But I had a conviction - possibly delusional - that if I thought hard enough I could communicate with VR. Wordlessly.
Colette ended her comment to this post:
And if you are able to communicate wordlessly with VR, please let us know.
I responded:
Should telepathy occur you'll be the first to know.
Last night VR, who has been following these exchanges with mild amusement, reminded me such telepathy has already happened.
Thirty years ago I was invited by the London magazine, Theatregoer, to become its restaurant critic - an evening job that didn’t interfere with my daytime editorship of a logistics magazine. Sounds like a dream commission doesn't it? It wasn't.
Go out for a normal meal and you spend the evening eating, drinking, observing and chatting. As a restaurant critic you have to fit in the surreptitious taking of copious notes, correctly spelled. Harassment descends and enjoyment is eroded. And there's a further distraction.
VR accompanied me to help cover up my suspicious note-taking. Also to test more choices of what was on offer at the restaurant. Very quickly I learnt to choose two quite separate meals and be prepared to ditch the one I really preferred. Quite uncannily VR always chose the same (as yet unannounced) meal I had in mind, forcing me to switch from, say, Escalope de veau à la Zagreb (see pic) to Filet de sole bonne femme. With subsequent adjustment to the choice of wine.
Does this qualify as telepathy? In fact this tendency still continues when we eat out normally. Although by now we acknowledge it laughingly.
OK, Colette?
Wife and I think similarly after 60 years (next year) of marriage. Telepathy? More like synchronicity, I guess.
ReplyDeleteAvus: I was a bit dubious about synchronicity, thinking that it meant two or more events occurring in some sort of harmony. In fact it turns out to be what the French would call un faux ami, a French word which resembles a word in, say, English but which means something unexpected. Example: Grand (in English: impressive, in French: big).
ReplyDeleteSynchronicity: The coincidences in a person's life of two or more events which seem to be linked in significance but which have no causal connection.
Telepathy: Communication that supposedly occurs directly from one mind to another without use of known senses. "supposedly" is inserted to show there are doubts whether this actually happens.
The point I was trying to make is that VR and I have widely varying tastes (she's pro-cucumber, I'm anti- in a big way; broad beans it's the other way round) and yet in the comparatively limited range of a menu we tend to come together. When we're eating out at our own expense this doesn't matter; when I was trying assess a restaurant's competence a wider range of dishes gave a fairer result..
More than okay! The only thing that keeps me from giving this post 5 stars is that you neglected to name the wines. Seriously, it sounds like you and VR have a lovely marriage and are effortlessly in tune. I also enjoyed discovering that you have been a food critic.
ReplyDeleteSince you asked...
ReplyDeleteThe Burgundy was a Richebourg from the Cotes de Nuit. It was in remarkably good condition given it was 49 years old. The best Burgundy I've tasted but not the best red wine. My father was a Bordeaux enthusiast and I have routinely drunk great clarets from Bordeaux's "big five" (Ch. Latour, Ch Haut- Brion, Ch Lafite, Ch Margaux, etc) from his cellar.
My host thus had to pay £560 ($709) for his bottle, an impulse buy at a lunch to celebrate my last day in his service before my retirement. That sounds a lot but in fact he got away with murder. I've just checked the the list of Berry Bros & Rudd, St James St, London (the Queen's wine supplier) where a case of six 1999 Richebourgs can set you back £34,500 - that's £5750 a bottle.
But I didn't want to rain on your parade with all these ridiculous figures. I was charmed with your pursuit of bourbon and I hope very soon you get to taste that 28-year-old Van Winkle, preferably paid for by Donald Trump and with him watching