Panna cotta terrine

Spent a lot of time yesterday paying attention to wedding menus. We’ve been completely clueless so far picking what we want to eat, and it’s only when you (me) start trying to make a fancy menu to impress people that they’ll also like that you realise that a lot of food words are a bit meaningless in themselves. I mean, how many people really know what a terrine is? Or panna cotta? Maybe I’m just ignorant or irredeemably monolingual, but I didn’t until yesterday. I mean, If I saw vegetable terrine on a menu I might well ask for it, but I wouldn’t know what they were going to do with them. For all I know they might do what we were once warned the chef had done with some vegetables when we tried to order vegetarian food in China, which was that they had been fed to a pig and then cut out of the pig’s stomach once part-digested (that was the gist of it anyway). So you wouldn’t want that, eh?
Well, as we were considering having two dishes that were both terrines on our menu, I thought I’d better look into the matter, and I now know they’re sort of pate mousse things. Furthermore, I thought, two can play at that game and so I found one or two forrin words of my own to fling around and make food sound interesting: instead of summer tomato tart (for which read: tomato tart), we’re now having summer tomato tart tatin. Ha! Stick that in your pipe and fume it.
In the afternoon travelled up to London to see Bert for a surprise because I can’t go on Saturday. And surprised he was (Tania knew I was turning up and had sanctioned the idea.) Drank lots of kronenbourg and ate curry and had a Bristol cigarette later which turned the conversation to serious matters of climate change and how we’re all screwed, although by that stage it was hard to remember what we’d starting saying from the beginning of a sentence all the way through to the end of the sentence, and so in the end we just gave up and drank more booze and whiskey and had a bit of an old laugh, which is probably a much better idea anyway. Somehow managed to spent hours looking at youtube videos which can be surprisingly absorbing if puerile. Also I got to see a video of Bert and Tania in various footage. Went to bed 3:30 (the time you go to bed is a measure of how good a night is – any bedtime before 1am doesn’t count as having enjoyed yourself – that is the law). In the morning we found youtube footage of Gwyn playing the guitar in his Buffy T-shirt with his rockstar hair, and drank lots of tea. Hopefully Bert and Tania can visit the boat in a bit but they have no weekends free for the rest of their lives and even have a spreadsheet of availability, which I wouldn’t want. Was lovely seeing those folks anyhow as haven’t been to their place in London yet. And now I have a hangover and a small child keeps peering at me through the seats in front of me in the train. I try to smile, but obviously what I think is a smile is in fact a curiously withering grimace that has the ability both to frighten children and to encourage them, ghoulishly, to return for more soon afterwards.
The sun is shining outside and, though I’ve said this before and often been proved wrong, I reckon that the sun is going to keep shining for at least several months and be hot and sunny and glorious and the summer will be sunny and great like it is in memories and everything will be just fine.
(Actually, now I come to upload this, it has gone very cloudy all of a sudden.)