venta

Last time I drove up to Samantha's, Andy gave me a set of directions which worked perfectly. Mysteriously, however, these instructions have degraded over time, and didn't work. Well, either that or I failed to follow them, but how unlikely is that ? So I took an interesting detour through Quorn (the place, not the fake meat) before ending up correctly in Barrow-on-Soar.

I don't see Samantha much these days, usually only in a ships-in-the-night way as she passes through our house on the way to or from Heathrow, so it was great to spend a weekend doing nowt much.

I turned up on lateish on Friday night, and just for a while it was like being back at college again... bouncing round the kitchen, cooking dinner in the middle of the night, singing along to New Model Army.

Saturday night we went out for dinner, and I was surprised by the inclusion of sweetbreads on the menu. I thought these were bull's testicles (or some other thing which needed a politely euphemistic name), Samantha thought they were what they said on the tin (ie sweet bready things). While not unpleasantly flavoured, they turned out to have a strangely spongey texture, and in fact tasted exactly like I'd expect fried bollocks to taste (if I'd ever thought about it) (which I might add, I hadn't).

Subsequent interaction with a dictionary when we got home suggested that you can get two kinds of sweetbreads, neck and stomach. The former is the "thymus gland of an animal", the latter the pancreas. Anyone offer any further information about what we might have eaten, or suggest which animal ?

I am a Philistine. I buy wine depending on whether it has a nice label or not. Well, I notice what colour it is too, and what grapes it's made of, and sometimes even where it comes from, but a sexy label is usually the clincher.

I also buy books because they have nice covers - and have an alarmingly high success rate of finding good things this way. This weekend I bought a CD because I liked the cover artwork.

It's From the Depths of Dreams, by a band called Senses Fail. It doesn't suck. On first listen, it's not fantastic either. Sounds a bit like Alien Ant Farm.