Bonus Blog: Happy New Year!

Welcome, hopeful reader, to our first bonus blog in quite some time. I say hopeful because of course, we're all hoping for a better 2021 than 2020. And with the vaccines rolling out (notably significantly more effectively in countries with centralised healthcare systems), I'm sure that will come to pass.

I have to say that for us, 2020 really hasn't been that bad at all... it's just been weird, a bit frightening, and at some points a bit dull. We've so much to be grateful for, and we're in a much better position than so many other people in the world: we're in a relatively civilized country with pretty decent healthcare, we still have gainful employment which isn't impacted by the pandemic, and we don't have kids to keep entertained. The biggest impact of the pandemic on us is that we haven't been able to travel anything like as much as we wanted to (which of course means we can't see family or friends), and also we've become much more familiar with the takeout menus of all the restaurants in Palo Alto. Anything that happened before March seems like an awful long time ago, and it's weird to think that once I used to go to the office every day. In many ways, the pandemic has forced us to explore Palo Alto much more thoroughly and come to think of it more as our home. We've walked around the place so much that I feel we know the streets pretty well now.

As we move into 2021, one of the odd things, which I remember well from last year, is that pretty much everyone else gets New Year before us. This gives us an opportunity to have the midnight experience a few times - London and New York are pretty notable timezones to see in the new year. This year, we enjoyed Jay's Virtual Pub Quiz at its usual time of 8pm in the UK, or midday here. It being lunchtime, I thought we'd complete the British pub experience by ordering something from Palo Alto's own British pub, the Rose & Crown.

The takeout menu there includes something called fish and chips, which I thought would be fun to have. So imagine my disappointment when the regal British chip was substituted for the humble American tater tot:

For our British readers, a tater tot is a bit like a thumb-sized hash brown: it's chopped up potato, formed into a small cylinder and then deep-fried. Doesn't this sound great?

I always think tater tots should be just amazing, but in practice they tend to be a bit soggy and disappointing. They're even more disappointing when you try to treat them like chips, and douse them in malt vinegar, but hey, you live and learn I guess.

About the only British drink on the Rose & Crown's takeout menu is something they call New Castle Brown. I wonder what they did with the old castle?

Read it carefully, and as you'll see, this is about as British as Petaluma, CA, which is, um, not very British. But hey, one of these was a freebie to make up for the tater tots fiasco, so never look a gift horse in the mouth. The last time I drank this stuff was probably 1991 so I wouldn't know the difference anyway.

Having recovered from our feeble attempts to be authentically British for a few minutes, we're now all ready for new year here, and expect to see the shenanigans from Times Square quite soon. Roll on 2021!