Food for thought! Lies and come-backs!

For lunch yesterday we went back to the restaurant we discovered last Saturday: Cais do Heleno. We took a friend with us. The young lady who served us the other day, probably the daughter of the chef, was pleased to see us again. The menu on offer was little different from the other day: roubalo (some kind of fish I have not yet identified) or mixed grill or roast chicken. We ordered fish for the three of us, but after a while the young lady came back, crestfallen, to tell us they only had two fish left. So, never mind, I had yet another salada mista, this time with grated cheese, but it was a different restaurant from the place where I have had three different salads.

At one point the chef popped up to see if everything was all right, full of apologies for the shortage of fish. They had been very busy, he told us, and he is the only cook. He spoke to us in Portuguese, Spanish and English. I bet that doesn’t happen often in the UK. As we came to the end of our meal we were the only remaining customers (I think we had arrived rather late as it was quite a long walk from our hotel) and we noticed the chef and his two waitresses - sisters? - sitting down to their own lunch.

A lovely, family run place. The service was great, the people friendly and the food excellent. And three of us ate well for under twenty euros in total. Now for something else. From the Washington post I found some stuff about POTUS. In a television interview on Wednesday Mr Trump maintained that he tells the truth when he can.

 “Well, I try. I do try . . . and I always want to tell the truth,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News. “When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful.”

There is something fundamentally wrong with a president who says he TRIES to tell the truth. He does seems to have a problem with it though. He tells the truth when he can but, presumably, many times he simply can’t do so. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported last month that Trump had made more than 5,000 false or misleading claims in the first 601 days of his presidency — an average of 8.3 claims a day — and that the pace is picking up.

For instance, he said a middle-class tax cut would be passed by Nov. 1, even though Congress wasn’t in session and had no plans to reconvene before the elections.

He has repeatedly asserted that Republicans are more committed than Democrats to protecting people with preexisting health conditions, despite numerous past actions contrary to that claim.

And he has asserted that the United States is the only country to grant automatic citizenship to children born on its territory, despite the fact that more than 30 other nations have a similar “birthright citizenship” policies.

Jane Fonda, still active at 80, says he is dangerous, but reckons that some of his odd behaviour is the result of bis having had an abusive father and a neglectful mother. Really? It’s all too pathetic!

In the New Yorker Magazine, Susan B Glasser explains that she has been listening to all of Trump’s campaign speeches/tirades during the midterms. She points out that his own advisers have said not to pay attention to the tweets; forget the overheated language and the alarming one-liners coming out of Trump’s constant campaign-style rallies. Pay attention to the policy.

But she reckons we should not dismiss him out of hand: “I listen because I think we are making a mistake by dismissing him, by pretending the words of the most powerful man in the world are meaningless. They do have consequences. They are many, and they are worrisome. In what he says to the world, the President is, as Ed Luce wrote in the Financial Times this week, “creating the space to do things which were recently unthinkable.” It’s not a reality show; it’s real.”

Is he planning a second term?


 In the UK rumours abound that David Cameron would like to make a come-back, maybe as Foreign Secretary. Apparently he feels a “vocation to serve”. His people deny that he plans to come out of retirement. But he is still quite young enough to do so.

We shall see!