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Waffle House - FFSR
Fast Food, Slow Reviews - Sam's ongoing mission to review all of the USA's fast food establishments, one at a time, over the course of years of trips to the States.
We’ve been before but not done a FFSR so we returned to the notorious breakfast diner joint. It was a bacon, egg and cheese hashbrown bowl for me and an all-star special for Charles (eggs: scrambled, toast: white, waffle: plain, meat: bacon, side: grits with cheese).
I thought the hashbrown bowl could have been better seasoned and the cheese could have been either more plentiful or more powerful. But the bacon was really tasty and was the standout item. The hashbrowns are something I just can’t get at home so it’s always a pleasure. And of course the eggs were cooked just right.
I had some of Charles’s cheesy grits and yum yum yum! Again the cheese left something to be desired but grits have such a wonderful texture. Smooth and creamy but with a little bite in there too. I think I’d like to try adding grits to a Full English back home and see how it works. Maybe include some American diner-style hashbrowns to complete the melange.
Pecan pie was our dessert (which we needed like a hole in the head but when in Rome 🤷🏻♀️). Sara Lee does some fantastic things with sugar. The texture is of molasses or tar or something but with a deep sugary, nutty flavour. And then there’s the candied, crunchy pecans on top. A real treat :)
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Empire of the Sun
It’s good! It’s Spielberg so it’s going to be good. I watched this basically entirely on the premise that it's adapted from a J. G. Ballard book: the last J. G. Ballard book I read was a bit of a trip.
The pacing of The Empire of the Sun was a little weird, it kept going in fits and starts. There’s a big time skip in the middle that I think was the right thing to do. But also a lot of what we would now recognise as tropes that seem a little bit facile.
The kid on the other side of the fence basically just got used as a prop, and multiple props at that. I don’t know what the story was with his stand-in parents, Natasha Richardson and that other bloke. For a little while I thought they were his parents and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t reacting more powerfully to seeing him again.
On the other hand, boy oh boy can Christian Bale act. Seeing his face, already so expressive but so familiar from his adult work, was a real treat. And John Malkovich’s character was terrific as well, always ready with a bon mot. I appreciated that his disappearance in the end actually turned out to be a bit of a blessing: if Jamie had gone with him then I suspect that things would have gone poorly. Davy, the other boy that John Malkovich's character was close to, was nowhere to be seen later on (I think).
Although geographically I just could not figure out how everything hung together, how people showed up or disappeared. I guess that’s just the Magic of Moviemaking (tm)!
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Florian Gadsby makes pottery
A balm for my sour millennial soul: Florian Gadsby (a posh London name to match his posh London accent) makes beautiful handcrafted ceramics, and films much of it. He gently intones over close-ups of pottery wheels, he shoots with extremely short focal lengths, he pans nonchalantly over a shelves of visually-cohesive vases, bowls, mugs, and teapots. He wears French chore coats and heritage leather boots around his meticulously organised studio. At the end of this video, he makes his own tape.
His videos include all of the Millennial Aesthetic Greatest Hits—casual references to time spent in Japan, man buns, an appreciation for fine pens, premium prices, cRaFtSmAnShIp. If someone hit the Gen-Z talking points this well everyone on TikTok would think they were an industry plant. I'm so Here For It.
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Now
I haven’t done one of these in a while. Haven’t written much lately. I haven’t made time for it; it hasn’t felt important. I haven’t quite felt myself lately, and one of the first things that gets cut when I’m in Survival Mode is self-reflection (which is pretty much the whole point of this website). Also on that list: joy in music. When I find myself doomscrolling through my music library I know that I’m having Another One of Those Days.
I suspect it’s the time of year. I get terrible hay fever in the fall (or, I don’t know, generic hay-fever-adjacent sinusitis), and this year has been worse than usual. Since the clocks have gone back, we only get about an hour of useable sunlight during the day — from noon onwards the sun is still technically present but its attention is elsewhere.
It occurs to me that I never wrote about the Loch Ness Marathon, which I ran at the end of September. It was a stunning day in a stunning part of the country. But the wheels came off just after the halfway mark, and I hobbled the second half at a walking pace.
It helps to try running interesting places... 
...and ensure as many runs as possible end with a pint Since then I just haven’t had much motivation. My running history has perhaps overindexed on Long & Slow runs, so I’ve been working on speed in an attempt to shake something loose. My running form has improved a bit, and I put up a good showing at the Brampton to Carlisle 10 mile race a couple weeks ago. I like that distance, and I like the carbo-loading pretext for scarfing an entire box of flapjack at once.
Still working towards a 20-minute 5k before the end of the year.
Around the house we’ve been checking more jobs off the list, with the goal of starting 2025 with a fresh slate. Our latest: there are now nice plush carpet runners on the stairs, replacing some awful tatty beige stuff that the house was assembled with back in 2008 or so. In a year of tiling, wallpapering, and carpeting, I like carpeting the best: it’s relatively tidy work and you can mask a lack of experience with a surfeit of staples. would carpet again.
The gaffer admires the handiwork 
John's Cafe as it is now... 
...and as it was For Sam’s birthday the other week, we both took some time off and enjoyed ourselves in the (admittedly meagre) sunlight while the rest of the world toiled at their desks. We went to a fancy breakfast in Durham with the retirees and the posh students, then took a tour of the Cathedral (no tower climb, unfortunately—under renovation) and castle buildings. We spent a day at Beamish and visited the new 1950s town; John’s Café is now open after having languished here on Wingate Front Street for years.
At the end of the week we made a chilly trip to the Lake District for a run with Ghyll across a couple peaks of the Helvellyn ridge. Clouds rolled in on us along the very tops, but on the hillsides we had wonderful solitary views over Grasmere.
I’ve just returned from a walk with Ghyll. It has been dark for hours (approximately 5) and the thermometer has dropped sufficiently that puddles are freezing over. In the field near our house Ghyll sauntered into the dark, from whence little crunching noises emerged at intervals as he wandered around in the tall, frozen grass. When we got home I had dinner and he curled up on the sofa.
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T. S. Eliot on causes
for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
From T. S. Eliot on F. H. Bradley, via John Ganz
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