Name this dish

I say!

No-one bothered to enter the quiz in my last post - at what temperature will a thermometer read exactly the same figure for both Celsius and Fahrenheit? Well, the answer is -40 degrees.

Anyway, here's another question. Mrs M and myself had a meal in the Hong Kong Restaurant - close by the Mount Soche Hotel.


Can anyone guess what my dish (shown above) was? Quite nice taste.

Well, as you may know, I've been trying to take my mind off cricket for a couple of weeks. The series between Australia and India is underway, and hasn't it been enjoyable watching India get the upper hand over their opponents. And to think - it's only one more week to go before the start of the Twenty20 series in Antigua, where each player in the winning side will earn $1,000,000. Can't wait.

In the meantime, I've been trying to find some non-cricket books to read, and hasn't it been difficult? I read Terra Incognita, by Sara Wheeler, about life at the South Pole, where it seems that the main topic of conversation turns out to be cricket. I even considered reading Bayonets to Lhasa, by Peter Fleming, about the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, but I expect that the Tommies would have spent their spare time clearing a pitch for the great game, even halfway up the Himalaya.

What a writer Sara is. None of this "It was on the occasion of my fortieth birthday" middle-aged angst for her. Here she is writing about nicotine withdrawal "Smoking is the leitmotif of polar expeditions. Shakleton understood the hardship of tobacco famine, and when he arrived at Elephant Island to rescue his men he threw bags of it ashore before he landed. The stranded men had been smoking penguin feathers, and one of them, the proud posessor of two pipes, had tried to smoke the wood on one in the bowl of another."

Here she is again describing her return to dear old Blighty. "I arrived back in London at the beginning of April. All the plants on my roof terrace were dead, but the spring sun was shining weakly through the tame northern clouds. As I began to pick up the threads of my life, the Frank Hurley quotation I had stuck on the kitchen wall loomed increasingly large in my imagination. 'After life in the vastness of a vacant continent,' it said 'civilisation seemed disappointlingly narrow, cramped, superficial and empty.' I say, it sounds like what Hotboy must feel like each time he emerges from his hit after a marathon meditation session.

Anyway, I have given up tryingto avoid cricket. My next book to read will be Dickie Bird's White cap and balls, about his life as a cricket umpire. Dickie wqas a batsman's friend. He didn't like giving batsmen out, and went though not a little anguish every time he had to raise his finger. The reason is obvious - he wanted the great game to continue forever, and each batsman given out only hastened the inevitable lifting of the bails.

MM III