Where is the yeast !!**?!

There should be a law against reorganising the shelves and the aisles in foodstores.....or at least a 90 day notice period. How do these mega grocers expect ordinary Timelords to cope.

It was bad enough this morning to set out for our local store in that "fine rain" (fans of Peter Kay will know what I mean) with thoughts of 35C in Beirut last week still in my mind. But then to encounter a reordering of the aisles?

You see Timelords like me like to do the shopping on a kind of autopilot. We know what we want and we know where it is. The kind of mind inspired by Teapot's Uncle George who unfailingly started off the week's shopping list with "tea, butter, sugar, marge, lard" and delivered it to the grocery chap with his broad Lancastrian twang.

So faced with a reordered store is like finding the motorway closed and a diversion in place to who knows where. There must be some deep marketing ploy in all of this so perhaps my friend Ethnoquest can explain and add a paragraph ot two in his dissertation (in English and not Arabic so I can follow it).

And where is the yeast??!! I need yeast for the bleeping breadmaker. And the more I searched the more I was tempted to become a bleeping Timelord.

In the end I had to accept failure and ask one of the shop assistants. A sort of soul purging exercise in humility. He was helpfulness itself and pointed me straightaway to the new place on the shelves where yeast is waiting for people like me to buy it. Well trained too. He must have been to one of Ethnoquest's courses because he asked me how else he might help and did his best to make me feel the most special customer in the store.

So I resisted the urge to ask him where I might find the ashtalieh or the tabbooleh.......

Where is the marmite...

.....after all Sunday tea is always marmite on toast.

But not this week.

After manaqeesh hommos lamb orfee tabbooleh sheesh taooq soujouk ashtalieh jellab and many more...... but not necessarily in that order.......will marmite taste the same ever again!!

That they may have life and have it more abundantly....

...is the motto of the American University in Beirut which I will visit later today. It was founded in the nineteenth century by an American missionary and the motto is still seen at the entrance today.

Beirut is a wonderfully diverse city. My host Ethnoquest describes society here as still essentially feudal and factions or parties within the body politic control different districts. And woe betide you if one group decides to move into the territory of another..... as witness the bullet holes on the walls within sight of here.

We drove around the city yesterday in the capable hands of Raheed who greeted me with a chocolate described gleefully as a slave's head (and that is the polite translation). I learnt that the topics most likely to bring the blood to the boil in this city are politics and traffic. Boris Johnson might test the peace here! Driving is a no holds barred survival of the fittest which would make Richard Dwarkin drool.

We ended our day with a walk along the Corniche where the city comes to life and familes are out for a stroll. There is a certain charm about watching men and women smoking their hookahs seated by the sea wall.....a sort of mini blast furnace in action.

Downtown today after going to All Saints this morning.