What I Cooked Last Night

Or, in this case, non-fictional: At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-past six there were no orders, and we used this time to polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other odd jobs. Then the grand turmoil of the day started - the dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little while, just to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation was that a hundred or two hundred people were demanding individually different meals of five or six courses, and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and serve them and clean up the mess afterwards; anyone with experience of catering will know what that means. And at this time when the work was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a number of them were drunk. I could write pages about the scene without giving a true idea of it. The chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering...

I was 'visiting' Facebook (do people 'visit' books in the library? of course not - ridiculous) and it suggested - or even commanded, if the imperative mood is what Facebook intended - that I " Find friends from different parts of your life. " Among the list of 'friends' Facebook suggested I 'find' from different 'parts' of my life was my sister. I don't need to find my sister. I know where she is already. * A few weeks ago Facebook listed on the stock exchange after ridiculous valuations fuelled by near-hysteria. It was a bad idea to invest, but many thought it was a good one. That misapprehension lasted what, two weeks? Maybe some still think it's a good idea. We saw this twelve years ago, but they never learn. "It's not the same," everyone said, "The dotcom boom was different." I wasn't talking about the boom part, I said. They're always different, like tulips. But how they turn out is...

I went out to the letterbox and fished out the mail. There was an insurance bill. It was heavy. I tore it open. A book fell out. Terms and conditions. One hundred and seventy-seven pages. Gloss cover in heavy stock. Perfect bound. Insane. They don't call it terms and conditions any more. They call it a 'product disclosure statement'. With capitals. To make it sound important. Now, let me see. What could they have usefully fitted between the front and back covers? The Postman Always Rings Twice , by James Cain? You'd get that in almost twice. Albert Camus' The Stranger ? Conrad's Heart of Darkness ? Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby ? James' Washington Square ? Animal Farm by George Orwell? Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy ? Easy. Most of those novels have chapters, of course, meaning plenty of blank pages; but this product disclosure statement just ploughed along, type falling on page after page like a concertinaed train wreck. ...