The other day I had to go out to eat by myself….I didn’t feel like doing room service so I took a walk and landed up at a Japanese restaurant offering a buffet. They had this little “boats-in-water system” which would carry dishes of sushi, noodles etc in a kind of circle with all the tables along side the boat “track”. I then made the mistake of sitting in a chair with my back to the direction from which the little boats were travelling from. Another tennis player had walked in and had sat one table away from me so I thought it might be rude to turn my back on him. The first catch was an easy one….the boats were going quite slowly and I had a few seconds to decide if I felt like salmon, which I did, and so I began to eat.

But at this restaurant (when you’re facing the wrong way) you constantly have to twist your neck to the right every few seconds to make sure you’re not missing anything you might want. Suddenly the boats seemed to speed up….I picked up my last piece of salmon sushi with my chop sticks and when I looked back I saw I had just missed my favourite dish. I would have had time to get up and lunge forward to grab it but I didn’t want to look desperate particularly when I saw the other guy eyeing it out. Then without warning, these little boats sped up even more. It just simply didn’t allow me enough time to A: recognise the food, B: decide if I want it and C: reach out and take the delicately balanced food off the stupid boat. On the next dish I managed to get through A and B and half way through C but fumbled on the return. I knocked the boat off its track and it started what one could describe as a pile up. The waitress ran over after giving me a look and managed to set the boats straight. I promptly decided that I should forget about A and B and just focus on C.

I caught a glimpse of something pink which I reacted to like a cheetah spotting a rabbit. In front of me was another piece of salmon sushi with a piece of eel sushi. I ate the salmon but had difficulty eating the eel – I recently went to the aquarium in Miami with my wife and daughter and had spent a little too much time looking at the eels, fascinated that people actually eat these things. They are hideously ugly (!!) and so it’s on this premise that I base my next statement on, “A long time ago, a Japanese man was stranded out at sea on a boat with nothing to eat. He managed to catch an eel and sunk his teeth into it….he then made it back to shore and decided that an eel should be tied to some rice by some seaweed for a hearty meal.” I hadn’t minded the taste so much before but there was always this texture which I hadn’t really liked. All I could picture was this green snake like thing slithering down my throat but with a quick gulp it was gone.

I ate a few more pieces of sushi and decided to give my neck a break and stopped looking for food. I had eaten enough but I thought I might do one more piece before I left. Suddenly three chocolate dipped strawberries floated past. They looked delicious but my cheetah reflexes failed me and by the time I had unilaterally decided that I was ready for dessert, my chocolate-strawberries had floated on to the horizon. Fortunately I kept my eye on the boat as it floated around the room and estimated its arrival from behind the kitchen for a delicious end to a stressful meal.