12th March 2010

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

Just a moment

  

A free eye test

There are advantages to being a gentleman of a certain age.  On my last trip back to the U.K. I went into Specsavers to book an eye test.  The young man behind the counter carefully filled in all my personal details on a form and when he asked me to sign it, I checked with him that the inspection would be free.  He had that slightly quizzical look affected by those who know better.  “I’m afraid”, he said patiently “that it’s only free for those over 60.”  He probably didn’t see the little dance I was doing on the other side of the counter.  My heart leapt for joy and if I had been left to my own devices I would have thumped the air and yelled “Yes!!”  I just couldn’t believe he was expressing disbelief in my age.  I had no identification and so he politely warned me that I would have to pay if there was some sort of “mistake”.  This minor threat was nothing compared with the joy of being thought so young.  In fact I have a good mind to go into every one of their Specsaver branches to try and get myself a free eye test, just so that I could hear my stated age being questioned.  It would be a good way of keeping a spring in my step and a glint in my eye.  I almost jumped over the counter and kissed him, but then I remembered that Church of England clergy are not allowed to do that sort of thing any more. 

 

Warm wet winters

 

My old geography teacher should be sacked.  There’s no doubt in my mind about that.  I can still remember as a class chanting “warm wet winters, hot dry summers”.  If you don’t know it, that is the definition of a Mediterranean type climate.  Perhaps you remember those awful roller maps that the teacher used to print in your geography books.  If you didn’t let them dry, there was a huge smudge halfway across Africa into India and you finished up with South America indelibly printed on your white shirt sleeve.  Now why am I remembering all of this?  Well, if I look out of the window as I’m writing this, it’s snowing.  Huge snowflakes are covering my car and the thermometer reading on the dashboard says ‘beware of ice’.  The temperature is down to 1’.  Now I’m not quite clear how this connects with “warm wet winters”.  I live in Majorca, that’s in the Balearics, they sit very neatly in the middle of the Mediterranean – at least they did the last time I looked at a map and, unless someone has moved them lock, stock and barrel, we should be having a Mediterranean type climate - that’s the pink bit on your old school map which covered most of Spain, the South of France, Italy, Greece and parts of North Africa.  Above that the map used to be coloured light green - western seaboard and temperate, below that in bright yellow, was desert and continental type climate - hot dry days, cold dry nights.  So where is the “warm, wet winter” and why the snow? 

 

Food for thought

 

Oh! Easyjet, bmibaby, Ryanair and Jet2 when will you learn? I’m not like my once international, jet-setting brother-in-law who airily rejects, with a dismissive wave of the arm, the airline meal when it is brought round. I love them. They break the monotony of the journey and they are something to look forward to – that ritual of dining at thirty thousand feet. Even the language used in some of the menus is food for thought. Vegetables, it seems, are not mixed but “assembled in a medley”, the potato is not mashed, but “creamed and pureed”, and the prawns in the seafood curry come from a remote village in an isolated part of the Indian coast that no one has ever heard of. Gravy, despite a lifetime of having consumed gallons of it, no longer exists; the meat is now “bathed in a jus’. It’s just so pompous.

 

Always a joke

 

According to one of the bosses at Easyjet “airline food was always a joke”. Yes I know, spot on, but we’ve got to have something to laugh and talk about and look forward to when we are bored out of our minds staring at the bald pate in front of us. Of course it’s a joke, one of civilisation’s little eccentricities. Although the concept is not quite as silly as when we were all allowed to smoke as we sat next to hundreds of gallons of airline kerosene swishing around in the huge aircraft wings next to us. That’s one change that I’m really glad of. But why did we have to lose the plasticized meals as well? Despite being constrained by what can be crammed onto a plastic tray I used to love rifling through the little plastic bags – salt, pepper, pats of butter, mature cheddar cheese, wet wipes, napkins and plastic knives and forks were all there. It was simply a case of tucking your elbows in and diving in as you balanced one clear plastic cover on top of another. It was a work of art in itself and the manoeuvring to avoid splashing gravy, sorry ‘jus’, down yourself needed the skills of a consultant brain surgeon.

 

For financial reasons I’m usually restricted to using one of the budget airlines so there’s an air of anticipation when I’m using a carrier that provides an in-flight meal. AirBerlin has neither given up such gastronomic offerings nor continued the traditional culinary experience. On a short hop to Barcelona or Alicante it is just a wholemeal roll with three pieces of salami and a bottle of water. I ask you! And it just had to be wholemeal didn’t it? But they certainly redeemed themselves on a recent flight to Cologne when my memories of a decent three-course meal on a plastic tray were relived once again. Similarly, last year it was with some excitement that I anticipated my First Choice flight to Manchester. On every other occasion I had gingerly lifted the hot steaming metal cover off the main course dish to tuck in to sausage and mash. I’d always enjoyed it and it became a standing joke in the family knowing exactly what our in-flight meal would be. But last time, horror of horrors, not sausage, mash and onion gravy but a piece of chicken breast sitting in a white wine sauce with fresh broccoli florets and new potatoes – how healthy can you get? It was lovely but what are things coming to when you can’t rely on a good plastic platter of stodge? Come back plastic meals, all is forgiven.

 

 

The best bit

 

Wine tastings can be quite fun. All the sipping, slurping, sloshing and spitting – that is the best bit - not that there’s usually much spitting because most of the wine we try is sufficiently good that we feel it’s permissible to swallow rather than spit. But inevitably that’s where the problems start.

We have a friend who earns his living dealing in fine wines and one of his party pieces is presiding at a wine tasting for local organisations. These events make for a very pleasant evening though one invariably remembers the words of wisdom given at the start of the night rather than those towards the end - where, like the various wines, the professional words of wisdom and description tend to become blurred as the evening wears on. He describes the grapes used, the fact that in the UK the bulk of what we pay for a bottle of wine goes on tax, so simply spending a tiny bit more on the wine can double the quality and the warning that money doesn’t necessarily buy the nicest wine.

 

Tired and emotional

 

I was reading recently of a large trade tasting where one of the guests who had become tired and emotional in the course of his researches tried to ditch his glass in favour of swigging straight from the bottle. He lurched from table to table until one of the organisers finally caught up with him among the dessert wines. Prising him from his current bottle he propped him in a chair saying, “You’d be better off here, Sir, against the wall. It’s plastered too.” Though even that is not as bad as the guest who spent a large part of the evening hogging the spittoon jug, believing it to be some carefully decanted vintage gem of a wine!

 

Fr Robert Ellis is the Anglican Chaplain of Mallorca

St Philip and St James Church

Calle Nunez de Balboa 6,

Son Armadans, Palma 07014

Tel: 971 737279

e-mail:anglicanpalma@gmail.com

www.anglican-mallorca.org