I was socialising a bit on Saturday, and met an elderly couple who I’d heard were a bit quirky, particularly in the food department, but who in person seemed quite nice and normal. Until someone mentioned airline food. These two were visiting Australia from (insert name of far away continent here - heck, they’re all far away), and had flown business class. The wife said, "We asked for bacon and eggs… All they had was quiche."

And she went on, without even a shred of a hint of irony, "Well, we don’t eat that kind of food".

Good grief. I didn’t know how to react. Laughter? Anger? Just change the subject and try not to smirk? Quiche?! Bacon and eggs? It’s just about the same food! Just arranged a bit differently! Is that how you react to anything you find that isn’t quite what you’ve experienced before?! What do you expect on an aeroplane, the chef to personally cook precisely what you want? Even in business class, I think that may be pushing it a bit.

I have a theory that goes something like this: We all do silly little things. We all have our little eccentricities. There are two things that stop them getting out of hand:

• the embarrassment of being spotted doing something that deep down we know is silly
• if we actually do them, people pointing them out and saying "Hey, whoa, you shouldn’t do that - that’s silly."

I reckon that’s why people who live alone are more likely to be seen as eccentric. There’s nobody there to keep them in check.

Of course, when two people live together, and happen to share an eccentricity, and nobody’s around to keep them under control, things can get out of hand. That’s what’s probably happened to these two. And now there’s nobody, least of all the poor bloody flight crew they encountered, with the guts to slap them hard and say "are you out of your mind?! This is not liver and kidney and frogs legs with raw snails, this is quiche! Just eat the God damn food!"

Oops, gotta go. Quiche for dinner. Yum.

Went to a bit of a buck’s night on Saturday. A bit of a pub crawl through the city. There was one casualty of the evening, and it all happened before we even started! By the time we were in the restaurant chowing down some delicious Mongolian food, our missing comrade had already managed to get himself into a pub brawl, get thrown through a window, and rang from Epworth Hospital to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it.

"Chris", we told him, "you might at least have waited for us before you started!"

In any case, we carried on, discovering along the way that if somebody published a pub-crawlers map of Melbourne, it would have made things a lot easier. We were only able to find two between the restaurant and Southbank.

It was just after ten when we reached the second pub, the venerable Young & Jacksons. We noticed that the final Hey Hey was running overtime, with Daryl "Rand McNally" Somers and crew obviously having scoured the tape archives for classic gems. Us in the pub were reminiscing, harking back to the good old days when Hey Hey was on in the mornings on Saturday after the Thunderbirds.

By the time we reached Southbank, Brian, the buck in question, was well sloshed, at times giggling uncontrollably, and having some difficulty in walking because he couldn’t feel his legs.

Eventually we reached Barcode, a fine establishment where one can partake in both alcohol and video games. Even though Brian claimed he couldn’t feel his legs and said there was a two second delay before his brain registered that an event had happened, he managed to win at Daytona, which was a pretty good effort.

By about 1:30am everyone was pretty stuffed. Alas, Chris was still indisposed and unable to carry out his plan to paint Brian’s private parts with permanent inks, so instead we joined the taxi queues outside Crown for a ride home.

Postscript: It turns out that another person who was expected on the night had an even better excuse that Chris: A crystal ball placed on his window sill caught the sun’s rays, and set fire to his house.

At work today, typing mid-sentence I started to type the word functionality. I stopped after a few letters, because it was all coming out wrong: the first letter was missing, and the order of the next four letters got muddled, resulting in a word that quite definitely should not be in a system design document…

George’s has closed its doors for the last time.

If you think this is old news, if you think I’m really slow to be telling you months and months after the fact, then I should mention that I’m not talking about George’s Department Store, the up-market shop in Collins Street, Melbourne, that has been yoyo-ing its way to bankruptcy for years.

No, I’m talking about something much more important: George’s fish’n'chips shop in Bay Street, Brighton. George apparently couldn’t get a deal going with the agent to extend the lease, and decided "Bugger it then, I’m retiring!"

There’s been no fanfare. No last minute bargain sales of potato cakes. No "two minimum chips for the price of one" offers. He just shut up shop for the last time on Sunday and pissed off back to Greece. (Well, actually, I have no idea if he went back to Greece. I just thought it made a nice line.)

So now, on those days when I don’t bring a sandwich in for lunch, on those days when I want a major cholesterol hit, what will I do? Will I have to resort to the nicely cooked but exceedingly wankily named "Mussels Fish And Chippery" up the street? Or the do-gooding grilled fish’n'chips place opposite the post office?

I don’t know. Time will tell.