According to a friend of ours the Portuguese tradition is for the person whose birthday it is to treat his or her friends. So yesterday we went out to lunch at the Nucleo Sportinguista and, as it was his birthday, he insisted on paying for lunch for five of us. Very generous!
Lunching at the Nucleo Sportinguista has become one of our traditions. I think it supports the local football club and provides good food for fans and passer-by alike. Conditions are rather spartan, with quite barracks-like tables. They offer a splendid “mista de peixe”, a platter with grilled sardines, horse mackerel and another fish whose name escapes me just now, served up with boiled potatoes and “grelos” - greens, turnip tops and the like. All very tasty. The only drawback is that you cannot share a dish. Everyone has to order a main course. Salad does not count as a main course. So you have to make sure you go there accompanied by people who are prepared to eat a lot.
Last year we took photos standing outside in the warm sunshine. This year it was too damp and drizzly for photos. So it goes.
Today began damp and drizzly but by mid morning, as Inwrite, the sun is doing its best to come out.
Here is another contribution from Michael Rosen:
“Dear Mogg
The greatest issue of the day - and in living memory - is surely the fate of Suella. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers (as Dickens wrote), must fight to save her, or we will be engulfed by barbarism and tofu.
Tent siti
Boris”
And here is a link to an article by George Monbiot on the group of “extremists”, including the aforementioned Suella, who have been undermining British values for the last decade and more.
And here is a link to an article by Adrian Chiles about the great dilemma: to kiss or not to kiss? It doesn’t arise as a rule in the UK. When we are introduced to people most of us don’t quite know what to do. Some of is shake hands. It is, after all, a way of acknowledging the other person. Others sort of mumble a greeting of some kind. I have long grown used to doing the kiss on both cheeks in the European countries I visit. I’m now trying work out whether there has been a reduction kissing and an increase in handshaking since the Spanish footballing kiss scandal.
One of the things i get a little agitated about is self-service tills in supermarkets. They’re taking jobs away from people and they are a real nuisance if you have more than three or four items to scan. I try to avoid them as much as possible but if you do have only a couple of items and you are in a hurry and all the manned (personned?) tills have long queues of loaded trolleys, you can find yourself obliged to go down that route. This is especially so as the old “Ten items of less ( fewer for the grammar police)” / “baskets only” tills have disappeared.
Now I hear that Booths’ supermarkets are getting rid of self-service tills in all but 2 of their 28 stores, the exceptions being Keswick and Windermere. Maybe tourists there are too impatient! "We believe colleagues serving customers delivers a better customer experience and therefore we have taken the decision to remove self-checkouts in the majority of our stores," the company said. "Our customers have told us this over time, that the self-scan machines that we've got in our stores they can be slow, they can be unreliable, they're obviously impersonal.
"We stock quite a lot of loose items - fruit and veg and bakery - and as soon as you go to a self-scan with those you've got to get a visual verification on them, and some customers don't know one different apple versus another for example," he added.
"There's all sorts of fussing about with that and then the minute you put any alcohol in your basket somebody's got to come and check that you're of the right age."
We don’t have Booths’ in our neck of the woods. I seem to remember my sister telling me there is one in Southport. Maybe it’s too posh for Oldham. And I bet they have a lot of loyal customers who like to chat with the cashiers. But then, they only have 28 stores altogether. Somehow I don’t see Tesco and Sainsbury’s rushing to remove the self-service tills from their multiple “extras” in places like city-centre Manchester, with commuters dashing in and out on their way to and from work.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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