.. if he’s got a cold when I ring, but he doesn’t want to leave Rotorua as the few friends he has left in the world are there or thereabouts. Maria and I intend to pay him a visit in April when we’re in New Zealand for a short holiday, but we’re not going to be anywhere for very long so it will be a fleeting visit – not to mention that Maria’s not keen on the bad egg smell either.
Despite it being important to me that I rang my father before his operation I still managed to forget. Luckily he survived and I managed to find out where he was recuperating and spoke to him on the phone. He clearly bore no grudge about my not calling him before the operation but his hearing aids were playing up so he couldn’t hear me very well. Otherwise he sounded in unusually high spirits, probably something to do with young nurses attending to his every need, I suspect.
So, I was lucky. No eternal shame and guilt - this time. I blame my infernal procrastination ganging up with my failing memory.
Speaking of procrastination, I still haven’t printed out this year’s New Year Resolutions. Actually, now I think of it I haven’t printed out last year’s resolutions yet either! I guess that might tell me that they couldn’t have been that important, but it goes to show that unless I write a list of things to be done they usually don’t get done, and that includes writing the list in the first place.

I obviously have a few failings but I’m generally a pretty loyal kinda guy. I was loyal to the ritual of finding a satisfactory cup of coffee right up to and beyond the point where it nearly killed me for instance and I’m loyal to my favourite restaurants in the same way. This restaurant-train of thought was provoked by watching a magazine-style show on telly tonight called World’s Best Restaurants.
There’s no doubt about it – the three restaurants we saw certainly looked spectacular. In this episode there was a Spanish restaurant in Spain, a French one in Japan and another French one in Las Vegas. (I say the last two were French because they are owned by famous French chefs/restaurateurs and their menus are to all intents French but with minor variations to accommodate local tastes and produce).
They all currently held three Michelin stars and the Spanish one had earned three stars for several consecutive years and was booked up for eleven months in advance, if you could get a booking at all.
I imagine a restaurant with such a reputation can’t afford to have a bad day. But what about their clientele? What if you’ve been waiting for a year for the day when you finally get to go to the restaurant of your dreams and you wake up in the morning feeling a bit off? Not off enough to cancel for Gawd’s sake, but bad enough to make you feel like you might’ve if the restaurant wasn’t so damned exclusive.
Then, when you’re in the limo on the way to the restaurant, you start feeling more iffy and you escalate to quite a bit squiffy. And when you’re ushered into the tastefully decorated dining room by an obsequious/ disdainful Maître d, the smell of the gorgeously refined and picturesquely presented food starts making you feel darn right nauseous.
The fact is that you’re not going to enjoy the food as much as you should no matter how brilliantly it’s conceived and executed and the very fact that the restaurant in question is so exclusive and has such a fantastic reputation and it was so difficult to get a table all conspire to make this the most miserable experience of all your gastronomic life.
Your personal perceptions will not affect the restaurant in question’s reputation by and large, unless you happen to projectile vomit onto Rupert Murdoch sitting at the next table celebrating his latest erection with Jerry Hall.
Very fine and exclusive restaurants are above the behaviours of their usually very fine and exclusive clientele, but it does raise the question about the perils of being a food critic in much the same way as I worry about the sensibilities of theatre and movie critics. I don’t think I’d want to get to the point where I was critiquing the finest foods available from the desensitised position of eating the most celebrated fare every single day. Maybe that's just me.
Anyway, I mentioned my loyalty, which extends even unto restaurants. We’re in the habit of going to a local Italian-style eatery in my favoured suburb of Camberwell, to the point that I’m on a friendly banter basis with one of the long-term staff there. These days we don’t get there more than a couple of times a year, but in all the years we’ve been going there, (more than twenty years in my case), very little has changed with either the décor or the menu.
On this occasion we had a waiter with whom I was unfamiliar and who unhelpfully mumbled the list of specials for the day, but nothing especially to alarm us at this stage.
That was until the food came out. Maria’s salmon was a miserable dry thing perched in the middle of her plate and looking unsubstantial even for an entrée.
My special of the day squid pasta in chilli tomato sauce looked and tasted as if it had been in a warmer for several hours and the squid (when I could find it) was hard and rubbery. I could’ve got better at a pub.
Our friend’s crumbed pork cutlet on the other hand was absolutely enormous and hung dauntingly over the edges of his plate. I didn’t ask how it tasted but it looked as if it had been pan fried for all of thirty seconds a side.
Later Maria said she didn’t feel like going back there and, loyalty notwithstanding, I sadly concurred. Life is too short after all.