Grown Up Tastes

I made the mistake of putting chopped nuts in the chocolate chip cookies on Sunday. We had friends over for lazy Sunday mugs of tea and inspection of The Extension. Sadly however the resident 12 year old does not like nuts and is refusing to eat the cookies because they contain nuts. This means that I am going to have to give them away, send them with The Man of the Place to his office or eat them myself. The new wetsuit hanging in the closet won't fit if I choose the last option.

I didn't put the nuts in there to ward off George, but that's what has happened. I put chopped pecans in because I like them. I used to not like nuts in cookies but somewhere along the line, my tastes changed.

I like to eat a number of things now that I didn't like before. Its a sign along with having conversations with my peers about insurance, that I may very well be an adult. I don't know when it happened but now I like strong cheeses like stilton and roquefort, anchovies, red wine and nuts in cookies. I do have to be careful that the nuts aren't Brazil nuts - terribly allergic to those.

I read somewhere that this is because our tastebuds loose their zing as our bodies grow older so that cheese that would be spat out by a child (and rightly so some may say) will be savoured by adults. When we were on holiday in France, we went through much more cheese than fancy bon bons from the pattiserie.

The other thing that changes is what we value. Years ago, before child number three was being considered, I was wandering home from the pub with some pals and we passed a tile shop. Being a new homeowner, I went up to the windows to see if there were any tiles in there for our bathroom. I didn't see anything I liked from the window and we kept on walking. I noted that a material change had just occured. Not five years earlier if I had been passing that tile shop while going home from the pub with my friends, I would have cast scorn on this waste of perfectly good commercial space. Somebody put a tile shop there. It could have been another pub!!! I would have poured scorn on the whole tile industry and the sad customers with their sad little tile buying lives.

I now have a tile buying life. I wouldn't call it sad though. Its just different to the life I had and different to the life I thought I might have.