I’m a small, sometimes petty, occasionally cranky man.

Change is usually something I’m all for. New music? Great. New cultures in Ireland? Fantastic. New shops, pubs, cinemas etc? Only the dogs…. However, mess with the minutiae of my life and I get very, very reactionary. Take the picture below:

Might not seem like much. But this week they took the existing salt and pepper grinders in my favourite café (the tall ones that look like chess pieces) and replaced them with what you see above. Was I livid? Was I what…. It’s almost as bad as when they took the ceramic container with the dozens of thin upright packets of sugar in and just started giving me two of them with my latte….

I still miss the old bank notes I saw at the museum last weekend, the old “printed on actual paper” bus tickets, the way the hash browns with the California Sunrise breakfast in Elephant & Castle used to be actual halved baby potatoes instead of cubes (it’s still a truly great breakfast…)

Grrrrr….

R

PS Yes, I am conscious of what an old codger this makes me sound like. To be fair there’s been an element of codgerism in my make up since I was a teenager but being a codger with a blog and a mysspace page makes up for it somewhat…