A token post
Feb. 27th, 2020 08:28 pmThe more often I post here, the more I feel that I have things worth posting; the more I don't post, the less what I have seems worth the saying. Right now, I don't feel as if I'm posting very much, and things I might post about feel either trivial, or irrelevant. Using the 'Archive' tab reassures me a little about the frequency of posting. though not about the quality: maybe it only feels as if I have nothing interesting to say, but then again, maybe it only feels as if what I have to say is ever interesting. This is not a bid for reassurance: if I've learned one thing here, it's that the posts other people respond to are rarely the ones I would expect. Never mind. Onward ...
We dined last Saturday in Sunderland, with cousins: three brothers, now living in different parts of the south, who periodically meet in Sunderland to watch football, for the uncertain pleasure of the game itself and the certain pleasure of family. Numbers vary: last time was just the youngest brother, his partner,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
durham_rambler and me, but this time we were a larger group: three brothers, one wife, one partner and a couple of grandsons. We would have been even more numerous, if all had gone to plan, and this was why the decision had been taken to transfer from our usual restaurant on the sea front to another, much larger one just round the corner. But two separate parties, the families of the two sisters who are the daighters of one of the cousins, had had motoring mishaps: nobosy was harmed, but one car had simply died on the motorway north of Bath, the other had burst a tyre heading south from Crail, where the family had been spending hald-term week. This as less decisive, but had delayed them long enough that they had missed the match, lost their tempers and decided to go straight home. Since the only person I had known would be present was the cousin who had written to invite us, my disappointment at this is entirely retrospective. We were as large a group as I could converse with, anyway. The restaurant was fine: we had been there on a previous visit when it was severely overstretched, took a ridiculous length of time to bring very mediocre pizza, and tried to compensate us with dree bottles of wine. It was still large and quite noisy, but the food arrived at a reasonable pace and was much better than I remembered.
The main point, though, is the company, and we talked. About family and holidays, about music and the inadequacies of planning departments, about having to replace electrinic devices: "Did you know we'd been struck by lightning?" asked R.
We dined last Saturday in Sunderland, with cousins: three brothers, now living in different parts of the south, who periodically meet in Sunderland to watch football, for the uncertain pleasure of the game itself and the certain pleasure of family. Numbers vary: last time was just the youngest brother, his partner,
durham_rambler and me, but this time we were a larger group: three brothers, one wife, one partner and a couple of grandsons. We would have been even more numerous, if all had gone to plan, and this was why the decision had been taken to transfer from our usual restaurant on the sea front to another, much larger one just round the corner. But two separate parties, the families of the two sisters who are the daighters of one of the cousins, had had motoring mishaps: nobosy was harmed, but one car had simply died on the motorway north of Bath, the other had burst a tyre heading south from Crail, where the family had been spending hald-term week. This as less decisive, but had delayed them long enough that they had missed the match, lost their tempers and decided to go straight home. Since the only person I had known would be present was the cousin who had written to invite us, my disappointment at this is entirely retrospective. We were as large a group as I could converse with, anyway. The restaurant was fine: we had been there on a previous visit when it was severely overstretched, took a ridiculous length of time to bring very mediocre pizza, and tried to compensate us with dree bottles of wine. It was still large and quite noisy, but the food arrived at a reasonable pace and was much better than I remembered.The main point, though, is the company, and we talked. About family and holidays, about music and the inadequacies of planning departments, about having to replace electrinic devices: "Did you know we'd been struck by lightning?" asked R.
