Queuing for shared food
February 25, 2011
Perhaps even worse than sharing food is the experience of queueing for shared food. This activity strips the dignity of everyone involved and does a disservice to the notion that we are somehow ‘a civilisation’.
Queuing for food is like being a vulture circling a carcass, waiting for the hyenas to have their fill. You’re in a pecking order and you don’t know what scraps will remain when you get to the front of that queue. It encourages base animal behaviour and reduces us to the level of beasts.
It should also be noted that queueing for food often precedes selecting from too varied a spread, which is another hatred. A buffet is fine right up until the point where it becomes effectively impossible to have one of everything because there are too many things on offer. You are not gaining 20 foodstuffs here; you are missing out on four.
Sharing food
February 25, 2011
Maybe it’s because I’m an only child, but I don’t like sharing food. In fact, I will not share.
Sharing food affects the whole experience. It alters your priorities and changes what should be an enjoyable experience into an every-man-for-himself free-for-all. I want to know what my food is and I want to eat it how I please. I don’t want to feel like if I risk eating some salad early on, I’ll not get any chicken kebab.
If food is to be shared, it should be equally divided and plated so that everyone knows where they are. If there is any dissatisfaction, people can trade items, but these deals are negotiated and therefore ought to be mutually satisfactory.
Slightly too much food
February 25, 2011
The right amount of food is fine. Far too much food is fine. I’m not happy with not enough food, but it’s a manageable situation - you can always go and get more. The worst volume of food is ’slightly too much’.
When there’s slightly too much food, you’re more likely to convince yourself that full consumption is a possibility and the closer you get, the more you’re committed. The very last mouthful is the hardest one of all, but it’s also the one you’re least likely to leave.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the binge-eating, but there have to be limits and they have to be either attainable or totally unattainable.
Lights Out in Wonderland by DBC Pierre - this annoys me
February 22, 2011
DBC Pierre is a good writer. You might forget this, but he did write Vernon ‘God’ Little, which is one of the finest books of recent times.
All the more reason to hate Lights Out in Wonderland then. I’m maybe 200 pages into it and it has taken me months, because it is so unreadable. Maybe it’ll all work out in the end and I’ll experience an epiphany, but I’ll have bloody earned it.
The main problem is that the protagonist is a pretentious, preachy arsehole. That might be the point, but it makes the book hard to read. I generally read three pages at a time at most and I often glaze over for much of that.
Being at work after other people have left
February 22, 2011
I don’t mind people leaving work early. I just hate being there after they’ve gone.
It doesn’t matter whether they’ve left at 5pm when I’m working until 5.30pm or if they’ve walked out halfway through the day because they’ve taken half a day’s holiday, it’s the feeling that life is kicking on without you that hurts.
It’s similar to the feeling you get in a tourist seaside town on a Sunday in the middle of winter. You don’t know what’s happening, but whatever it is, it’s taking place somewhere else; somewhere very, very far away.
It’s 5.10pm and I’m at work. Nothing is happening here.