixth sense, perhaps. I don’t know whether she has spent eight years memorising me like a favourite poem or whether she has always known. We like to think that we are the same in so many ways but this isn’t one of them; we are very different in terms of what we notice and don’t. Next to me, a single eyelid opened and a suspicious eye greeted me first, then the world.

“You’ve gone ping, haven’t you?”

Going ping, that reference to the moment when I am properly awake, like toast shooting out of the slot or a timer going off, like a starting pistol firing. Once it’s happened, it’s happened and the metaphorical toothpaste will never go back in the tube again however hard you try. In the last eight years, one thing we’ve learned is that trying – in this respect at least – is pointless. She instead warms up like a radiator, comes to life gradually like a modern lightbulb. One thing I’ve learned over the last eight years is that it’s a process you cannot accelerate (she, of course, knew that already).

“I’m afraid so.”

“Do you want to have first shower?”

This was not a question, not even an invitation, but a subtly worded command. I’ve picked up those nuances over the last eight years. First shower, that wooden spoon we fight over every morning. The loser misses out on the final fifteen minutes in bed, stretched out to the very edges and hogging the warmth of two people, collected over hours of sleep, precious in those final moments before it dissipates and real life intrudes. Most mornings I win that battle, although I lose the war when she returns from the shower and slips back under the duvet, determined to have the last word. The last word is very important when you’re stubborn, and both of us never expected to meet somebody as stubborn as us. It took us nowhere near eight years to figure out that we had both met our match.

Standing in the shower, having lost just this once, I found myself thinking about how things change. Going ping. First shower. Second shower. A whole vocabulary that didn’t exist when we first got together, an array of concepts we didn’t have, or didn’t have words to express. And those are just the ones at the start of the morning, for every moment of every day there are dozens more. The in-jokes, the pet names, the codewords. The expressions, or phrases, or tones of voice that say change the subject, or stop being like this, that say you please me greatly or I am proud of you. The hundreds and hundreds of little things like this, things I will never tell you or couldn’t explain, that all add up to something else, something I might sum up as we’re in this together, you and I. How did we accumulate all of this? Is it the padding round our marriage, or is it the fabric of our marriage? I stood there in the dim light, under the steady patter of the shower, and I wasn’t sure if I knew, or whether it mattered.

You’ve gone ping. First shower or second shower. Nice cup of tea before bed? These are the rituals and the language of our world. And here’s the other thing about it – my marriage is my world, but it’s not the whole world or even the real world. It’s better than the real world, a beautiful bubble I live in for as much time as I can that protects me from how cruel and arbitrary the outside world can be. It’s a place with its own rules and its own language where we are king and queen and can do what we like, or do nothing, be idle or productive, grown-up or silly. Normally we are idle and silly but it’s our idle and silly, and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to understand.

In our bubble, provided we start the day together and end it together, side by side, drinking our tea, one bedside light out after the other, it’s as if it doesn’t matter how awful the period in between can be, or how much everything else can bend us out of shape. Every night it is all fixed, and we begin again. I don’t think we’ve ever had a significant argument, certainly nothing profound enough that it couldn’t be fixed before bedtime. Did I know all of that eight years ago? No, not in the slightest.

Eight years ago those rules and that language didn’t exist. We had lived together for two months, but we just knew that we wanted to spend eight years making it up as we went along, and then another eight years, and another eight years after that, for as long as we could and as long as our beautiful bubble would last. Looking back I know that it would have seemed like a gamble to anyone; we knew so little about each other, but somehow we knew this was our best chance to be happy. If I wasn’t so mistrustful of the notion, I might even have described it as a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Eight years on, my wife and I went for breakfast at a café opposite the town hall where it all began. We sat on the banquette side by side, looking out on things together. We like to share an experience rather than sit across from each other, another thing we’ve learned that we didn’t know before we got married. When we go to parties, we often mingle separately. “I don’t want to sit with him, we get to talk to each other all the time”, my wife will say to friends at dinner and I’ll smile because if she hadn’t said it I would have said much the same. I don’t even pretend to be offended, which is unlike me. Then at the end of the evening, when the tea is made and the bedside lights are on, we compare notes and have twice as much to talk about, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Eight years on I have grey hair that wasn’t there back then. I have put on weight and lost weight, and acquired a collection of prescriptions and better glasses and different clothes. Eight years ago, it was all slogan t-shirts and big baggy jeans and a grade two all over, now it is muted striped tops and trousers that fit. I smell nice. I can behave in polite company, if I must. I look like the grown up I never really thought I’d become.

At breakfast, I found myself thinking about whether I am the man she married, and whether it matters if I’m not. If I had known it would turn out like this, I wouldn’t have changed anything and I wonder if she would say the same. I can be maddening. I’m grumpy and petulant. I sulk. I always think I’m dying. (“The doctor says I’m not dying. He always says that.” “He’s been right so far.”) I obsess about the smallest things. And yet if you ask me about her, if I talk about my marriage, you would never know that the rest of my life can be so marred by gloom and neurosis. She has saved me from so many things, and sometimes I assume that she knows that I’m grateful. But it’s okay, because I know I saved her too.

When we’d finished eating, we walked across to the station, a trip we’d made eight years ago as singletons for the last time. We made our train in time and settled down on opposite sides of a table, our Sunday papers of choice spread out between us. She loves the Sunday papers, I only read them to make me cross. If something makes me especially cross, I try to read it out to her and she tries to stop me. Did she know that eight years ago when we got married? Is it something she would change about me if she could? I wondered if I could change it if I wanted to, or whether I’d ever want to. Then I wondered whether we have spent the last eight years discovering who we are or becoming who we are and then it became too difficult, so I looked out the window and watched the drabness going by.

The train took ages, going via Southampton, sidling along the perimeter of the country as if it was apologising for something. The landscape was grey and the train went through station after station of towns I never even knew existed. Nobody got off, and nobody got on. When the view got boring, which didn’t take long, I took to looking over at my wife. There’s an art to this – you have to look just long enough without getting caught, and that takes judgment. If you get caught, there are inevitable questions: “What?” “What’s wrong?” “Why are you looking at me?” “Stop it, it’s distracting.” But if you time it just right, you can see everything.

To my wife, this would be a journey just like any other. We just played with our phones, and read the papers, she’d think. We didn’t really talk. It was boring, and the train took ages. But I know better, because I looked across at her and I saw the woman I met, the woman I married and the woman I’m married to now, all in one. She was looking down at her phone, playing a game, and her brows were knitted. Her hands were a blur, fingers across the screen, moving things and pressing things and her clever, clever face took everything in. Before she came along I was with a woman who stared blankly into space all the time – at home, at restaurants, at walls, at books, at me. My wife is not a woman like that. And I thought to myself: You please me greatly. I am proud of you. We’re in this together, you and I.

Dogs and bears

I’ve taken to noticing the dogs and bears on my walk to work every morning. They make me very sad.

My walk to the bus stop takes me round the back of the mall, by the rear of the Mothercare, an ugly white building with a huge wheelie bin permanently stationed at the bottom of the steps. From there, I head past the delivery area where the vans pull up and go into the depot to drop things off, the side of the mall most people never see because it’s not the façade, and in shopping the façade is everything. Then I walk under an archway and head towards the main entrance and on my right I see the strangest thing, the dogs and bears.

At street level, there are a couple of glass windows which are being used to display stock from one of the tacky card shops. All there is in each window are rows of perspex shelves full of merchandise, shop fronts with no shop behind them. It seems a curious afterthought – part use of dead space, part waste of space. It’s designed to draw you into a store which doesn’t exist; even if you wanted to go inside based on what you can see, you wouldn’t necessarily know where the shop even was.

The bears – well, the bears are plain tacky. They are a strange nothingy grey, with blue noses and tiny staring eyes. Some wear cheap-looking t-shirts in a synthetic approximation of silk, others grasp cheap, not very glossy pink or crimson polyester hearts between their outstretched feet. There are slogans on the t-shirts and hearts in childlike writing, not joined up. Special Girlfriend says one, Special Daughter another, Lovely Daughter a third; well-worn variations on a theme. It’s hard to imagine a person who could be made to feel special with such a gift. Interspersed with the bears are gift bags featuring yet more drab cuddly toys on the front. Everyone needs friends says the writing on the bags. The bears look like they do not have friends, as they sit patiently in their perspex prison waiting for a rescue that will never come.

The dogs, though, are what break my heart. They sit side by side on the shelves in the other window, doleful beige and cream creatures with wayward ears, begging to be loved. They wear t-shirts, have red and grey tags round their necks, and some hold hearts in front of them too. The slogans are more imaginative, and maybe it’s just because I’ve always had a soft spot for dogs but they tug on the heartstrings much more effectively. I love you very, very, very much! I know I’m only little but I love you lots and lots! Hello, my name’s Boofle. Can I come home with you?

Nobody seems to know that the dogs and bears exist, except for me. I don’t know if anyone will ever buy them. Rows and rows of dogs, sitting on their see-through ledge, begging to be loved, looking like one day they might jump. Eventually they will get packed away in a box, or left there long after the shop has closed down. They won’t ever get to come home with anyone, or love somebody lots and lots and they will never meet a special girlfriend, or make a special friend.

When I was five years old, my mother gave me a toy panda for Christmas. She told me that she was in Mothercare the day before Christmas and she saw a solitary panda sitting on the shelf, all alone. She told me that she had been browsing for something else and that the panda had told her he was dreading spending Christmas in that big dark shop without anybody to talk to. She told me that she took him home for me because he asked so politely, and that I was to keep him company, and I said I would. I can see him from the sofa where I write these words, and I’ve kept that promise for over thirty years. And I know, as well as he did, the terror of having nobody to talk to.

Maybe that’s why the dogs and bears make me sad, because nobody will have that conversation with them as they sit there behind the glass. I really wonder whether anybody but me notices that the dogs and bears are there at all.

The best things in life aren’t things when they’re friends like you, says one.

At night, when I walk home, the dogs and bears are still there, sitting patiently in the dark. Their cage is not lit, because they aren’t thought to merit it. When it gets really cold the glass steams up, and it’s like they are all in there breathing. I’m not sure when I first noticed them, or how long they’ve been in there. At least they have each other.

I would love to liberate them.

Sometimes I find that the dogs and bears cross my mind when I sit at my desk, when I should be thinking about something else. I don’t know what it is about them that gets to me. The feeling of abandonment perhaps, or the loneliness. That sense of being forgotten. I look round and I wonder who else has something in common with the dogs and bears, how many of them put things on display which nobody will ever see.

The 2012 Bloggies

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve made the shortlist for the 2012 Bloggies, as one of the five blogs nominated for “Best European Blog”. I know people traditionally say that it’s an honour to be nominated, partly because there’s a very strong possibility they won’t win, but it really is true.

What that means I guess is that a lot of people coming here are seeing my blog for the very first time. If that’s you then hello! Hope you like it, make yourself at home and do have a look around. There's a "best of" section in the sidebar, if you're interested. Feel free to leave a comment, if you tend to do that sort of thing (I know lots of people don’t, which is fine too).

Unlike most of the nominated blogs – in all the categories – I’ve never been clever enough or HTML-savvy enough to include an “about me” page and even if I did I’m not sure what it would say (perhaps regular readers could offer some suggestions in the comments section? Keep it clean if you do, given that I’ve got guests). Basically I live in Reading with my wife and my small but growing collection of hang-ups and I write about whatever takes my fancy. Sometimes that’s food, sometimes it’s travel, sometimes it’s office life, and often it’s just small things or minor details that take my interest. I’ve been doing it for nearly three years and eventually I hope to get the hang of it.

I thought I might do some re-posts from 2011 over the next couple of weeks; hopefully that will give people an idea what the blog is about and will also mean there’s always something new to read. I appreciate this might not be the most thrilling experience for regular readers, but hopefully you’ll bear with me (oh, and feel free to make any suggestions in the comments about any posts you’d like to see again).

Last of all, because I nearly forgot – please vote for me! The link is HERE.

I’d really appreciate it if you did, particularly because I’m reliably informed that it’s a right royal pain in the arse clicking on the voting buttons and filling out the captcha, let alone jumping through the hoop of checking your email spam filter to make sure you can verify your email and finalise your vote (in fact, a fair few people have told me that the voting process is only slightly easier to understand than “A Brief History Of Time”).

Whether you vote for me or not, thanks too to everyone who nominated me, read one of my posts, commented on it, Tweeted about it or passed it on in any way over the last twelve months. I’m really lucky to have so many people who are so kind, positive (and sometimes forgiving!) about my writing.

Fiction: Know-it-all

[Submitted.]