breaking bread

Saturday, lisa went to the cinema to be upset by the Kite Runner while I stayed at home with George and made a half hearted attempt to try to catch up with some work (editing a pilot idea for a video podcast I'd like to try to convince the natural history museum to fund)... of course George made it impossible to do anything much apart from play with him. Gillian popped round later which meant I could legitimately abandon trying to do anything!

On sunday we'd planned to go to see a Mummer's play being performed outside the Globe theature. in the event, several other people also decided to go, and we couldn't get near the action. instead, Lisa and I, Sam, Debs and Mark and Raoul ended up drinking in a turkish resturant as a prelude to going back to Sam's and drinking some more.

It was supposed to be another meeting of the South london Food club - this time with a French theme. however, it ended up as a way to use up the vaguely french leftovers from Christmas (centred around Sam's Cassole - not sure of the spelling there).

Most of us didn't have time to do much cooking, so ended up just bringing French wine - so the evening went well anyway (I did make some oddly shaped bread - but left it rising for far too long).

With Raoul there, as well as Gareth and Ian Tokelove, the evening ended by turning into a philosophical discussion on the nature and nurture of human sexual attraction - all kicked off by Raoul and I talking about the prospects for eternal life, and Gareth describing his meeting with his new thai girlfriend (who he spotted accross a crowded train station) and her subsequent inability to accept that he'd arranged to spend new year's eve at a fetish club without her - and with two other women (Sam and Jane).

my take on the sexual attraction thing was basically that if women are there to have children, then men are there to give women a safe environment to do it - and that when we learned to make bread, we men basically made ourselves redundant. by planting crops and making bread, we removed the need to be hunters, and allowed ourselves to create completely safe environments for our families. Unfortunately, sexual attraction is instinctively based, so it still leaves us looking for someone who can fill those old roles.

That means that modern men have two options: either continually look for trouble so that they can show off to women about how good they are at rescuing them from it - which kind of defeats the object. Or - to become nerds - to try to compete on intelectual grounds -showing their prowess at solving mental rather than physical problems and hope that women will somehow understand from that that if a sabre -toothed tiger did come along we'd be able to deal with it.

Neither solution really works.

Meanwhile, Jane's son, Nathan honed the art of the con by making a series of wagers with members of the party... I did help him out with a couple of pieces of advice:

1) Let the punter win the first 10p bet
2) then say "let's make it interesting" and raise the stakes.

he seemed to get the idea fairly quickly.