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A very enjoyable, slobby weekend.

It started with a late rise on Saturday morning. I should really have made an effort to get out of the house sooner, but somehow half the morning had slipped by before I’d thrown my stuff into the car and headed off in Sal’s direction. Good traffic, clear roads, and I was there in less than an hours, a day behind dad who was already lost beneath the tide of read broadsheets that accompanies him on every visit.

He’s looking for somewhere new to live, so we headed straight out, to chech out some flats around Blackfen and Greenwich, eventually stubmling into a garden centre the size of France, beautifully landscaped across a set of rolling hills, it made me want a garden of my own for the first time. I suspect I’d end up filling it more with tomatoes and carrots than flowers and grass, but it would be somewhere to sit in the sun.

We spent the rest of the afternoon mooching around the merged villages of South East London, end in the evening headed out to a Mongolian Barbeque place in Blackfen. The food was fantastic, although if you were a more strict vegetarian than myself, you’d have problems. There is Quorn, as an alternative to the meat or fish, but the cooking itself could turn a squeamish herbivore’s stomach.

The idea is that you pile up your plate with veg and meat, fish or Quorn, ladle on some sauce and spices and then take it all over to an enormous communal hot plate, about five feet round, where two chefs tip it out onto the hot surface, arrange it into a tidy strip, and then keep on bothering it with a set of spatulas until it’s cooked. Obviously you can’t help but have all the meat juices mixing with the vegetarian stuff that way, and although they keep scraping the goo off the surface they do end up wiping everyone’s food where everyone else’s food has already been.

The result, though, is a fantastic mix of flavours (although the chillies were as mild as peppers), and something I’d be up for doing again.

Sunday, we were all up uncommonly early. Dan was off to a Beetle convention, so by eight we were sitting in the lounge drinking coffee and by nine we were picking at bagles. By ten we were in Greenwich, walking along the banks of the Thames, and by eleven we were eating biscuits and drinking tea in a cafe on the high street. All highly organised, but indulgent and restful, and despite the frequent showers, which were doing their best to prove that adage about the April weather, much fun.

It’s years since I was last in Greenwich, and I’d forgotten how good the market is, with about 80% of the stuff on sale being hand made, and a good third being highly edible. Fortunately we managed to resist, for the most part, as Sal was cooking a huge roast (chicken for them, aubergine for me). In fact, it was such a huge roast that it wiped us out for the rest of the day, and we spent the whole afternoon, in decadent manner, slobbed out on the settee reading the papers and watching TV.

It is months - if not years since I’ve done that and, for the for as long as I can remember, I didn’t feel guilty at all.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.