Reviving old traditions. Eating out. Finding fault with writers. Noisy neighbours.

 Today a couple of friends and I set about reviving an old tradition. After we all retired from teaching, and before pandemic and lockdown came along to restrict our activities, we used to meet every once in a while and go out for lunch in Manchester, a suitable mid-point for all of us travel-wise. Then lockdown came along and we were all stuck in our separate places. Once travel restrictions were lifted I suggested meeting once more but one of our number was still a little cautious and then another actually caught Covid and was out of the running for a while.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from the reluctant traveller saying that she had recently travelled to London to see her daughter and that going to the centre of Manchester no longer seemed so daunting. So we settled on today as a reasonable date and met in Waterstone’s cafe at midday, just as we always used to. From there we moved on to El Gato Negro, a Spanish or possibly Catalan tapas bar. Over croquetas and queso manchego and albóndigas and pan a la catalana and other stuff we caught up with all our news. 

So now we need to decide when to repeat the experience.

On balance I think tapas places here in the UK are perhaps a bit of a rip-off. £8 for 4 meatballs or for 4 salt-cod croquetas is a little,on he dear side, especially when you have grown used to free tapas in so many Galician bars. And the salt-cod croquetas were not as good as the “pastéis de bacalao”, almost the same thing, that I can get from the Portuguese cafe in Oldham market. That place was quite a find. Portuguese speakers from the Oldham area have been there tucking into authentic-looking Portuguese food whenever I have popped in for take-away pastéis. 

I’ve been reading a detective story in which research takes an investigative journalist (aka a nosy parker) to Italy. There she sees a villa with a for sale sign:  se vende. Unfortunately that’s the wrong language. It should say in vendita. I do hate it when writers and their proof-readers don’t do their research properly! Otherwise it was a good read!  

Granddaughter Number One is suffering from noisy neighbours. They seem to have been having family rows for ever - lots of screaming and shouting and banging around the place. Today it all go so loud that Granddaughter Number One, working from home, had to apologise to the people in her zoom meeting because they were having difficulty hearing what she had to say. Oh boy! We are very fortunate, we rarely hear our neighbours at all. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!