Meat. Meat. Meat.

This has been a week of meat, starting with an epic bacon-based tabehodai on Friday night (tabehodai is where you can eat and drink as much as you want for a limited period) and culminating last night with a visit to our favourite yakiniku restaurant in Okayama. Yakiniku is where you sit at a table with a circular flame grill at the centre and are given thinly sliced, marinated pieces of meat and vegetables. You cook them yourself, BBQ style, dip them in a sauce and then eat. The quality of these places is quite variable, but the best restaurants seem to be those where you are given charcoal grills, rather than a gas flame, on which to cook. So essentially it’s the difference between a charcoal BBQ and a gas BBQ.

There are many Japanese dishes (although yakiniku itself is of Korean origin) which are cooked at the table and which involve some element of work by the eater. I like this way of eating as it is very sociable and allows you to cook things according to your own personal taste. Also, there’s something about cooking over an open flame that will always be fun. Maybe it’s the caveman thing.

“Stop going on about your tights” was K-Chan’s* instruction last night. I will stop soon, but am really luxuriating in having warm legs. Why have I been missing out on this for 29.9 years? On inspecting myself in the mirror, I had hoped to see ballerina calves staring back at me. I guess in some ways they were kind of flattering compared to bare legs (the legs of tall skinny men always look ridiculous), but tights are no cure for knobbly knees. Now that’s it. I will say no more about the tights!

*The Lady took issue with me calling her “The Lady”, both for historical blog reasons (someone else had been called “The Lady” on a previous blog…) and possibly also for the Thatcher connotations. So I have decided to call her K-Chan. Chan is an affectionate term and whilst it’s often used by small kids to their friends, people also use it for things like Hello Kitty, who is referred to as “Kitty Chan”. So K-Chan it is. Unless she tells me not to. Apparently I’m not allowed to call her The Shrike in a reference to B.S. Johnson. There are good reasons for this also.