the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

This is not just about food and drink, although I might as well start there. As you age your taste buds change as does your sense of smell and both affect how food and drink tastes. What we like or dislike can change as a result, but some of that is clouded by the way regulation has impacted on the food industry.

Recipes have changed to meet new regulations on things like preservatives and additives, and there have been other changes in the interests of profit. The way some foods are grown has also brought about change. In the same way that some cut flowers are grown for looks and have no scent, fruit and veg are grown in ways that make them look good, but have little or no taste.

A combination of these factors mean that when I revisit something that I used to enjoy twenty, thirty or more years ago it does not taste anything like I remember it, or at least I don’t get the same sense of enjoyment as I remember.

The same applies in other areas, and it was literature that got me started on this train of thought. The Berkshire Belle and I are avid readers. We can both get through a book in a day if we have nothing else to do, but she will get through around 5 a week and I am on about 3 at the moment. I tend to read bigger, non-fiction books more so we are probably about even in terms of words read a day.

Recently, having got used to an e-reader, I have been going back to some of the authors that I used to enjoy, but there have been some disappointments along the way. Back in the Seventies I found Neville Shute books in my local library and became hooked. I read all of them and enjoyed most, but re-visiting them has not been a success. I’ve picked on him as an example, but there are others. Stories that I found riveting half a lifetime ago I now find contrived and implausible. Alistair MacLean is another prime example.: His books kept me amused on many a road trip a while back, but leave me cold now (and not just Ice Station Zebra).

Not all tastes have changed though, because I have tried some authors that I could not get on with and still find them wanting. Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway still have no appeal to me at all and I cannot understand why they are so lauded. Another popular author, more recent, that I have also tried again is Terry Pratchett, but his work still seems to just not quite get there for me, it seems to go off in the direction of genius, and then lets me down.

I suppose that experience has something to do with it. I have lived through a lot since I first started to read sixty five years ago, and the callow teenager, whilst not far below the surface in many ways, has turned into an old man who have seen and experienced a lot. My judgement has been influenced by all of it along the way. But is seems odd that whilst I have lost my taste for some of what used to give me pleasure, I have not learned to get on with some of the others.

One constant for me has been music and I still love stuff from my younger days every bit as much as I used to. Within my playlists there is classical music through blues, jazz, pop, rock, soul, country, reggae and other genres through to about the mid-1980s. You won’t find much created since then because I don’t like most of it. In fact after a purple patch from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies things do tail off somewhat, but I still go back to all that and love it as much as I ever did. I am also still finding things from those times that I missed out on, but have now discovered and love just as much.

So have I got into anything new, things that I didn’t like, but now do? Well curry would be one. My first experiences of curry houses on the High Street back in the early seventies was not good and I loathed the stuff in terms of look, smell and taste, but the Hastings Hottie got me into curries gently, serving me up “spicy prawns” as she called them (a prawn curry to anyone else) and we’ve gone from there. The best meal that I have eaten was an Indian one, albeit at a Michelin starred restaurant, and working in North Africa, Thailand and China where I have eaten the authentic curries from those regions has helped me come to enjoy the stuff. I now cook it at home almost weekly.

I also had no taste for whisky until the late 1990s. I had only tried grain and blends by then and was not a fan, but ensconced in a Midlands hotel for a week at a time working on a project one of my colleagues introduced me to single malts in the bar one evening. I tried a few and whilst I could not get on with the heavily peated whiskies of Islay, I have grown to like most of the other regions and have enjoyed Japanese whisky too ( a 24 year old Yamazaki). I am a Speyside fan especially, but in my decanter at present is an Orkney.

A couple of examples there of things that I could not abide, but now enjoy, so I do have the capacity to add some new things to my life. At least I am still enjoying it.