Skip to main content

Mondays

I was vaguely amused last night by a slew of facebook status updates featuring people moaning about monday being imminent. I couldn't concur, for the last few weeks it's been my only day off. Sometimes not even then (witness intemperate outburst of rage at bank hoidays not so long ago). I'm inclined to like them as a result. Should you work in the catering industry and you're lucky enough to get two days off at the same time they tend to be Sunday/Monday or Wednesday/Thursday (Mon/Tue if your employer is an absolute swine). This is why, as Anthony Bourdain points out, your best bet for going to a restaurant is midweek, the chefs are rested, the horrors of the weekend are at the back of our minds, we're refreshed, we're eager to send you out a nice meal.

Saturday, as I may well have noted elsewhere, is amateur night.

But this is all grossly off topic, the point of this post is to eulogise Monday, the day of rest, when half the chefs in the country have their feet up. When even if you are a poor restaurant lifer with the midweek weekend, you know you're going to get a relatively easy day, go over your stock, a bit of light prep maybe.

And this is a particularly picquant day of rest for me, as it is conceivably the last one I'll have for a loooong time. I'm working cover for the next fortnight after this, so no days off, and at some point in the next 2-3 weeks Mrs Coastaltown will phone me half way through a shift, tell me to drop everything and get my arse home, and an unspecified period after that a small Coastalbaby will rock up. And that will be that.

So. Peace and quiet today it is. And in that spirit I'm going to go and have a nice sit down. Enjoy your Mondays.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed.

I absolutely love trees, and I get quite irate when they get cut down. One of the aspects of life with which I most often find myself most at odds with my fellow man is that I'm not really a fan of the tidy garden. I like to see a bit of biodiversity knocking about the gaff, and to that end I welcome the somewhat overgrown hedge, am pro the bit of lawn left to run riot, and, most of all, very anti cutting down trees. I love the things, habitat, provider of shade, easy on the eye, home to the songbirds that delight the ear at dawn, the best alarm clock of all. To me, cutting a naturally growing tree down is an act of errant vandalism, as well as monumental entitlement, it's been around longer than you. So, this being the case, let me say this. The public outcry over the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap is sentimental, overblown nonsense, and the fact that the two men found guilty of it have been given a custodial sentence is completely insane. Prison? For cutting down a Sycam...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oh! Are you on the jabs?

I have never been a slender man. No one has ever looked at me and thought "oh, he needs feeding up". It's a good job for me that I was already in a relationship by the early noughties as I was never going to carry off the wasted rock star in skinny jeans look. No one has ever mistaken me for Noel Fielding. This is not to say that I'm entirely a corpulent mess. I have, at various times in my life, been in pretty good shape, but it takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of vigilance, particularly in my line of work, where temptation is never far away. Also, I reason, I have only one life to live, so have the cheese, ffs. I have often wondered what it would be like to be effortlessly in good nick, to not have to stop and think how much I really want that pie (quite a lot, obviously, pie is great), but I've long since come to terms with the fact that my default form is "lived-in". I do try to keep things under control, but I also put weight on at the mere menti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inedible

"He says it's inedible" said my front of house manager, as she laid the half-eaten fish and chips in front of me, and instantly I relaxed.  Clearly, I observed, it was edible to some degree. I comped it, because I can't be arsed arguing the toss, and I want to make my front of house's lives as simple as possible. The haddock had been delivered that morning. The fryers had been cleaned that morning. The batter had been made that morning (and it's very good batter, ask me nicely and I'll give you the recipe some time). The fish and chips was identical to the other 27 portions I'd sent out on that lunch service, all of which had come back more or less hoovered up, we have have a (justified, if I do say so myself) very good reputation for our chips. But it was, apparently, "inedible". When it comes to complaints, less is more. If you use a hyperbolic word like that, I'll switch off, you've marked yourself as a rube, a chump, I'm not g...
Post a Comment
Read more