Tuna tataki

We went for sushi. CH and I. You need to understand how significant this is.

CH and sushi are not something I have ever seen mixed before. CH trying new things is also a comparatively rare sighting.

I mean, I love sushi. Love it. I’m a foodie in general, as my sizeable ass shows. But there are certain foods which I simply cannot say no to. I can resist deep fried junk food — I channel the nausea I experienced when pregnant, and that seems to do it. I can sometimes resist chocolate — not always, I must confess. I can rarely — if ever — resist anything garlic-flavoured.

And I can never resist sushi.

I mean, it’s healthy, it’s not fattening (if eaten under controlled circumstances), it’s filling — a rarity for your eyes-bigger-than-her-stomach Minx — and it’s abso-fucking-lutely delicious, goddamit.

So how did I come to be in my favorite sushi place (which happens to be next to my office), with the unadventurous, non-foodie CH?

I will tell you. Patience, y’all. (That “y’all” was for you, Pursuit.)

When CH told me that he knew about the Muse, he asked me why. Why had I gone looking for something extra-marital? And I told him the truth. That the Muse provided me with something that he didn’t and never had: compatibility. Intellectual, social, cultural — you know what I’m talking about here.

I, in turn, felt that I had excluded him from a large part of my life by having these online friendships with lots of weird and wonderful bloggers — some weirder, and some more wonderful, than others.

So, since the Muse is no longer part of our equation, CH is doing what he can. And this is one way of redressing that particular balance, despite being an avowed “put-raw-fish-in-my-mouth-you must-be-kidding-I-would-rather-swim-in-a-pool-of-my-own-vomit” kind of bloke.

So there we are, in the sushi bar, and it’s even a new experience for me. I mean, I’m used to going in there and availing myself what I now realize was a rather severely limited business lunch menu. Since CH had always previously refused point blank to go to eat for sushi, and since he is the one with whom I usually go out to eat (none of my close girlfriends being of the sushi-eating clan either), sushi was always a lunchtime event, usually guiltily snatched in the middle of my working day.

But this is a whole new kettle of fish. (And raw fish at that. Heh.)

For starters, the dishes are different. More varied. Yummier-looking. And so much more variety. I’m like a child in a toy store. A Minx in a night-time sushi bar. Use the expression folks. I’m sure it could — and should! — become a widely used phrase.

A delightfully tasty-looking dish floats past me on the conveyor belt, as I straighten my skirt, and hang my bag on the floor. I swoop my hand out and grab it, to the bewilderment of my husband.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he asks me, clearly baffled by the whole set-up.

“Choose the dish you most like the look of,” I replied, somewhat indistinctly through a mouthful of salmon sashimi, “And the price of the dish is according to the color of the plate on which it stands. I also ordered us both miso — it’s a soup, you’ll love it, they serve it with shitaki mushrooms, tofu and seaweed.”

“Er… OK, then.”

Over the soup, and the accompanying garlic rice (which, quite frankly, they could serve me in heaven and I wouldn’t complain) I told CH at length about my blog friends and acquaintances. All of them. The current ones mostly. How great they had been to me, the sort of friends they are to me, and how much they mean to me.

How so many had been concerned and worried and supportive at the time the Minxette went under the knife (she’s doing really well, btw). How, more recently, the constant stream of comments and emails and IMs checking we were all OK, and not buried under a ton of rubble, had enabled me – literally – to keep going from day to day.

No real names. No directions to anyone’s blog. CH is not a blogger, and isn’t interested in becoming one. Mostly because English, despite his being fluent, is not his first language.

But at least now he understands a little better. Which should facilitate things a little better between us.

Mixing Japanese food with unburdenings of the heart. And no indigestion. Who’da thunk it?