Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Lunch with Jill and Lewis


Jill and I normally help celebrate one another's birthdays.  Usually I shout a dinner in February for Jill's birthday and she cooks me a dinner in July for my birthday.  Somehow or other, however, we got it the other way around this year, with Jill cooking Anne and me a dinner in connection with her birthday.

We have something of a tradition that Jill cooks us pasta with seafood and a creamy sauce.  She does it well and I always look forward to it.  This year the seafood consisted of lots of small prawns, which went down well.  I get a bit freaked if I have to peel large prawns.  I generally get someone else to do it for me. The pasta was either tagliatelle or fettucine.  I can't tell the difference between those two.

Jill and Lewis go on a lot of cruises and Anne does too so most of the conversation revolved around foreign parts, particularly South America.  Mr Trump however did of course get a mention.  Can any dinner conversations avoid a mention of Mr Trump these days?  Jill noted that on one of her recent cruises most of the American passengers were very enthusiastic about Mr Trump.

Lewis noted that Australia's Pauline Hanson has similar ideas about Muslim immigration. He rather embarrassed himself at one stage with his criticism of such immigration.  But Lewis is Jewish so he has excellent reason to be critical.  Muslim scripture, particularly the hadiths, does after all tell Muslims to kill Jews!  And Mohammed himself wiped out Jewish communities.

From the Pharaohs to Mohammed to Hitler, Jews have certainly not has it easy, to put it mildly.  Among both religious Jews and Christians there is a view that the long survival of Jews against all odds is a sign of divine intervention.  I can see the logic of that.

In recent years Anne and I have got rather bushed in driving to and from  Jill's place.  Anne drives and the GPS system that came with her Toyota is a bit brain-damaged. So this year she turned it off and let me give directions. There have however been a lot of changes in the roads since I used to drive out that way so I feared that I would misdirect us.  As it happened, however, we got it all right both going and coming back. It was actually pretty simple.


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