But first, some housekeeping. In an uncharacteristic moment of immodesty, I ventured last week that I had been the cutest page boy at my aunt and uncle’s wedding. Well, if I did! My brother, not by nature much of a taker of umbrage, in this case took a healthy dose.

And so to this week’s actual topic. I have mentioned previously that, in my 18 years as a technical writer, I travelled quite a lot on business. My role was to capture the minutes at meetings with our customers, meetings designed to discover the gaps between what the customer required and what our off-the-shelf software solution provided, in order to identify precisely what customisations were required. My work consisted of sitting in on meetings throughout the business day, sometimes working through lunch, and then polishing the minutes, often late into the night, for approval the following morning. The work was very demanding, in terms of both the length of the working day and the level of concentration required throughout. This was especially true for me, since I had no technical background and typically understood between ten and twenty per cent of what I was capturing. The relevance here is that I had few opportunities for fine dining.

I learnt a lot spending a week or two in a wide range of major cities in Europe and North America, and a couple in Asia. Perhaps the most important thing that I learnt was that eating tuna and sardines for two weeks straight sitting in a hotel room does not make you a stronger swimmer.

Every one who keeps kosher and travels has stories to tell. I’ll tell you mine…and then you might want to share yours. Those of you who don’t keep kosher may never even have thought about the challenges. Why on earth would you?

My food travelling kit consisted of a tin of fish* and a sachet of cup-a-soup for each day away, crackers to accompany the fish, my favourite teabags, a plastic plate and bowl, a china cup, and cheap metal cutlery. (On one occasion, my knife was confiscated at the airport, despite the fact that, as I explained to the security staff, I would find an identical knife on my in-flight dinner tray in a couple of hours.)

In addition, I carried ‘portable and discreet’ food that I could take to the office to eat for lunch, or nibble discreetly if we were working through lunch and I was falling asleep from hunger. In my case, this comprised raw peanuts, almonds, sultanas, Nature Valley bars and plain chocolate.

On arriving at my destination, I would check in and then go in search of the nearest supermarket, where I would buy fresh fruit and salad and milk. In America, this represented one kind of challenge. By the time I arrived at the strip mall, it would be something like 20 hours since I had left home. I would park my hire car and walk into the supermarket. I would then spend ten minutes selecting food and 30 minutes walking up and down the half-mile milk section, trying to find a normal carton of milk, with no additives or subtractives, in a size that would fit into my hotel minibar.

I would then walk out of the supermarket, look around the vast open-air car park, and realise that I had no recollection of where I had parked, and, in addition, no idea of what make, model or colour of car I had just picked up at the airport. I can highly recommend, as a way of recovering from a long transatlantic flight, a healthy 30-minute walk up and down a strip-mall car park, carrying weights in each hand (two supermarket bags are ideal), pressing a remote unlock button every ten seconds while desperately looking for blinking sidelights.

In Bangkok, my problem was rather different. My hotel led directly onto an indoor mall, at one end of which was a Tesco’s. This was tremendously comforting, until I walked in, and realized two colossal challenges. Everything was labelled in Thai. Please don’t think I am complaining about that. Of course that is a perfectly reasonable thing to find in Thailand, and the problem is all mine, not theirs. (Incidentally, I have seen it claimed that Thai uses an alphabet, but written Thai looks more like the cardiogram of someone with arrythmia). The second challenge was that I was completely unable to determine, having found fresh produce, what was a salad vegetable and what was an unspeakable and boneless something dredged out of the depths of the sea.

There are some episodes of Star Trek in which the intrepid crew land on a planet that supports a civilization whose homes are furnished with fruit bowls and flower vases. The set dressers always come up with some laughably weird fruits and flowers to place in the bowls and vases. Bangkok kept reminding me of that.

I stated earlier that on business trips abroad I had few opportunities for fine dining. Occasionally, the opportunity did arise. I was once covering a two-day board-level customer meeting in Vienna, and, as part of the package to entice our most important customers’ CTOs and CIOs to give up two days of their time, these specific meetings included luxury boutique hotel accommodation and fine wining and dining. On this occasion, we were entertaining the customers at Vienna’s finest restaurant. Two of us had requested kosher food, which was provided from a local kosher caterer.

This was during the period when cuisine minceur was all the rage. The restaurant’s first course was, if I remember rightly, a cube of turtle meat about the size of a sugar cube, with two lengths of grass laid tastefully beside it. Next was an espresso cup of consommé. By this point, we had ploughed our way through gefilte fish balls the size of your fist and a deep bowl of chicken soup with lockshen and kneidlach. When the party’s main course of a diaphanous slice of roast beef, a new potato, a fan of six string beans and a teaspoon of mustard sauce arrived, our fellow diners were bidding against each other for a share of the kosher chicken dinner that filled our generous dinner plates.

On another occasion, I was in Montreal for the fast of Asara b’Tevet, in early January. The basement of our hotel led directly into the subterranean pedestrian precinct. We would walk the half mile every morning to the customer’s downtown office. I had not actually been outside for almost a week. When the fast ended at sunset, I was still working, but at 7:30 I decided that I could not face sitting at the desk of my hotel room to break my fast on yet another tuna and salad meal . I knew that there was a kosher restaurant serving the Jewish student community. I always feel that there are few sadder sights than a middle-aged man eating by himself in a restaurant, but I really needed a hot meal of comfort food. I checked on the map; the restaurant was only a ten-minute walk away. So I put on a second pair of socks, donned my thick sweater, winter coat, cap, gloves and scarf, and set off.

If you have never tried to walk in Montreal in midwinter without snowboots you will have to use your imagination. A ten-minute walk in summer becomes a thirty-minute trek, during which, every time you need to cross a road, you have to scale a mound of snow that makes you wish you had brought your crampons. I was almost, but not quite, completely wrapped up against the cold. I never realized that your eyebrows can ache from the cold.

When I eventually arrived at the restaurant, they were about to close, but took pity on me, and I enjoyed chopped liver, salt beef and chips that took me back to the Blooms of my childhood. The meal was so good that I did not even mind the walk back to the hotel.

One final memory. The first time I returned from the Far East, having been away for almost three weeks, I was very much looking forward to the kosher airline meal. Not because I expected it to be fine dining, you understand; simply because I had lived out of a fish can and a cracker packet for too long. When I opened the promising black box, I discovered…tuna and crackers, which I soon learned is the standard fare on long-haul trips from Singapore or Bangkok. Never mind: it made finally arriving back home all the sweeter.

What I haven’t yet spoken about is shabbat away from home. Unless I was on a weeklong trip to Europe, I was unable to return home in time for shabbat, and so I always had to spend shabbat abroad. Watching my non-religious colleagues leave for home on Thursday night or Friday morning was rather depressing, but I usually comforted myself with the knowledge that my employer was footing my hotel bill, and I would have a chance to see something of the city I was in, before my Sunday flight took off. However, I think that shabbat abroad is a large enough subject to warrant a post to itself, at some point in the future when I am casting about for something to write about.

Meanwhile, to prove that you don’t need to travel far from home to see things of interest…

*The fish I packed was principally tuna, with a couple of tins of sardines. This explains this week’s title, which is supposed to be an amusing reference to a song from The King and Me (as some of you would probably prefer me to say).