Rainbow Awards! "Bitter Waters" cover! Vote now!!!

So the Rainbow Awards give kudos inter alia to the year's best LGBT cover - which is of course Elizabeth Leggett's cover to my own collection Bitter Waters. And you can vote in this splendid kudos-giving process, merely by going here and making with the clicky. You have to give an email address, and you have to vote for at least three covers. Obviously you really, really have to vote for Elizabeth's, because it's the best. After that there is some discussion whether you should reward good work by voting for two more lovelies, or try to game the system by voting for anything except the serious rivals. Up to you.

After that, you can come back here and argue about whether "kudos" is a plural or not. But not till after you've voted.

O Parson, you did not shed your nose in vain

Sometimes I think I could live on nibbles, on appetizers and treats, on chef's perks above all. Give me the parson's nose and the liver and a little crispy skin, and what need more of the chicken?

I love tapas, and meze, and eating family-style as they call it here, sharing everybody else's choices, a little of everything. Going out for dinner with firm friends and a firm custom, where everybody's plate gets passed around the table and you eat only a mathematical share. The Chinese custom - which was only a murmur and a dream before I went to Taipei and found it actually occurring, much to my delight, much to my benefit as the perpetual guest - of picking choice morsels from the communal dish and dropping them into your neighbour's bowl, I love that.

Except that then I do also and quite differently adore a deep deep bowl of rice all to myself, or a heaping* plate of chilli, bulk in comfort and comfort in bulk. A fresh loaf of bread and of course I won't actually eat it all but I could, y'know? If I wanted to?

A shaving of cheese can delight me; I once fell in love over half a grape (tho' that may have been the gesture, more than the comestible**). But volume, sufficiency, abundance delights me too. Even if my middle-aged appetite is no longer sufficient to my still-adolescent yearnings ("his eyes", we say, "are larger than his stomach").

On the other hand, middle-aged me could drink adolescent me under the table. And is more than willing to prove it, any day of the week.

So there is it, a duality reveal'd: sometimes I like little things in abundance, sometimes I just want mass. No lessons to be drawn here. Move along.


*as we also say here - the English edition would say "heaped"

**We were at boarding-school. Grapes were a rarity enough, but gestures of affection? Oh, boy...