mackerel and cabbage

london 6.02pm 9C dry saturday 2019

9.33pm 6C

this morning i was at victoria station, or rather outside it at about 10am. it was strangely quiet and peaceful. hardly anyone about, usually it would be thronging with travellers with luggage. i had overshot my stop. had wanted the stop just before this one to go to the post office. but since i am here, i decided to go to the food hall nearby to use their toilet. the station itself have its main toilet but it is under repair, and so also the side toilet . they have put up lots of temporary cubicles housing the toilets like portacabins, but it was on the other side of the station. i figured the food hall must have toilets and so it proved. and the toilets were much nicer than the portacabin ones.

there is a roti blatta place on the mezzanine floor of this food hall, but it was not doing business. a sign says the roti might take a bit of time and to ask how long it will be. i figured the roti man was not around. in malaysia, roti is a breakfast food, and you will find the cook busy making it early in the morning, but it is impossible to ask anyone to work so early in the morning on a regular basis, especially as here there are not that critical mass of customers wanting to eat roti blatta so early in the morning. the prices reflect this, in that in malaysia roti is very cheap, but here they are like very expensive, in the £9 range. it is a street food in malaysia, but here it is like gourmet food. anyway from what i see, the downstairs have the customers and they were having breakfast of pastry, and croissant and baked goods.

i was thinking that tortilla breakfast of burito that i had , seem like good value at £3.50. though i just remembered you can get a macD or a burgerking hamburger and kfc chicken burito for £2 with a coupon, and you get fries too. 

but anyway it was nice to have a peaceful opening to the day at the victoria area , a moment of calm to start the day. it was quite a cold day too.

an old man who sat next to me on the bus started a conversation with me, saying it was cold, and he started talking but i could not make out what he said, so just nodded and pretended. haha. i dontknow whether it is just me who is deaf, or him with an accent that i could not understand.

well i did what i need to do at the post office, i was the only customer haha. a nice change. then off i went to the library to read the papers. that was this morning. 

now it is nighttime, and i am back from doing a bargain shop at tesco. it was an interesting episode. there were lots of reduced liver, chicken, 30p, and pork liver 25p. such a temptation, normally i would swoop on them and buy them, but now that i got gout, i cannot eat liver anymore. it really is a bother. because i love liver esp chicken and pork liver. instead i bought mackerel at 50p, two fillets. which i fried and ate one with the cabbage . i bought two  clumps of white cabbage (or should i say bunch how would one describe these i wonder; maybe i should call them 2 rounds of cabbage) of them, at 20p each. they were reduced because the outside leaves look a bit shabby, otherwise they are really allright. they are  selling for 79p each. which is very expensive for cabbage. they were very small cabbage too.

i think there is a shortage of cabbage. usually cabbages are very cheap, even in winter. don’t know whether they could not find any EU people to harvest them or what. anyway i had a delicious dinner using these bargain buys. the fried mackerel was delicious. its rare to get mackerel reduced like this. and to think mackerel was a fish that was supposed to be only good for poor people.