Saturday 23 May 2009

If you look back you'll turn to stone (1)

When we were a proper family - you know man, wife, two children, one girl one boy (I think there was supposed to be a 0.4 child too, to keep the statistics right, Friday was take away night. Inspite of some Catholic heritage on my side (pretty lapsed, and only by dint of my father's family having allegiance to Rome)it rarely involved fish and chips. Chinese or Indian were tip top favourites, and at an early age the boy had a thing for chicken chat....although it did make him screw his nose up. Such was the tradition, that long after I departed the family home, the boy continued to enjoy Friday Night Take Away, and why not. After all there was more to go round.

When the boy came to live with me permenantly, in the confusion and panic (oh what do I do, how will I manage this, etc, etc), the FNTA died a death, although it was quite fondly spoken of on a regular basis. So at the boy's suggestion, on Friday we had new FNTA. Chinese was the dish of choice. It duly arrived half an hour of ordering, and it was certainly a feast fit for a king with sweet and sour this, lemon sauce that, peking the other and black bean who knows what. In true Chinese tradition, there was enough to feed the entire street. And it seems that it was at that precise moment, when we started taking the cartons out, the romantic notion of FNTA evaporated. We both had some, but 90% lay uneaten whilst Have I Got News For You wittered away in the background. Perhaps we shouldn't have done it, perhaps the expectations were wrong, but it certainly didn't make for a great evening.

And funnily enough we were both hungry an hour later....

4 comments:

  1. Awwwh - you could have sent the leftovers round to us!

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a sweet and sour story.

    Or should I say bittersweet?

    Nice that you still have some good memories of the early days though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have some leisure-skilled pals who swear that a left-over chinese takeaway is even better for breakfast. They may be right when it comes to crispy shredded beef.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rosiero and Brother Tobias....we ended up eating it all for lunch the next day. The boy has always felt that last night's curry makes for a good breakfast...

    Laura...oh ho ho...you're crackers

    ReplyDelete

There's only one thing worse than being commented on...not commented on