A culinary experience
Gabriel's idea of a treat is a visit to a restaurant.
Isaac's idea of hell is ... a visit to a restaurant.
While 13-year-old Gabriel loves poring over a menu, carefully planning a culinary experience, 11-year-old Isaac is moaning before we've sat down.
This dilemma has led to us leaving Isaac with my parents on various occasions, and he's really not bothered.
Every now and again, however, I'll insist he comes with us, so the four of us can spend time together.
By the end of the evening I'm usually regretting my decision.
Isaac will normally say he doesn't want anything to eat and then say he's hungry when the food arrives.
And the boy simply can't sit still. He fidgets and fiddles while the three of us are trying to maintain a conversation.
Eventually he will go to the toilet. This will be the first of many such visits. If a visit to a restaurant lasts two hours, Isaac will normally have visited the toilet four times. Please note I said visit and not use.
Isaac uses the toilets as a distraction, somewhere other to be rather than round a dining table.
At least it gives him something to talk about. He has become an expert on the insides of restaurant toilets and will talk at some length about what they have got – toothpaste dispenser, number of hand-dryers – and where the restaurant is letting itself down because of a lack of facilities in the gents.
Meanwhile, Gabriel eats on.
Talking of food, which he normally is, Gabriel bounded in the other night proclaiming he'd had the best packet of crisps ever.
I asked him the obvious question, though expected to quickly regret it: "What flavour was that then son?"
"Spicy Cajun squirrel flavour," he replied.
I was nonplussed by this, but Gabriel went on to describe the flavour.
I was regaling Isaac with this conversation yesterday expecting a similar dumfounded response to my own. I should have known better.
"Nah dad, they're no good, the fish and chip-flavoured crisps are far better."
My education is incomplete. What other wacky flavours of crisps are available now?
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Weather for Sunderland
Friday 10 February 2012
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