No, not a blogpost in praise of the Latest Faddy Diet™, seasonally inappropriate and Guaranteed To Fail. No pious writings explaining how I shall cut out all the food that gives my body energy just when temperatures traditionally plummet and during a month which only just exceeds nine out of twenty four hours as daylight.
I'm rather bored of the way that the puritanical and slightly disturbed have managed to mainstream their body dysmorphia and create feelings of guilt in normal people - and more importantly, in the young and impressionable - in much the same way that sexually dysfunctional priests have done in bygone eras.
'Diets' don't work. Embedding change into your lifestyle does work, but, like giving up smoking, should be done at the right time for the individual. In my experience, the people most obsessed by diets seem in general to be those that have the poorest relationship to food - mainlining junk, immature palates, nutritionally ignorant, and lazy in the kitchen, as well as suggestible about advertising, Royalist and open to brainwashing by the moneyed Elites against their better interests. Often seemingly sociopathic.*
(On Wednesday we served pan fried turbot on a traditional stir fry with packet noodles).
I have almost no idea why I started photographing my food almost assiduously over the Christmas/New Year break. Something about there being not much to photograph outdoors, or much incentive to go outdoors. Something about the Festival of Food and Drink. I'm now officially tired with it and won't photograph another bit of food until I eat out again or at least have something photogenic at home.
Okay, maybe the Christmas cake and the other box of chocolates when we get round to eating them.
And the chocolate biscuits, when we open them.
And a trifle, if we ever get round to buying one from Markles.
But - insert proud face symbol - I have resisted photographing leaf tea brewed in a china pot and served in china tea-cups.
Yesterday, I went for a book-guided walk around The City, West of St Paul's (more, in time) and finished off with a late pub lunch in The Harrow near Blackfriars. I don't know what it's like on an ordinary working day, or in the evenings, but I liked it - although I only saw the downstairs front bar. I wasn't greatly inspired by the food menu but plumped for a Gnocchi, tomato, basil, mozzarella & roasted aubergine. Turned out to be one of the tastiest and filling pub lunched I have had in a long time. Looking again at the food menu, it's perfectly pitched for a pub - fish and chips; sausage and mash; ham, egg & chips; chicken salad; (all described more poshly than that!) and veggie gnocchi, plus the 'special'. Jimmy had chicken and chorizo stew and declared it full of flavour. Definitely one to remember if we're in that area again.
* nothing in this paragraph should be mistaken for any type of expertise or insight. Just one blogger's opinion, based on anecdote and observation.
