Blasphemy

Any restaurant that puts leaflets on its tables telling customers “How to enjoy” its food has a problem, or at the very least a lack of confidence.

We do enjoy being told what to do of course - filling one’s belly on the tit of authority does sooth the 'soul'. However, stuffing your gut at an all you can eat Taybarn’s buffet is a bleak, soulless affair despite any command to enjoy it.

Now I don’t mean to be a snob, which of course I am, but I did spend Saturday lunch time boggling at obese families shovelling their week’s calorific quota onto a single plate of bloated slop and marvelling at anorexic waifs making confused points of nibbling exclusively on salad leaves at an all you can eat restaurant.

There were ordinary families of course. And if I could be so bold as to count ourselves amongst them, then we might assume that they’d rather not have been noticed.

Not somewhere we’ll be rushing back to.

Anyway, I felt I should run early yesterday morning to take advantage of the empty Easter Sunday roads and burn off the Taybarn calories before girding myself for the considerably more palatable onslaught that is the mother-in-law’s Sunday lunch.

The route took me through the back of the church yard, past the arched main entrance where ordinarily I would scarper at full tilt down the steep path to the main gate.

I didn’t expect to literally run into the vicar who was stood welcoming his congregation to the early Easter service.

He was a pleasant, somewhat eager twenty something – bright eyed and bouncy enough for him to skip aside in his flowing white robe to let me past without a serious collision.

“Shit, Christ! Sorry!” I blurted out.

He didn’t even flinch at my blasphemy and gave me a big, holy smile and said “No problem mate, enjoy your run!”

He had Nike trainers on under his robe.

Nice bloke.