getting to grips with things

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Would you like common sense with that fish?

E was buying a single grocery item from the local convenience store.

‘Would you like chopsticks with that?’ the clerk asked her at the register.

‘It’s cat food,’ she pointed out.

‘Oh.’

Which reminds me of French bread.

I buy my French bread from a particular bakery in Osaka which is also a cafe. The place sells sarnies and bready snacks and cakey stuff and so on. And sticks of crusty French bread. The staff on the registers usually ask the customers ‘Eat here or take away?’

Except me with my big French sticks. They don’t ask, they just bag it up and let me go.

I have been tempted on many occasions to say, ‘Don’t bag it, I’m going to eat it now.’ I quite like the image of sitting down in the cafe with an enormous baguette  and chewing my way through it. But I haven’t had the heart to torment the staff by joking that I might.

So you can imagine my delight on the occasion the staff actually asked me of my French stick, ‘Eat in or take away?’ Not a sign of irony or humour or even an inkling of what the question suggested. This was my cue to say ‘Eat in of course. What else would I do with 60 centimetres of French bread?’ Or perhaps I could have said, ‘Take away please, I’m going to eat it on the train on the way home.’

French bread

Sadly, I bottled out of making a silly answer thus depriving me of a punchline for this post.