Dreams of White Tiles . . .

First Mid-Autumn Festival I’ve spent in China and not had great big boxes of inedible (to me, anyway) mooncakes to dispose of somehow. This is a benefit of not having an employer that I hadn’t thought of previously.

I”m not sure why I have such a dislike of mooncakes. I think it comes back to my first mooncake, many moons ago, which looked a bit like a pork pie. So I thought, naturally enough, ‘Yay, a pork pie’ and took a big disappointing bite. I have the same feelings towards the little cubes of beef jerky you get wrapped up in bright foil like sweets – years of Pavlovian conditioning as a child have left me assuming that anything small wrapped up in bright foil will be a sweetie, and sweeties are good. Then you unwrap it and it’s a bit of spicy dried beef – which I would actually quite like to eat if it didn’t try and cheat me into thinking it was a Cadbury’s eclair or something.

A few weeks ago I came across bags of tiny pressed cubes of fish meat, again wrapped in bright foil, on the supermarket shelves. I was just thinking ‘What on earth will they do next?’ when I noticed what was next to them – bags of tiny pressed cubes of fish meat, again wrapped in bright foil – “with wasabi!”