The art of lunch

I was just reading a well written article on the state of pudgy cricketers, and I started thinking. That is always dangerous. The paragraph in questions was this:

For me - and this may just be a matter of age - the heyday of international weight gain was the 1980s, when such mighty lunchers as Mike Gatting and Ian Botham strode the world like colossuses (mainly because that's what they were). Gatting, of course, influenced the culinary policies of pavilions across the world, although I'm happy to say that rumours suggesting he used a funnel are entirely false. When Shane Warne bowled him with the Ball Of The Century at Old Trafford in 1993, his captain, GA Gooch, told waiting reporters, "he looked as though someone had just nicked his lunch". And a bit later, "if it had been a cheese roll, it would never have got past him".

Now what happened to that great institution - the long lunch? For myself, the answer is simple. Money, or rather the lack of it. But is that the truth for everyone? Surely the many masses still have enormous budgets and can encourage enormous bellies - feeding the habit so to speak. The world's restaurants have blossomed, but they are their busiest at dinner time.

I blame the fast food industry. That and the worlds employers. In our hurley burly world, the lunch hour is just that - an hour. I think I may start a revolution to get the lunch hour extended to what it was back in the early nineties ... when fast food would allow you to go to the bank, and do some shopping as well as eat; but if you didn't need to stand in the long queues, or feel the need to listen to terminally dreary music, then you could go out and enjoy lunch from around 11 to just after 2. Now if I could only get hold of the necessary cash.