The Wellington

Accept no substitutes…

I was in the pub some time ago, and wanted to order a Wellington. As I give the order, the nice waitress asks me – certainly because of past experiences – whether I realised this is a “vegetarian Wellington”.

What do you mean, I ask in my naïveté. It means, she answers, that all the nice things you read in the menu are not there to enrich the meat, but to substitute it (she didn’t say it that way, of course; but that was the gist…).

So, this was in actual fact a Wellington without the meat, which is like saying a pizza without the dough, or mashed potatoes without the potatoes. A pure contradiction in terms.

I was immediately reminded of liberal religious sisters.

Mundabor