Suuuuuushi.

   I see sushi as a kind of endurance sport. Quantity and wasabi for Olympic gold. I could easily bankrupt myself on a semi-regular basis just for sushi, and I wouldn't feel any worse for it.My favourite sushi is the stuff they make at Fruit & Veg city, but the damn place is just too much of a drive out to justify getting it too often. And also, I'm poor. That makes it somewhat harder. Le sigh.
   However, the other day was monthly grocery shopping day. The banks closed, the municipal workers took a long, leisurely lunch, and GPs everywhere charged double their usual rates. We battened down the hatches and took off on the long trek to Pick 'n Pay. Interesting story:* a couple of months ago, we went to our normal Pick 'n Pay for the normal shopping trip. We kept not finding things. This was odd, as the reason we go all the way out to P'nP is because they have actual food, whereas the much closer Spar seems to object to having more than one kind of bread at a time. We were stocking up for my sister's birthday party, and we just couldn't find the stuff we were looking for. We wondered briefly why P'nP should be stocking Spar brand milk and cleaners, but thought not too much of it.

*Again, lie.

   I think you see where this is going. Twas, in fact, a Spar that had been erected exactly where the beloved Pick 'n Pay used to be. We only realised this by the end of the ordeal, when we looked up to see the Spar sign on the wall. Neither me or my dad have yet won any kind of Nobel Prize for our genius.
   The upshot is: we needed to find a new Pick 'n Pay. After me and pregnant Brenda had a bit of an adventure the other day finding some demon entity called "Centurion Lifestyle Centre", me and the father decided to try that-a-one. Happily, also just down the road from the aforementioned Fruit & Veg, which I celebrated loudly.
   We found a P'nP. I think that's where all the Pick 'n Pays in South Africa have gone. I made sure to check we weren't in a Game or a Macro or something, as this is obviously a mistake I'm prone to making, but yes, Pick 'n Pay it was. FUCKING HUGE. And considering we went on a Sunday, packed. Now, I don't like crowds. They make me feel a little panicky. Look, I'm weird, I don't like my fingernails to touch the car either, and I wear toe-socks because the skin between toes shouldn't touch. If I had had more of a stomach for it, I could have done all of my yearly bicycle and Verimark shopping
there, but as it was I think both of us just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible without getting thrown up on by a rogue infant. I don't drive, but I think steering that trolley should allow me to claim my license right now. There was signalling, T-juntions, yielding and even one or two speed bumps formed by the mass of some of the slower children. I took great care to make sure to steer around people, was mindful of elbows and behinds, and hummed to myself nervously like Sheldon. HOWEVER, I still came away from it with many a war wound, as people insist on charging into you with murder in their eyes.
   One particular woman (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) managed to ram her trolley into my ribs so hard it felt like G4, whilst I was legally parked by the frozen food section. I politely swore under my breath and moved myself off further to the side, and then she proceeded to take off about five cubic centimetres of shin flesh. I moved again, even though, Lady, there was ample space for you to glide past me gracefully, but now I think that special vein in my forehead was starting to throb.

  After the gauntlet was run, we dashed to Fruit & Veg, and I ran in while daddio sat in the car. I went in and grabbed some of the pre-assembled little sushi platters, and then mildly shat myself when I saw the queues. There was some queue jockeying in P'nP as my dad hunted for the shortest line and I followed the 6"10 head through the sea of people in trust. Here, people were smooshed up against one another like they were ready to commit violence on your person if you even looked like you were trying to get ahead of them for a box of smarties on the rack ahead. I stood there, sedately holding my food and kept my head down- I swear to you, the atmosphere is tangible. It's like a scene from Tale of Two Cities, with the peasant classes ready to riot, given half an excuse. Of course, with my shin still bleeding profusely (not really), the crowd-mentality encroaching steadily, and the earlier indignity still rankling, I was on a short fuse.
   Then Mr. Eager bumps into me in a leisurely, lingering manner from the right. The vein in my forehead pivots my head in his direction, and I say, with considerable irony I'm quite proud of, "Excuse me." He, missing my exquisite sardonic intention, replies "No, it's ok, I'm just trying to get in here," and pushes his trolley in in front of me where his pal had been saving a spot for him.
   Oh goodly God, this person is treading on a thin, fragile line. He does this only because he assumes, quite wrongly, that I am not liable to stab him in the eye with a chopstick.

   As it stands, I exited with no manslaughter to my name. I got into the car and simply inhaled heady sushi fumes to calm my nerves. And when I got home, I ripped into that package like a man starved of soya sauce. With every sting that travelled through my spinal chord and directly up into my brainstem, I silently blessed wasabi. It was finished much too quickly. 
   Damn, I've psyched myself up now. Where the hell can I get sushi in the next ten minutes?

For The Love Of Pizza

  Lots of news, pielovers. first most and foremost, Wednesday the very 24th of August, was the day the world (or his mother, but quibbles) gave us Stephen Fry. I celebrated by using big words at people and reading some more. I suppose I'm not a party animal, but I can at the very least be a celebratory arthropod. As you should know by now, Stephen Fry is both the For The Love Of Pie mascot, and on our coat of arms.

 

Disembodied head of slightly creepy Stephen Fry on a pale of azure on another kind of azure, little hearts gules dexter and sinister, or whatever.

   I would lead you in a rousing rendition of our school song, but I've neglectfully forgotten to write one for you. I suggest you each choose your favourite Cream song and simply hum it to yourself for pleasure.

   I do think though, to honour our mascot, we must have a quote. 

 

   That quote is from his book, The Liar, thought by Adrian as he fancies himself playing God sorting potatoes on a line. It was between that quote and one with a delightfully filthy word in it, but in the end I decided to spare any delicate sensibilities the offence of country matters.
   I truly am so thankful that we have Stephen Fry in this life; he has so greatly given me the English language, I fear I'd be mute without him. Let's hope he sticks around a great many more years, the better to balance out the vacuum left by such entities as Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton.

   Amen.

   So, let's talk pizza. I had some. Last night was monthly pizza night, and frankly diet be damned. I've actually found it's less what I eat than how much of it I eat, when I eat it, and what I drink during the day. I've cut out most (MOST, I say, MOST) of my sugary drink intake, and replaced it with a worrying quantity of water. I've taken to eating my dinner really early- almost as a late-ish lunch- and then not snacking again until I go to sleep. But when I do eat, I eat just what I damn well please, and it's working, it seems. 

   So until it fucks my scale, I refuse to shun pizza, pies or anything that forces itself down my throat like hara-kiri pastry in favour of enjoying myself at least marginally.

  


   Side note, this happened:

   Fair to say, my head asplode. I'm not particularly hip, I'm very much up where the kids today are down with one thing or another, and this whole twitter business is almost as new to me as it is to my mother. ("But the mouse won't reach the little icon, and I've got it up against the keyboard already!") I follow my favourite gods on twitter, and the whole Whedon clan is in there. For you, savy and technologically on trend reader and loyal blog-scoffer, a reply from someone as smoking as Mo Tancharoen may well be just another part of getting up in the morning. I, however, lost all of my shit. All of it, gone. Shitless. She who is Kilo and the frontperson for Lupus awareness and of the golden voice and SPARTACUS and wife to the most deliriously enviable husband; she doth replied.
   I spent several minutes after that rushing my entire blood supply to just my cheeks, looking like a surprised beet for approximately two hours. This is a habit my body has helpfully picked up: at night, my cheeks go from pasty white, to "slipped a bit on the blush there, did you dear?", to dark purple. When I say purple, I mean actual aubergine, I exaggerate not. Imagining Mo Tancharoen sitting there hopefully in her PJ's, slouched over a computer much as I am now was obviously just too much for my delicate system to handle.

   My Word of the Day email today was thusly:

   This seems to me to be a word I can so easily imagine coming from Sheldon's mouth, no? Or perhaps Moffat's Sherlock. I'm still deciding, but it's a wealth of possibilities. I like it.