Too Much Of A Good Thing

Brunch is, as I may have said before, not a proper meal. Nobody is given advice that they should brunch like a prince regent, dine like a pauper. But despite this, people continue to believe that they should eat brunch.

It's not that I have anything against breakfast, or lunch, or elevenses. Why, on a good day with a prevailing wind and the love of a good woman, I could easily eat three breakfasts.

But three brunches? That way madness lies. You'd die from a surfeit of eggs benedict and cut-price cava.

I didn't have three brunches today, but I did have one, on a floating restaurant moored in Aberdeen. Jumbo is a boat in the marina which people visit, via another boat, to eat Chinese food on the lower deck and Western food on the upper deck. (Unimaginatively named 'Top Deck'.)

I'm wary of any restaurant on wheels, because the proprietor can easily escape. But at least it's difficult for a wheeled dining venue to escape the country, whereas a maritime eating establishment can maraud the high seas, dispensing badly cooked offal to every nation with a coastline.

Not that I'm saying Top Deck is that sort of establishment to float from country to country, delivering tureens of MSG-laden gunk to all and sundry. It's just it would be a lot easier for them than for, say, a hypothetical Mr Wong and his putative Shanghainese noodle joint.

Not that I saw any offal at Top Deck, I don't think it's that kind of place.

Being a vegetarian, there was never much chance that I was going to get 400 dollars of champagne and food down me in three and a half hours. I had a go, but there's only so much salad a man can eat, and although the apple crumble was a cut above the usual dessert you get served up at buffets in Hong Kong, after two portions and a bottle of champagne, I was less than capable of clearing my plate.

Defeated, then, by a restaurant called Jumbo. Well, by a floating boat called Jumbo and its eponymous Top Deck.

I'd like to suggest that I spent the rest of the day engaged in profitable pursuits, but most of the remains of the day was taken up with lying face down on my bed and drooling.

I did manage to get up eventually and visit a friend, hospitalised with pancreatitis, but I'd left my tact behind and spent ten minutes telling him about all the food I'd eaten today, before clocking his intravenous drip and the nil-by-mouth instructions.

Sorry 'bout that.