My daughter went out to dinner last week at a very nice restaurant in Looe. I always like to interrogate people who go out to dinner as to what they ate, it's a kind of surrogate meal for me, and I can drool without any added calories. All the family do it. My daughter, who is on holiday, rang to give me a blow-by-blow account of the meal she had at her, and my, favourite restaurant. She needn't have done, because I know the menu by heart, especially the meze. You start with a large salad, hot pitta bread, olives, a whole pot of yoghurt and other dips, big enough for a main meal, then follow with a selection of fish, fried cheese, mushrooms, omelette, calamari in batter, the inevitable chips, a couple of spicey sausages, shish kebabs and then full-sized pork chops. Just when you think there couldn't be anything else, they come out with the final course, a good-sized moussaka. Thank goodness they only serve the meze once a week. On one occasion, feeling I couldn't possibly eat that much I ordered a moussaka and salad. The staff, however, worried in case I should leave the establishment with a rumbling stomach instead of a fully extended one, brought me the salad and dips anyway, then followed up with a bowl of chips to go with the moussaka. The latter, when it came, wasn't the usual end of meal size, but an enormous one in what looked like a pudding bowl and I felt I had to eat it under the watchful eye of the waiters, who were beaming encouragingly. On the other hand, sometimes family members ring up to check what we're eating when they need a bit of a boost. One year my son, when he was living in London, worked on Christmas day and forgot that even the corner shop run by an Asian family, wouldn't be open. His Christmas meal consisted of a tin of spaghetti hoops on toast and a Penguin. 'What did you have?', he asked mournfully. So we told him, and he said thanks, he was now going to eat a Jacob's Cream Cracker, the only one in the packet, for supper. So back to the meal out. 'We had some wonderful pan friend scallops', she said. Pan fried? Why does practically every restaurant menu deem it necessary to say 'pan fried' instead of just plain 'fried'. What else are they going to fry things in but a pan and a frying pan at that? Or do they have dustbin lids as an alternative? Dustbin lid fried scallops doesn't, of course, sound quite so appealing. Nor does just plain 'fried' because anything fried is nowadays thought to be unhealthy. Hotels now never mention the word 'fried' when they offer you breakfast, it's 'full English' which basically means everything but the baked beans are fried but nobody's going to put it down in writing. Sad, because there are few other foods which can beat a good old British fry-up in the morning and the best place to find one is in a good old British transport caff, where nobody would dream of asking for anything 'lightly grilled, please' for fear of being escorted from the premises by a pack of jeering lorry drivers. I have fond memories of a transport cafe on the edge of the town where I had my first job on a newspaper. We used to trundle down for what I suppose you could call brunch (although that wasn't a word then) or an all-day breakfast, but which was in fact just the normal everyday menu which never changed. Chips were served with everything from early morning to late at night, everything was fried and in giant-sized portions. The tea was served in large cups and was a kind of deep mahogany colour and the bread came in doorsteps. Ask for a bacon sandwich and you got about half a pound of bacon stuffed between two gigantic pieces of bread liberally spread with margarine, real margarine which was dark yellow and tasted of, well, margarine and not one of those anaemic spreads we get now. The caff itself was tatty, the cooking equipment didn't bear looking at too closely and neither did the staff. One of my colleagues once asked for a couple of poached eggs on toast (he used to drink Babycham in the pub, so what else could we expect?). The assistant, a misnomer because she wasn't really in the business of assisting anyone, looked at him as if he had cast doubts upon her parentage, and hissed 'we don't poach, we don't boil and we don't bleedin omelette.' He slunk back to the table with two friend eggs, black and crispy round the edge, sitting on his toast. Ah golden days. I expect transport caffs now have all the right food hygiene certificates and built-in grills, but I hope they still do doorstep bacon butties. And so back to 'pan frying', which is used more and more to add five quid to the bill and which is supposed to glamorise the food so that when you see someone selling 'pan-fried organic pork and leek sausages served with crushed potatoes and lightly sauteed red onions' you don't think 'Oh this is a bit expensive for sausage and mash'. Or that's the theory anyway. It's the same with 'oven roasted', as in 'oven-roasted Mediterranean vegetables'. What else do you roast in? You don't roast on the top of the stove, that's called frying or boiling. You can't roast under the grill, that's called grilling unless you are in a posh restaurant and it's griddled. But oven roasting is in, you even see oven-roasted potatoes accompanying oven-roasted leg of lamb on menus. I suppose it won't be long before we see a description on the menu of North Atlantic Dogger Bank cod steaks dipped into an emulsion of authentic French organic hard wheat flour, organic eggs from Rhode Island Red hens living outdoors on a small farm just a few miles from Newton Abbot and fresh milk from Jersey cows, lightly season with freshly ground black pepper and Breton sea salt and deep pan-fried in virgin sunflower oil, served with organic Red Lion potatoes peeled by hand and cut into thick Julienne, likewise deep pan-fried and accompanied by slices of unwaxed Tuscan lemons with a bowl of vinegar de Sarsons on the side or Ketchup au Tomato. In other words, cod and chips! Nothing wrong with fish and chips. It's still high on our list of national favourites, despite competition from takeaways selling everything from just about every country in the world. Or rather our own version of everything from all around the world. I doubt if the Chinese would eat bits of pork in tired batter resting on a lurid red sauce made almost exclusively from sugar and red food dye. So, long live the fish and chip shop, but be warned. The day they start calling them fries, or worse still, pommes fritte, will be the day I stop going.

The big move is over and the Cornish Times is now ensconced its new premises, the former Webb's Hotel, now Webb's House in Liskeard. The old hotel has been restored to its former glory, albeit for a different purpose, and is a great place to work in. Having moved lock, stock and notebook we are all now gradually settling into our new desks, unpacking our boxes and looking forward to months of being able to say, 'sorry, I think they lost that in the move'. Only joking. Really, only joking. If we say that it will be absolutely true, but it won't happen. Never. Must go now and search for my in-tray.