Pizza Express now seem less good at giving me a gluten-free meal than they seemed at first glance. The first time I tried going there with my own pizza base, everything was fine. The second time they failed to cook the base properly. The third time, last night, they slightly overcooked it (probably overcorrecting after I politely drew their attention to last week's lapse), but more importantly they forgot to put the cheese on my pizza! When I queried this, they took the pizza back and did a complicated ritual involving pre-melting the cheese and then re-baking the pizza a bit to stick it down, causing the base to be further overcooked in the process. Their excuse was that the chef had apparently thought that ‘since it was such a small pizza base’ I wouldn't want cheese on it. Huh?

(The base comes in packaging that says ‘milk free’ as well as ‘gluten free’, presumably on the grounds that it's easier to make one product that's everything-free than to faff about with lots of slightly different ones, and I had initially suspected the chef had been confused by this and decided to make my pizza dairy-free just in case; but apparently not.)

Also in Pizza Express, I was rather annoyed by the overenthusiastic waitress who responded to all questions of the form ‘can I have’ (more water, $condiment, some cheese on my pizza) by saying ‘Of course you can!’, in a tone of voice calculated to suggest that it was a really silly question and we shouldn't have even needed to ask. While on the one hand it was certainly pretty unlikely that she would have said no to any of our entirely reasonable requests, so in that sense the reply ‘of course’ was pedantically accurate, on the other hand it seemed a bit much to imply our questions were superfluous, since we do at least have to make our desires known before even the best waiting staff can fulfil them.

I've been feeling a cold coming on for a lot of today. I'm still at work so far, since it's mostly manifested itself as coughs and sneezes rather than a loss of energy, but bah nonetheless.

And finally, last night someone sent me email drawing my attention to a blog entry in which Tom Duff commented on my coroutines article. At around nine this morning the blog website went down and hasn't been seen since, which means I can't show it to anyone! Bah.

So, lots of gripes and grumps today. Ho hum.