Sahl Hasheesh - Welcome 2015!

Sahl Hasheesh - Chez Paul

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all enjoyed your celebrations and festivities, that the hangovers have gone, and that the new year is starting well for you.

I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t have any New Year’s resolutions, but the good news is that this is at least in part because I understand that I can’t or won’t fulfil the criteria that you need to have a resolution.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t have plans. I hope to release both of my novels this year, although my second novel (Space Shapes) is moving so slowly that I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ll manage. Sometimes, I even question if it’s worth publishing, but I’ve been working hard on it recently and am feeling a little more optimistic just now (apart from the occasional wobble). In October I’ll be releasing New Year’s Resolutions – For Fish! And probably in the first half of this year, I’ll be publishing my German false friends book (and I still need to find a title for that). So, it’s quite an ambitious year even without any resolutions.

I’m not regarding any of these plans as resolutions because I haven’t got a schedule telling me how to fulfil them or when. I want to reserve the right to change my plans (and thus they are plans and not resolutions). Yes, I’m a pedant!

As mentioned before, for my New Year’s celebrations I went with Safi to a new restaurant in Sahl Hasheesh called Chez Paul. My brother Paul in New Zealand expressed great confidence in this choice of location.

Safi and I had originally gone there to ask them what their menu would be and to enquire if they would have entertainment or what they would do. We were requested to come back later as the menus weren’t yet decided.

When we returned a week later, they were just finalising the menu. To our disappointment, it was full of things we didn’t like (salmon, fish, cheese, minestrone soup), so we asked if we could have a la carte on the evening. Safi moaned that she wanted turkey and I moaned that I wanted tomato soup. We probably sounded like two spoilt children! They promised that a la carte would be fine but that there’d be an extra charge for the entertainment.

Charging for the entertainment was fine, but I didn’t want to commit unless they told us the final price. Perhaps a week later, I went back to see if they had finalised the menu and costs. To my surprise, they’d changed the menu completely. Miraculously, it now contained tomato soup (hurrah!), turkey (hurrah from Safi) or t-bone steak (hurrah from me). Consequently we went for the fixed menu after all.

It started off with a free cocktail (alcoholic) and ended with flambé bananas; we had party poppers, party whistles, party hats. A life-size Santa bobbed about by the door. There was no entertainment – allegedly the singer had had an accident or something.

Still, I’m not complaining as it still made for a good evening with delicious food.

Here’s hoping that 2015 is a good year for everyone!