Isn’t he a beauty?

He’s guarding the residents of Plymouth from perils coming in from the sea! I reckon he’s as nice a lobster as I’ve ever seen. You should bear in mind, he’s about ten foot tall and is on top of a post that’s probably 20 foot tall.

After a desperately late night last night, I felt I’d earned my day off today and as it was payday, we decided to go into town, do a bit of shopping then go and do a big food shop at Sainsbury’s on the way home.

The weather has been fab, we’ve pottered about, checked out the Tamar bridges on foot, visited the Barbican for the first time, bought the things we needed and then did the food shopping….

The only fly in the ointment of our day was getting into a dispute with a restaurateur over a meal that was patently not what was described on the menu, coupled with poor service. In the end, after a ‘discussion’ about how to resolve our ‘disappointment’ in what we’d bought, the restaurateur gave us back pretty much all of the money we’d spent on the food, only leaving us to settle up for drinks.

We discussed this on the way back to the car……you know, should we have complained? We Brits are, of course, famous for accepting poor food and poor service without question.

My instinct when she’d walked over to us saying her waitress had overheard us discussing our dissatisfaction and could we tell her about the problem, was to simply say ‘it’s fine’. But then I thought ‘no’ – we paid a reasonably chunky sum of money to her business and we didn’t get the meal that was described on the menu. So, I explained what I thought the problems were in an unemotional and straightforward way. Although it was clear she didn’t really understand the point I was making, she did at least have the good grace to treat the ‘customer as king’!

Anyway, even though I know only too clearly there is no such thing as a free lunch, I also know that we probably did OK out of the deal on balance and our day certainly wasn’t marred by the experience.

This shot was taken only minutes before we sat down for our lunch – I probably wouldn’t have raised a murmur if it’d been his bar!

Last year's shot was stoooooopid!