One Boat that I wish had Sailed

Let's face it, 'steamboat' is basically an anorexic soup that you have to bloodywell cook for yourself. It was one boat that I wish had long since sailed, but it hadn't.

Now chowder I can understand. It's thick and comes ready cooked like any sensible soup. I never had this problem with gazpacho in Spain, even though it was a cold, spiced, tomato soup. But there we were, in a steamboat restaurant,  faced with a multitude of pale fish balls, particles of squid and an assortment of things whizzing around on plates pretending to be sushi,  but were not.

Food on conveyor belts has always seemed a little odd to me. It reminds me of factories and, by extension,  factory farming. I do not need fattening, and my sell by date has, more than likely, long since past.

Hot pots, other than Lancashire,  could most likely be left to Mongols, if indeed it was they who invented them, and their Chinese cousins - the steamboats could also follow them to the far reaches of Mongolia for all I care. If I wanted to cook I would have stayed at home, strangled an egg and scolded some potato with oil. But she who keeps on insisting that she should be obeyed had dragged me, against my will and all that I hold holy, to a steamboat emporium, for dinner.

I languished,  pouting, dreaming of more substantial meals in my recent past. Cinnamon pretzels and roasted duck, though not together you understand, swam before me. Crab claws, dressed and undressed and even partially dressed crab in stockings and suspenders beckoned to me in a miasma.  Succulent cuts of beef metamorphosed into tender steamed chicken until I opened my eyes and witnessed - soup, bloody thin soup and a stack of small plates. The contents of those plates had been tipped into that bubbling morass pretending to be soup, by my patiently smiling wife who sat defiantly next to me. My wife was mentally saying "you may, or may not, like it, but now that you are here you are bloodywell going to eat it" . Hence smiling like Lysistrata.