A note about T.M. Lewin Shirts

T.M.Lewin shirts might at first glance appear to be a little expensive. Why spend £30 on a shirt when you can get 2 for £18.99 at Tesco? But T.M.Lewin shirts are 100 percent cotton, not a walking fire risk, they are cut just so, and the non-iron feature is genuinely non-iron. Which is great in Japan because I don’t have an iron, or an ironing board or the will to iron. So, a little extra goes a long way. (By the way, this blog isn’t sponsored by T.M.Lewin, although I would be open to offers. ) This blog is not about shirts, it’s is about my time in Japan, so I suppose I better get to the point. I say my shirts are 100% cotton but that is a lie, they are 93% cotton, 7% ramen.  Ramen, the bane of my life. Disclaimer, I call everything in a bowl with noodles and broth ramen but I am sure there are a million different names for the different varieties I fill my grateful belly with. Anyway, as I say, the bane of my life. I can hear you asking how can a delicious, nutritious, bargainous meal like Ramen get you riled up? Well, I’ll tell you. 

Whoever invented Ramen and the other similar soups available, was both a genius and an idiot. Let’s take slices of meat, long noodles, a whole egg, and vegetables and place them in a bowl and cover them with broth. That’s the genius part. The idiotic part is what came next. This looks delicious, what shall we eat it with? I know, let’s eat it with chopsticks. Soup with chopsticks? A whole boiled egg with chopsticks, long dangly noodles with chopsticks, a slab of meat with chopsticks.

I am sure that different nationalities invent foods to confuse foreigners. For example, in my many years in the Czech Republic I never once managed to eat a Chlebicky, (a precariously balanced open sandwich) without a splodge of mayonnaise or potato salad hitting the floor or my shirt or trousers. Yet the Czechs would eat them as serenely as a Swan on the Vltava. It’s the same with Ramen, I splash and splosh everywhere, getting ramen on my shirt, on my phone, on my trousers, on my neighbour’s shirt, phone and trousers. By the time I have finished eating my bowl of broth, I am sitting in a puddle of soup. Meanwhile, those around me, slurp and suck and demolish the bowl in half the time with no collateral damage. Do they have lessons in school; after Double maths is there Ramen eating? Or is it an innate skill, learned like the language from a young age? Whatever it is, it is a cruel joke and it means that if I want to keep enjoying heaven in a bowl, I have to take the consequences. 

The consequences