The Best, for Less

19 November 2011 at 11:31 pm (Food, Greece, Places, Plinky Prompts, Wellbeing)
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Sandwich bars don't have a reputation for being posh eateries. Swing by an Everest, though (they're all over Greece), and you won't care about posh again. Too delicious for nitpicking.

Chachi’s Sandwich Bar

Everest redefined the tradition of the 'quickie bite', taking it from cheese and spinach pies and sausage rolls (greasy and occasionally dodgy) to full meals, with a lot of room to go healthy and with more than decent prices. Where else can you get a filling meal, a dessert and a drink, and still keep the bill in the single digits?

There are traditional-style pies and ready-made cold sandwiches, to be sure, but the great strength of Everest is the completely customisable toasted sandwiches. Basic white bread rolls, but the choice of fillings is entirely up to the customer's whim, and I all staff have had to deal with some pretty daft combinations. I'm not sure if I've ever had the exact same sandwich twice myself, and believe me, I've had hundreds. (Nothing better after a night of clubbing, to keep the post-drinking munchies at bay.)

In more recent years, they have introduced customisable salads as well – pick a (sealed) bowl of greens – spinach and rocket, or a medley – and add your choice of extras and dressing. I used to have a lot of such salads for dinner when I worked evenings. Spinach and rocket, with roast chicken fillet chunks and honey-mustard dressing, or with red beans, sweetcorn, diced peppers and a vinaigrette. If I was extra hungry or it had been a particularly nasty day, I could add a slice of carrot or marble cake. And their 'chococaramel con panna' (hot chocolate with caramel syrup and whipped cream) was comfort in a paper cup in any but the hottest weather.

My husband, who was not yet my husband at the time and enjoyed ping-ponging emails with me during the hours of low activity in the evenings, never stopped being bemused at how little I had to pay for my dinners, compared to how many things I piled into either my salad or my sandwich. All until he came to visit and had the experience himself. It is really the only way.

I miss Everest. I haven't been to one since August 2010, and I plan to indulge fully when I find myself in Athens again.

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No More Heroes?

19 January 2011 at 9:18 pm (Music, People, Rants, Reading, Religion, YouTube)
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Hugely, obscenely misunderstood song. It’s not about nihilism and ‘the age of heroes is past’. It is about calling for more heroes, for a way out of mediocrity. ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ If your English is not good enough to understand the words, don’t critique.

Excuse the fit of pique; I recently came across a series of articles on rock music collected from a Christian youth magazine I used to read. I hadn’t seen them in a few years, and only came across them on my last visit home, while sorting out books to take back with me. I remember reading them when I was a teenager and being rather unconvinced. As an adult, I can fully grasp the extent of their bias and ignorance, and both are monumental. Really, proof that one should leave well alone if they don’t know their subject well enough. Ignorance is no excuse for misinformation. (Yes, I know it happens all the time, but don’t get me started along that track.)

The heart of the matter, however, is that people need heroes. Rather, they need role models, and in the absence of heroes, they’ll opt for antiheroes or villains. So, whatever happened to the heroes in the 21st century?

The short answer is: we’ve grown closer to them, and they no longer seem larger than life, like they used to. With the media covering every corner of the planet, it is easy to find out nearly everything about those who are everything one wants to be, and that makes them appear just human, regardless of their glamour levels. It’s hard to imagine legends of divinity about someone that you know even where they stop for coffee.

It’s not the heroes’ fault if they fail to fill the boots we prefabricate for them. It’s up to us and what we want from our lives. If you want 15 minutes of fame and aim to go on Big Brother to get it, you should be prepared to bitch and whore for attention, and eventually to be shoved aside when the next crop comes up. If you want to be Sir Alan Sugar when you grow up, be prepared to be treated the way he treats his apprentices on the way. We all have a big goal, but it doesn’t matter when we reach it, or even if we reach it at all. What does matters is the how; the journey there and the choices we make along the way. Because the goal is one moment and the journey is, you know, one’s life.

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Looker and Thinker

16 November 2010 at 8:56 pm (Insight, Personality, Plinky Prompts, Psychology, Self)
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The feud between Athena and Aphrodite continues. Am I greedy for wanting to reconcile them?
I am in two minds about this shot

I know, I know. This is one of those either/or prompts. You can’t have both. One of the cases where the ‘what if’ situation is actually more restrictive than real life, where there are almost as many bright, beautiful people as stereotypes, for either side.

Stereotypes. The key word. If they were true, then all beautiful people are at best ignorant, because maintaining their looks takes up so much time and effort that there’s none left for the cultivation of their brains; while smart people are such only because they are so socially inept that they have nothing else to do but learn things.

As usual, the majority of cases falls somewhere in the middle. (Bell curve, anyone?) I’ve always been a well-adjusted geek, myself; decently looking, despite my struggle against piling on weight and my rather shabby wardrobe, but a loner by nature, reticent with people I didn’t know well, and quietly competitive. School did matter, and I did well enough to be rather intimidating – not the kind you’d like to sit next to at tests.

So, which side would I want reinforced, if I had to choose only one? I wasn’t sure when I was young, and I’m still not sure now.

There are days when I’d do anything to be the kind of woman who turns heads in the street, who gets noticed just by being there. I mark off those days as midlife crisis episodes, when my insecurity hits the red and demands reassurance that I’m not over the hill, that all is not over with me yet, that I can still be attractive. The kind of thinking that, under different circumstances, would leave me wide open to the lure of an affair.

There are other days, more of the bad hair variety, when I wish that, since I don’t have the looks anyway, I could still be a real genius, at least have a brain for something that’s in demand, like science, technology, or business, so I could get a stellar career doted with accolades and/or more money than I’d know what to do with, instead of a poor fool of an all-around humanities student. That’s my competitive side, the one that thrives on challenges, wanting out and bowed to.

On either extreme, I’m unhappy. Both are wishes for other people to pay attention to me, permission to other people to regulate my happiness. Wanting more of anything is fine, working for it is admirable, but I can’t help feeling it would be for the wrong reasons. I want both, and I know I should be wanting neither.

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Required Reading

10 November 2010 at 10:31 pm (Britain, Education, Insight, Plinky Prompts, Reading)
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The manners of children

I admit it, I’m biased, because Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess is my favourite children’s book of all time. I got it as a New Year’s present when I was exactly the young heroine’s age, and identified with her very strongly. I think it was the work that started my interest in Victorian culture that has accompanied me ever since.

The tale itself is not particularly complicated. The heroine, Sara, starts by leading a life of luxury at her London boarding school, fawned on by everyone, from the headmistress to the staff and students, thanks to her father’s wealth. Instead of being spoilt rotten, she is actually kind and perfectly mannered, as well as smart and imaginative. She makes friends left and right, which triggers jealousy among those she displaces. When her father loses his fortune in a friend’s disastrous investment and dies, Sara is turned into a servant and worked mercilessly for the barest survival essentials. Instead of despairing, though, she lives more and more in her imagination, maintains her manners, and perseveres in her studies. Eventually, she is rewarded when her father’s friend, who in the meantime has reclaimed and multiplied his fortune and has been searching for her, moves next door and the truth inevitably comes to light, removing Sara from the boarding school of hypocrisy and misery for good.

It is quite a girly book, and there is no character for boy readers to identify with (those will have to opt for the other, lesser Burnett classic, Little Lord Fauntleroy). The message, though, is applicable to all children: generosity, politeness, and hard work can pull you through misery and into a better life. A kind word or deed, however small, can touch a life in ways one can hardly imagine. Today’s children no longer dream of being royalty, or even like royalty. But among the general rudeness and laziness, a read like this could very well get some of them, those who really want to do well, sitting up and thinking that standing out among their peers is not all bad.

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Family, Revamped

7 November 2010 at 9:25 pm (Family, Parenting, Plinky Prompts, Politics, Rants, Relationships, Women)
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Legislating family matters: You’re doing it wrong.
I promise, we did not adopt a child…

I thought long and hard before even pointing at legislation I’d want changed. Everyone thinks they can legislate better than the specialists themselves, and sometimes they’re right (because legislators are only human themselves and what looks like a good idea at a time may very well turn out to be a big mistake). But nobody can be right on everything, so I felt I had to pick my battles and concentrate on one primary cause.

Being the kind of person who wants to do right by everything and everyone, that was very hard. It’s incredible how much effort it needs to say, ‘This is an admirable cause, but it is not my cause.’ But if I had to choose only one law to reform, it would have to be the criteria for adoption.

The issue is close to home, because I could have had to deal with the adoption nightmare myself, having remained childless until the age of 35 and thus not knowing if I would ever be able to have biological children. The ordeal of an acquaintance, who was denied on grounds of age when she was barely past 30, only compounds my interest. Both she and I are lucky: she fell pregnant with twins soon after she gave up all hope, and I had my gorgeous boy without a hitch at 36. Not everyone is like us.

I feel that prospective adoptive parents are grilled way too harshly on issues of finances, health, and age. The vast majority of children are born into families less than financially stable (really, who is financially stable today? not even the filthy rich, it seems). People fall ill, even with life-threatening conditions, and an orphan is in the same predicament whether biological or adoptive. Additionally, I do feel that there are extremes in the realm of biological parenthood – teenagers simply don’t have the necessary resilience, physical, mental, or emotional, to bring up children, and the menopause is a sign that the childbearing years are over, not a cue to go for IVF – but the restrictions imposed on prospective adopters are ridiculous. With more and more women waiting until after 30 to attempt a first pregnancy (ironically, in order to be more financially secure), it makes no sense to deny them the right to adopt if nature won’t cooperate.

And don’t even get me started on the hoops a single parent or a gay couple would have to jump through in order to adopt. Most of them would be denied even the chance to foster.

I’m convinced that, if all one needed in order to adopt was a job, no potentially fatal pre-existing health conditions, a healthy age difference between adopter and adoptee (dictated by the societal trend of the time), and, okay, a partner as well, I can give you that, because single parenthood is not a walk in the park… well, then there would be much less bureaucracy and fewer abortions, geriatric IVFs or surrogacies, all of which strike me as – to varying degrees – unnatural. Not to mention it would cut right through the illegal paid adoption industry – because without the law’s support, people will just go outlaw.

But then I’m a simple woman who would, in all probability, have been turned down as a poor old hag, what do I know?

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