The Salad and the Wood.

So last Wednesday I had a meeting with my supervisor which went as well as it ever does which is to say it went fairly badly. He reiterated that he 'doesn't have the time' to do it, in which case I do rather wonder why we've been putting one another through what is presumably a mutual hell for the last four and a half years.but there you go. And that was probably the kindest bit too.

To cheer myself up I had arranged to have lunch with my friend A. She had suggested meeting at Soonny and Vito's and I had provided myself with a Google map of the route from Universty Gardens to S & V's. Apparently a 15 minute walk. I walked for a lot longer than 15 minutes and wound up on the Great Western Road which was nowhere near where I wnted to be. It didn't help that it was pouring with rain so that my map became more and more of a sodden little mess the longer time went on. And not only did I miss my turning on the way there, once I had got myself back onto the right road I walked right past the place because I was looking for it on the wrong side of the road. Me and the sense of direction, we have a really special relationship. An especially bad one as it happens. 

Anyway I was only 15 minutes late, which is really bad, but it could have been muc much worse,  and A said she hadn't been there long herself so it wasn't too dreadful and we settled down to look at the menu. I had soup and a sandwich and A ordered a goats cheese tartlet with salad. The soup and the andwich were great. Halfway through her salad A found a lump of wood on her plate. 

Now this is not ideal, and I'd like to think that any self respecting catering establishment would be horrified to realise they are serving up bits of tree with their green leaves, but it has to be said that the response from the waitress at  S & V's left quite a lot to be desired. When A poited out the strange interloper on her plate and said she wasn't sure what it was, the waitress declared herself equally baffled and seemed more than ready to leave it at that. When A pressed the point with  the comment that she was a bit concerned to find it on her plate the waitress offered to gert rid of it for her. Which she did by taking the plate, taking the piece of wood off it, and giving A the plate back. I honestly could not believe wat I was seeing. A again pointed out that  she was reluctant to eat the rest of her food without at least knowing what the wood was and from whence it came, to which the reply was  'Well I don't know. I don't work in the kitchen I'm just a waitress'.

At this point I suggested, possibly with just the slightest degree of edge in my voice, that she might like to go and ask someone who did work in the kitchen, a notion which seemed to strike her as completely off the wall, but to be fair she did and came back with  he message that 'chef didn't know where it had come from either, he thought it might have been in the order from the supplier who sends the leaves'. She added that if A liked she could choose something else from the menu and she wouldn't be charged for the salad. 

(Thinks: what sort of 'chef' chucks salad leaves onto a plate with such carelessness that he fails to notice the presence of a block of wood about half the size of a thumb?)

It will come as no surprise I'm sure to hear that we departed without dessert, lovely thought their cakes looked,  and walked through the rain, but along the river, to the Yarn Cake where there are no stray pieces of timber in the cake and there is the added advantage of being surrounded by beautiful yarn which you can purchase should the fancy take you. The fancy certainly took me and I bought two skeins of yarn, one of which is for a Christmas present for someone else so doesn't count. I was also given, by pre-arrangement,  3 skeins of wonderful yarn by A which she no longer wanted to keep, and which is for a specific project I had planned to start in March. As things have fallen out I could start it much earlier than that, but more of this another time.