An all too clinical experience.

I had time for lunch today, however I find that eating without other parts of life being gratifying is not a fulsome pleasure. I had a Szechuan sweet potato noodle soup with beef, chicken, and tripe. The description was more interesting than the product. I suspect that the Szechuan peppers were absent, as the thrilling numbing that they give was absent, and it tasted just like a good, standard, Chinese soup, rather than one of the most distant frontiers of difference that Szechuan food is. It also burnt my tongue, as I ate alone in a clean meeting room and read a mental health policy manual. There wasn’t a lot to do today, apart from waiting for crises, and I don’t like resolving acute crises much anymore, particularly when I don't have a decent notion of the history of it. I'm not a firefighter. I felt empty on the way home, not from lack of food, but from a lack of satisfaction at work, and the last day of a four-week stint with another mental health team, which I found jading and uninspiring.

The nicest thing that I ate today was the swiss seed bread with just a smidgeon of peanut butter on my arrival home. I like the crunchiness and wholesomeness of the seeds, which remind me of eating an orange poppy seed cake without the stickiness and succulence. Having said that, some kind of orangey herb from the soup lodged in my teeth, and it provided an interesting flavour on my cycle home.