People watching 

The canteen (otherwise known as the ‘buffet style restaurant’) is a great place to sit and watch the world go by. There are people here of all ages, multiple nationalities, all sorts of shapes and sizes, and yet there are patterns to be discerned, repeated behaviours to be noticed.

The Eastern Europeans are easy to spot. The women, slim and glamorous, even in their eighties throw back outfits; the men burly and morose, unsmiling yet attentive to their children. These tables always have a plate of food for sharing in the middle of the table: sometimes bread or salad; meat or fruit. The content doesn’t matter, the important thing is these people eat communally; sharing is instinctive for them.

Not so the Brits. No sharing here. In fact, prior to this holiday I thought we Irish were the only ones who suffered from the famine mentality. (My absolute dread of running out of food or alcohol results in always being left with mounds of leftovers after parties. Not necessarily the case with alcohol!). It has become apparent that the war years and the consequent rationing, must have impacted similarly with the Brits. That’s the only logical explanation for the plates piled high, the massive quantities wasted; the seeming inability to select just one or two main courses to try, rather than having plenty of everything…. And this happens three times a day in the ‘canteen’ and then continues in between in the various snack bars, where fruit, fries, pizza, ice cream and other snacks are available all day.

I’ve seen young children drinking pints of coke; grown men standing by the dessert /pudding area, shovelling one plateful in to themselves and then filling the plate again before returning to their table; I see bags and bags of wasted food being thrown away because we don’t correlate what we want and need and are able for, with what goes on our plates. I have cringed as local staff wipe yet another set of plates clean, and wonder what they think about our waste and lack of control. This is a poor country. This level of gluttony would never be ok but the fact that there are people living and working here who struggle to get through the winter makes it all the more obscene.

And what of the Paddys? Can they be spotted from the crowd? In many ways, we are indistinguishable from the Brits. Our kids wear the same football jerseys (apart from the odd shamrock rovers supporter). But we are paler, a fact now significantly exacerbated by the growing trend that most British women arrive having had a spray tan! Our taste in clothes is equally bad, and the men on both sides of the Irish Sea continue to wear dark socks with sandals. Compared to most other European countries, the Irish and British look equally crap!