Monday, May 03, 2010

nibbles, Moby Dick, noodles






















Lunch in the Grove.

To add to the books-not-finished discussion, I think to myself today: How many times have I started Moby Dick? And how many times have I failed to finish it? I know the first chapter well enough. But Captain Ahab and that damned whale...!

Outside the Chinese take-away in London Road, I see a transparent plastic bag of straw being unloaded from a van. Not straw, I think; rather long, white worms. Then I realize , with some relief, that what is in the bag is neither worms nor straw, but noodles. Pasta, they say was brought to Italy from China by Marco Polo. But some have cast doubt on this theory and advanced the belief that Chinese noodles and Italian pasta evolved separately. And why not?
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1 comment:

Roderick Robinson said...

No problem with Moby Dick. It was one of Somerset Maugham's Ten Novels and Their Authors and, at the time, it seemed fashionable to knock them off more or less in one go.