Cooked food in sushi restaurant shock

Friday 13th, viewed as a very lucky day in France, especially if one has had the foresight to open an account with Currencies Direct, turned out to be very unlucky for the thousands of creatures who I found stealing my grass seed yesterday.  Earlier in the week after the completion of our long-awaited connection to mains drainage, I had carefully prepared and raked at no small personal cost I might add, I still have the blister, an area at the bottom of the garden and re populated it with grass seed. Yesterday I discovered this grand larceny, theft on a huge scale, organised crime at its most efficient, although technically I knew where it had all gone it was still theft and I am sure the Reverend Jeff will have a Commandment that covers that.

Ants had fastidiously collected almost every seed from a 30 metre square area and piled them into 4 nests, one of which I photographed as evidence either for a police prosecution if any of the perpetrators survived and can be brought to justice, or in my defence of any charges of mass annihilation (genantocide?) that may be pressed by animal rights groups in the future, or maybe even one day for this column if I am really short of a photo.

This “ant”agonistic behavior had to be stamped on before it got out of hand, but stamping on my newly raked area was going to make a real mess so I had to resort to chemical warfare in the shape of Nippon Ant Killer Powder. Now I have had to replace the seed at some cost. Who will pay? I am now officially anti ant. I bet their leader was called Adam or Atom.

After a miserable day yesterday we decided to celebrate sprog 1’s birthday a little late because he was actually 19 in March. It was his choice as to where to go so we headed out to Le Rouret to Le Saj an eastern restaurant specialising in Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese food to indulge said sprog and sprog 2’s craving for sushi. Personally I like my food cooked so have never gone with the modern fad but reports were positive. The Beef Penang (cooked) and Thai Green Curry (hot and cooked) were both very good. I think sprog 1 was happy with his choice of venue and food judging by this picture, although the banana split he is tucking into looked distinctly cooked.

Is that something cooked in there?

Talking of cooking (or in the case of sushi, not cooking) I was sent out during the week by that nice lady decorator to the English Book Centre in Valbonne to see if I could get a Dinosaur Cook Book. The shop assistant looked at me blankly and after a few seconds said “Do you mean the Dinah Shore cookbook?” which I admit was a bit of a relief, I wondered what she was up to.

And talking of rock dinosaurs, tonight I should have been in Cleveland Ohio. One of my clients, Steve Marriott although passing away in 1991 is being inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame for his contribution to The Small Faces. The Faces are also being inducted at the same ceremony and Rod Stewart was going to sing a couple of Steve’s Small Faces songs but he has pulled out with a sore throat, but sadly the organisers never bothered to inform the estate representative (me) and I only found out yesterday in a chance conversation with Jerry Shirley, drummer in Humble Pie, another band Steve Marriott fronted when it was too late to travel. I shall have to wait until the HBO programme in May to see what happens. It will be interesting to see who collects Steve’s gong given the interesting Marriott family politics.

Chris France