Sunday mornings. Don’t you just love them?
A leisurely check of the mornings emails, news, and tweets (more of that in a minute) sets me up for a gentle drive across town to the outlet village that hosts the Farmers Market on Sundays. I get there shortly before one, check out a huge pan of paella on the go at one stall, and the ‘your breed of pig’, bacon and sausage grill at another. I will have a difficult decision to make about my brunch on the way out.
A pair of Clarks later I surface and the rain, not due until four, has already arrived. The damper has been put on my plans and my taste-buds start to weep in frustration, but al fresco dining, in a downpour, in a tee and shorts is not really wise for one suffering from manflu. I drive home via the sign of the golden arches.
People watchers of the world should spend half an hour of a Sunday lunchtime in their local Macdonalds, and see how the next generation is being brought up. It is a real eye-opener. I get a chicken salad something and take a pew.
“Eat your lunch, Jase, or there will be no ice cream”
I feel for Jase, destined for whatever replaces the asbos of the future. As his young Mum chats idly to her mate, the poor little sod is looking at the remains of a now cold, half-chewed, burger (you know, the cheap one off the value menu with a tired bit of lettuce and a salty sweet dollop of relish to make it taste of something).
Looking around there are Mums and kids, but no Dads it seems? The reasons for that may be manifold and so perhaps I’m not about to get judgemental on that score. The only males in the place are packs of three or four marauding fifteen year olds. They will come to appreciate the value of nutrition soon enough, but they have a phase to go through. I recall spending the odd hour in Wimpy myself, many moons ago with a toasted bun and a mug of coffee.
In the time it takes me to digest the edible parts of my snack Jase steadfastly refuses to take any more of the muck in front of him. As I get up to leave he all but begs his Mum for the ice-cream that will wash away the taste of his main course. He should have known better.
“Can’t you see I’m talking? Now eat your burger.”
I’m A Bit Of A Twit
But then you knew that already, didn’t you? Seriously, have you not yet had a mooch around Twitter? I have steadfastly avoided going near the place over the years after seeing the sort of stuff that went on at Facebook, and MySpace, and all those other tedious places where the world befriends each other and tries to lure you into chat and some form or another of virtual role-playing.
I’m only a bit of a lurker at the moment on Twitter, which is just fine by me. I don’t really want to be embraced by a score of strange folk attempting to fill me in on the minutiae of their existence in a hundred and forty characters, but that restriction means you can pop into the place, pick a few favourite people to ‘follow’, and then dip in and out from time to time just catching up on the sheer randomness of it all.
Without it I could not have learned that three hours ago Chris Evans was drinking a cup of tea on the gym floor. I would have been ignorant of the fact that Dara O’Briain was listening to John Cage on his iPod last night, or that my mate Treacle was yesterday imploring us all to “stop talking about ****ing football and say something depraved, please and thank you.” If you decide to join us feel free to view my nonsense @blazing_saddle. The link is in the sidebar.
So apart from turning into a ‘Meldrew’, according to Mrs Blazing, I am also a committed (for now) twit. It’s official. I’m not about to tell her that we prefer the term ‘tweeter’. Secretly I quite enjoy being thought of as turning into a curmudgeon.
I wonder how poor Jase got on with his ice-cream?
