Mixing

The thought of mixing can make the heart sink or lift depending on the skills of the mixer. Pineapple and cottage cheese; potato salad and hard boiled egg; clotted cream and fudge; the thought of all of these, you might think surprisingly, at best cause indifference and, at worst, repel me. But other mixes interest me enormously. Baking meat into pastry. Scraping the residue of a tomato salad - chopped onion, tomato pips, olive oil and the tomatoey juices - into a saucepan of just drained pasta or into gazpacho.

Bloody Mary

I first had one of these on my eighteenth birthday. The date coincided with a school reunion and my old Science teacher offered to buy me a drink after the meal. I had long loved tomato juice - Granny used to buy it for me in green tins - although I had received parental criticism for the amount of Worcester Sauce I was in the habit of adding.

My aunt CeCe used to teach me that a Bloody Mary without the Vodka was a Bloody Shame.

But the drink I came across for the first time today, which inspired these reflections, is something called a Greasy Mary. It comes from a Scotsman, Pat MacLaren, who was commenting on a photograph of a Bloody Mary taken in a bar in San Fransisco that had so many vegetables on top that it looked like a salad. This is what he said:

"Scotsman's dilemma. Lovely booze but it's got all vegetables in it. You should try a Greasy Mary. Basically you get the runoff tray from a George Foreman grill after you have cooked the cheapest Aldi full breakfast for a scout troop. Pour into a glass and mix with equal parts vodka, garnish with a tiny Scotch egg on a stick."

Long haul flights

These musings occur to me on a flight from Tokyo to Vienna - both excellent places but the parts in between, certainly on the current flight path, seem to me to be a little barren.

First, I am convinced that one of the two outer seats in the bank of four is the best to aim for. There is always a chance that the passenger next to you will choose to clamber out on the other side if you are asleep. The other two passengers are almost bound to do so.

Airline food is almost always disgusting: Victoria Wood once summed it up well when she described the passenger next to her who ate everything: "He ate the salt and pepper. He ate the little towelette thing for wiping your hands on. He even ate the thing I thought they only put there for a joke, you know the tinned pear and the dream topping." When comedians make you realise how we've always thought something but never dared to say it out loud.

The meal just served by Austrian Airlines fell, I am afraid, into the disgusting category. There was a choice between "Asian Chicken" and "Western Pork". I plumped for the chicken, on the grounds that we were in Asia and the food was likely to have been made there by people more experienced in putting together Asian food than Western food. The chicken had been so finely minced that it was indistinguishable from the insipid sauce surrounding it. Remind me, on another occasion, to write an entry on the western style sliced bread they give you in India.

The only exceptions to the rule about poor food are, in my view, when snacks are purveyed. Air France provided a perfectly good baguette filled with Mountain Ham on a flight from Paris to London once. Fortunately there was no time to heat up any food. A different kind of ham but none the worse for it was given to me by the staff on a USAir internal flight. I recall a particular awkwardness: I wanted a tomato juice to go with it. How, though, should I say tomato?

Tequila

A thirtieth birthday party when Tequila shots were brought round reminded me of an occasion many years ago (in fact in about the year the birthday girl was born) when my parents entertained a Mexican at our house in East Dulwich.

I have no idea how he ended up staying with us but he brought with him a bottle of Tequila and gave us a lesson in how to drink it. We were all assured that his was the authentic way. There were the three stages. A pinch of salt on the bridge between the thumb and the index finger to lick, a swig (no shot glasses!) of the Tequila, and finally a sip of tomato juice from a separate glass. Somewhat extraordinarily, I was permitted to participate. Personally, my favourite bit was the salt and lemon juice.

Since then, I have never seen anyone drink Tequila in that fashion. Instead the form appears to be to start with unadulterated salt, then to down a shot of Tequila and finally to suck on a lemon slice. That was how we did it at Katy's thirtieth, anyhow. One of the deleted scenes from "The Office" involved an interesting variation on this theme in which the lemon slice was held between somebody else's teeth.