Birthday Girl

It was Sanae's birthday last week. She turned 35, no wait, 34 I think, no, no, she's claiming she is in fact 33 but that may well be early middle-aged despair talking. To date she has received the sum total of one, yes, count 'em, one birthday card, from her beloved husband (and she is not happy about that people, not happy at all). To make up for the cruel, heartless, cruelly heartless indifference of everyone else in her so-called 'family', I whisked her off to the Windsor Hotel for Sunday lunch. Or rather, 'prolonged Sunday grazing' as it should really be called. The Windsor Hotel (host of the 2008 G8 summit, trivia fans) does this rather good all-you-can-eat buffet on a Sunday and the three of us put it to the test. The deserts get an overwhelming thumbs up (God, the cream cheesecake with the raspberry sauce..), the sauteed oysters, equally fine, with the meat dishes penalized a point or two for the overpowering sauces they were served with. The curry, though, was damn fine, the chunky tender pieces of pork and the dry, saffron flavored fluffy rice putting the lie to the myth that the Japanese can't cook a decent curry (though, by and large, they can't). The way Cian savaged the bread rolls means another three stars there, and of course there was the spectacular view from the restaurant itself, with the azure blue of lake Toya below us, and the snow clad majesty of Yotei-zan looming in the distance.

After the lunch we decided to go a for a premptive walk before our stomachs exploded. However, Cian refused, so Sanae had to carjack the hotel's courtesy Roll Royce and we had a race to the beach at Uzu. We ditched the Rolls in the water and ambled along the sand, pretending to be overweight American tourists before the cold wind drove us into my car and back home (with Cian alternately snoring and farting the whole way back. Too much raspberry sauce).

All in all a nice day out (solitary birthday card notwithstanding).