Recovering from Kuniyoshi

Women are wonderful. 
I'd barely, if ever, 'be honest Kev,' I'd never heard of Kuniyoshi until Nat told me and asked me to go and see the exhibition as she could not, and when I explained this to Noughty A in the studio, that is noughty with an 'o', she immediately arranged us to go together.  'That'll do,' I thought.  'This won't be so bad after all.'  The exhibition may turn out to be incomprehensible and a chore, but I shall have the company of a beautiful woman as compensation. 
Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy. 
Oh hell!  That place again.  I know, or know of, or knew too many people there, and the knowing has never helped me get a picture into their travesty Summer Exhibition.  Not once.  I swear it's nepotism in reverse.  The RA owes me hundreds in futile entry fees and aggravation. 
Worse yet, as I slunk in across the courtyard paddling around the corny water spouts, I saw with horror that the London Original Print Fair was in mid jamboree.  No wonder half the purposeful striders through the tourists looked so familiar.  There were the print dealers betraying their nerves looking expo cocky, printmakers looking desperate, and the printers hungry as hell. 
Waiting for Noughty A, as I should wait, I mused over the London Original Print Fair flier. 
The Daily Telegraph's man Richard Dorment's quote, 'By far the best place to buy prints' headed the exhibitor list of old names, re-namings and the odd unknown.  The odd newcomer? 
I must be out of touch.  Eyestorm - and later to Safari - Google?  Oh it's Them.  Again. 
Andrew Edmunds - hmmm.  Have I forgotten?  Perhaps I never knew, perhaps Andrew Edmunds is new, but no time to dwell on Andy new or not as lovely A arrived, buoyed me to attention, buoyed me up the stairs, into the lift and we were in. 
Kuniyoshi. 
I'd hate to admit that I could ever forget my sweet companion, but I very nearly did forget her. 
Not at first though, my spirit sank as it always does when viewing old prints and drawings in museum conditions.  I want to see these things, not peer tiringly at them glass encased in the dingy gloom of conservation lighting, scrabbling over and over to remove sunglasses I'm not wearing.  Not that I don't appreciate the necessity and not that you can't see the work, and Kuniyoshi's shone through the dusk. 
Bugger the monied grandiosity of the Print Fair below, here were prints of domestic human scale.  No spurious limitings of editions, nothing unoriginal, each a commercial production of multiples from cherry wood blocks cut to print hundreds, thousands, or none if no good.  The handcolouring is without any doubt skilled but shows endless human fallibility.  The printing blocks are small, cherry tree scale and the images are composed of several blocks set tiled together; printed and coloured separately, the variations of washes and blends don't match across the entire image, nor does the pasting together register one printing precisely to its neighbour - this might have mattered to the printers and colourists in the print shop, now, it doesn't matter a bit. 
There are lots of other printmakerly presentation tricks to enjoy: blind embossed textures, the fibrous grain of the paper giving lustre to solid colours, metalic pigments in the colour washes and inks, all good stuff of course but 'what of the images?' 
The overall impression is narrative rather than illustrative.  Noughty A, unforgotten, introduced me to Manga when we marvelled at the obvious post referencing in comic and graphic art.  There were copperplate printing influences in the uses of block textures and wash, from Dutch engravings reaching Japan, and the feeling that there is nothing new under the sun.  Standing in front of the largest pieces, tall multi-block tower block prints perhaps a meter high with slashing vertical colour marks, I overheard a man reminded of Ian Davenport's painting. 
There is a series of battledores which looked like they should be taken home and cut out to shape.  Another series, of clever, rather sinister graphic surrealism; of faces which on closer inspection are composed of contorted bodies. 
The graphic line, so labour intensive to achieve in block cutting for relief printing reminded us of brush strokes more than the marks of nib or pencil. 
But is it art?  'Probably not,' I think, but then wonder at the boldness of each composition stripped back for craft production, ease, speed and cost effectiveness, but compensated for by wild diagonals and irrational composition dominated as much by the graphic panes and seals as the pictorial content.  Many of these prints were meant to be handled, left on tables or seen askew on other people's laps, they weren't conceived to hang framed on the wall.  They look pretty good on the wall though and there's humour.  A fight on a roof almost slapstick, and a series depicting named officials under attack.  'Number 47: Loyal Retainer Nakamura Masatatsu fending off a hurled brasier' was my favourite of the day. 
I had a moment's uncertainty as I grinned.  'Was this meant to be funny?'  What do I know about Japan, next to nothing and resolving to re-read Mishima, lend Mishima to lovely A and investigate calligraphy with her, we walked out into the dazzle of spring sunshine, exhausted, reaching for shades, strolling away through teeming London exhilarated as if we were the only ones there. 

'What size are they?' asked Nat.  None bigger than imperial (76 x 56 cms), most smaller, excepting the two tower block images.  The wood block on display was approximately a foot square.  (30 x 30 cms)

Kuniyoshi is at the RA until early June. 
The London Original Print Fair finished today, Sunday.  Whether you've missed it or anything, there'll be another print fair coming along soon. 

Same same, back in the blighted West

I haven't blogged for a while.  I've been away see and I've almost forgotten how to use this computer; my fingers blunder around making typos and no sense. 
So.  I don't need to tell you what's been happening: jobs gone, banks going, bankers hammered, money getting printed - you know all that and it's on and off the front pages so that's that, and we're getting used to it not being news anymore.  You know what's been happening, the sea level is rising and Barack is digging in, I suppose, because I haven't heard. 
I left on inauguration day and missed his swearing in doing the airport tango with a check in trolley.  Was it any good?  I expect it's been forgotten. 
The US Americans I met were bullish, Bushless at last.  'I never voted for him,' they said, 'now please like me,' they're saying. 
I haven't blogged for a while because I've been away, but what sort of excuse is that? 
I wasn't off the map, and if I had been I'd have been blogging non-stop: I'd have been paid to and my fingers would be razor sharp on any keyboard. 
I didn't go and do anything very exciting.  I went to work.  I can do that, I can take my work nigh anywhere and work providing a few basic conditions can be met.  I can't work on the move though; I need a table that's mine, power, light, not too cold not too hot, cheap if possible, beautiful if beautiful can be got, safe enough, secure within reason, and a constant noise level.  I can't work with bangs or slabcutters grinding.  Good music stops me working: I listen, bad music I have.  People stop me working, but I can't do without people and there were enough. 
I went to Kerala which is exciting, but I went to find all of the above in Kerala, and K provided satisfaction in an unexciting way that was ideal for working.  I ignored Kerala's excitements: its backwaters and beaches, yoga, massages and aruvedic medicines, ashrams, cheap teeth and cheap opticals, resorts and fish restaurants.  I missed out on the elephant parades and holy skewerings, fire walkers, nature reserves, dams and folk singing.  I saw some temples and mosques, and many, many new churches built along the tsunami wrecked shore. 
I took to a quiet terrace in the coconut forest with banana and jack fruit outside, with a swamp as a view; full of weed and duck and jewelled kingfishers, where the house cow went for its daily bath and into which everyone threw their trash.  I bagged mine, put it out and it was thrown into the swamp for me.  Learning the ropes and finding there is no alternative, I came to throw my own there. 
A din seemed to chant in my ear as I woke to the predator's whine; chanting as I worked.  A silent noise of frogs and crickets, crows affirming crow, nameless other shouting birds, dogs, palm fronds clacking in the wind, slap slap of flip-flop in the dirt, slapping laundry, temple bells, temple drums, a distant muezzin, and the wash of ocean surf. 
Laundry hung beside the red track that ran down the hill, past my terrace and around the swamp to Temple Road and dark little shops.  Auto-rickshaws gathered where two tiny, beautiful young women ran an internet cafe: fan cooled, stifling hot, connection fair, and full of mosquitos.  Incense and mosquito coil smoke billowed about their saris and sweet efficient smiles.  All men looked, and they had brothers and cousins at hand. 
The mossies were the drawback.  Too many: hungry and merciless. 
Big fat brown ants walked along the power wires making highways in the sky.  Little ants joined me for gin, liking the tonic best and everything else I ate except pepper and coffee.  Tiniest ants swarmed in the milk pan.  Not many spiders; not many cockroaches, surprisingly few flies and no snakes came indoors. 
The coconuts were ripe and nuts crashed down with lethal potential.  One morning, men came climbing the trunks, their bare feet bound together with tape, carrying curved edged axes to harvest the nuts in a bombardment.  They pruned the fronds which tumbled crashing, blocking my stairs and blocking the track.  Coconuts thumped, chipping masonary, denting the metal gates, ricochetting into the swamp and bounding, rolling together strewn everywhere. 
Fresh coconut flesh, rice and fresh fish - the food was fabulous, if an ordeal to eat with my landlord's family: with hands, served alone and scrutinised, eating alone, overawed and overfed.  Fair food in the tourist restaurants, I don't wish to be unfair, but not good for India, for Kerala not good, where food is of the best in the world. 
It grew too hot in the end, undermining my resilience and well being and forcing me home; here, where I can sit in the cool sun, wear clothes, wrap up warm, walk at a bracing pace and not get bitten. 
I went to work in Kerala, not to play, not for holiday; and work I did.  At what I know, to what effect I don't.  Work, 'same same' Kerala people said to people like me in Kerala.


 

Sitting Bum - Flaming Horror

I try to get up from this screen, I really do. 
I try to turn it off - surely I've finished with it: I log out of my networks, close down the applications, reopen mail to check mail one last time and shut down.  I shut the lid only to lift it again to do the very next thing .  .  .  to write this piece, as it happens. 
With a laptop I don't have to sit back down again in that room, on that chair, or go anywhere.   I don't have to find it; my laptop is with me - available, portable, wifi-ed, ethernetted if desperate, in my bag about my person - all the time. 
Women organise life by their own timetables while men have never been so tyrannised by wife as by wifi, and this, a gender-centric observation is born from desperation.  Crying for help doesn't mean you'll get any but we're all being out-competed by our computers: Mesdames, come and help here. 
Why women should bother is another matter or course, but men never really understand why women bother so much with men anyway.  Self interest, men suppose; I mean, I wouldn't bother one second about another bloke unless, (a) he supports WHU, (b) he is going to either give me a job or do one for me, or, (c ) to misquote Douglas Adams, 'absolutely nothing else'. 
My boss is a woman and she supports WHU. 
'WHU?'  I do know; it's footie - a soccer team, and I don't care even if Barack Obama does follow them, but I bother about my computer - all of the time. 
Not to mention now.  Writing this is on my laptop is symptomatic of my dependence. 
If this is breaking out of jail, tunneling back in is the best I can do.  Smart eh. 
Good moves Man.  Cool, and while I'm on it, it's online and I can shop. 
I can work and conference.  Email, what a drag - text, but far more letters and fewer fax.  No fewer phonecalls. 
My old fashioned, full blooded live chums communicate with me this way as do my parents and children. 
I have new friends online in professional networks, social nings and dating .  .  .  tempted, I join a new group and find 'friends' on arrival, linked in from other networks they're on or I am. 
I do my banking and pay my bills.  I watch my stock free-fall and this is how I'd sell, if I should sell it, or more likely when I have to .  .  .  if there's any value left there.  This is how I bought stock and should be buying more, now, as the market falls in the old faith of risings to come. 
Oh shit. 
Anyways, [adv., pl., p.t.] I bought my holidays, books and music, booked my working trips, arranged the itineraries, saw the hotel poolside, my next car or sofa or computer virtually on this very screen. 
I sell my 'art' from this self same screen, and when I've finished worrying work, assets and tax; working family and friends real and virtual, finished with that and want to do something else .  .  .  to listen to music or the radio, to watch t.v. or a movie, book a ticket, play a game, reserve a seat; I roam around a bit to stretch my legs, massage my calfs and remember I'm a biped not a sitting bum; then it's back at the screen to relax. 
Relaxed and ready to work again, I stay put to write, to draw, print, to order the gear and arrange transport. 
I'm struggling to turn off my computer and there's so little reason to.  Everything I want is on it so why turn it off, why do I want to, what else am I looking for?  Country walks?  Sex? 
Er .  .  .  yes, food too, and virtuality suddenly seems such bollocks; horseshit if you're North American.

 
Laptop Lunches
VirtualNora wrote to all her network friends, stricturing us, 'When there is a will there is away'. 
It's a typo of course, I stick up for my mates, even the virtual friends in social networks where we sit safe in our smug profiles; or, is it vice versa, smug in our safe profiles; okay, sit safely smug in our smuggly safe profiles and wait in hope that someone else will do something.  Even, possibly especially VirtualNora, who set up and moderates her network is waiting, but waiting for what exactly? 
It is such a thrill to get any response (!!!!!), and such a disappointment when the response is, 'Hi :)'.  You garner virtual friends with less than that - I haven't exchanged a 'Hi :)' with half of mine.  When, in the virtual whirl, do we ever 'cut to the chase'? 
Now I know there is a problem here.  There is an inbuilt resistance to being identified as you, an acknowledgment that life in the virtual is not so safe as sitting solo on one's bum should be.  Having a common name, I found my name is far commoner than I'd thought.  Getting a domain name, a mail, or blog address with your real name is no straightforward matter; and you know what's coming here: if I want a blog with my name on it, it is going to cost me. 
Life in the virtual is not so good as to come for free, so there's a surprise, but we all like 'free' even while we know that freebies are nearly always rubbish and come with a cost.  But, I'm not going into expense where 'free' is an option, indeed 'free' is the name of the game.  The cost is, and it's a challenge, is I've no free choice but to name myself atavistically as 'nogwinting.blahblog' or somesuch, and lucky me not to have to resort to numerals this time. 
Naming myself thus .  .  .  well .  .  .  what can I not say?  Who can't I pretend to be?  What profile image can I not put up? 
It's a challenge and a temptation.  It doesn't matter what I blog however weird - even I can't remember my name.  I become anonymous to myself and anonymity is a powerful tool. 
It's a temptation worthy of challenge and it's free.  Anonymous can speak without consequence, without reference to 'self'.  Pure unfettered messaging is possible, and sedition is necessary to the best of societies. 
The message can be pure, but Anonymous suffers from speaking without the conviction that consequence brings, without the certainty and impact that an 'I' bestows, and Anonymous is too easily dismissed as feeble minded, vandal, cowardly and disaffected. 

Vital or Virtual

Is the virtual profile a persona?  I cannot safely assume that my friend, VirtualNora is a 'she'.  The profile picture is a hint: looks like 'she', but who can tell?  220 by 220 random pixels at low resolution is not so many to make much of.  Have 'Photoshop', can photoshop, can do anything with 220 square and don't need to take so much trouble over it as that. 
The anonymous option opportunity is both the strength and weakness of virtual, both part of the appeal and part of the problem. 
Are people hiding something; inventing something; proclaiming a hidden side; a private side; a better side; disguising a shameful, embarrassing inadequate truth about themselves, or: is this liberation, freedom, a great unfettering outlet of a creative streak available to us all - at long last?  Or are we all taking the piss? 
Does it matter that there is no way of knowing? 
'do u have another name?'  asks VirtualUsha. 
VirtualCordelia states, 'If you have to ask, you don't want to know. '
VirtualMajlinta refuses my 'friend request'.  What's wrong with me?  And still miffed several days on, provoked to poke, maybe 'her', I reinstate my add request.  Take That!
Yay. 
People or atavars, name, username, virtual name: what is this identity confusion?  Is it a dilemna, or guise, or identity crisis? 
VirtualNanny guides us away from vital through the strict profile form (see Privacy conditions) to submit smart favourites, cool ones, the honest ones and the cute.  Finding the profile pic takes time; the one you like for this yourself if you have one; time to make some more; getting them onto the computer plus a bit of retouch; filling in the 'about you' box in 1000 words or 700 characters; deciding which your favourite movies, music, food, holiday destinations, sport, books and others are, and what this list of likes says about you. 
Are VirtualNora and virtual networks an identity crisis with a friendly face? 
Is there an unspoken acknowledgment that 'virtual' isn't real, (how mad is that?); that Facebook friends aren't real friends, (huh?); that social networks aren't social; that as the chase never kicks off it's not much of a network at all? 
Is this 'play'? 
Licensed Identity Crisis, guise or disguise, is this not a 'tease'? 
Naughty VirtualNannyNing letting us stip-tease like this.  It's 'fancy dress' in pretty pixels.  The Masque Ball without thrills and disappointment, and as so often under laptop tyranny, I wonder if I'm missing the whole point.  I wonder if I'm the child seeing the Emperor naked or whether I'm just missing the point of nudity. 
Still no joy with VMajlinta and I'm not going to put up with this vicarious brush off without having my virtual say. 
I'll say not .  .  .  Message to VM whatsoever you are: 'Well B'orf! Don't be my virtual friend you Precious Pongy Pile of Perfect Atavistical Pixel Dung :('  But then again, 'Hey, get a grip nogwinting why don't I?'  Like everything else, virtual may mean nothing and come to nothing, virtual is part of the vital and on that basis it's all a bit of a shrug and a bit more of the same.  Better be in the virtual than not. 

Bloody Nora
Better get this thing off my lap  .  .  .  I so know that Lap Dancing ain't sex.

 

SCARED OF GAZA

THE GREATWORK: the novel

I haven't been caught yet.  The 'Great Work' nearly killed me and I married his oldest friend.  We have two boys.  That should have been vengeance enough.  Honor looked after me and I hope she remembers to until her dying day.  I suppose that's it really . . . a horror story and there's nothing supernatural about any of it.  I'm not dead, so, it's not over.  Only Owen spanked me hard enough and look at all the trouble that caused.  You see, the thing is . . .

The thing is . . .

The ten thousand.

CLUTCHING AT DEBRIS

THE GREAT WORK

IN TIME

MRS SMILING

Book keeping, and beekeeping.

The novel by
K JACKSON



comment? . . . contact   Kevin Jackson©2008

forthcoming:

'SOLITAIRES'
the new Novel by Kevin Jackson,

Who did That? The characters from The GREATWORK live on, delving into things they
never could have done.

Bred to Bread

HIDDEN discreetly beneath a napkin of pristine laundering, lay a complete, perfectly sliced loaf of bread. We are eating in a traditional Turkish restaurant and there are musicians to entertain us.  Oud and saz players back a young singer and she sits next to a fierce looking older man who provides percussion on a large tambour.  The fare includes rice, frites and pastas of choice, lamb, delicious fish, and salad we would pay dearly for in UK.

I offer the bread basket around but there are no takers.  When the three of us are supposed to eat bread, and so much of it, is not clear.  We don't touch it and I wonder what will become of it.

When or more importantly, why should bread ever need to figure in our meal?

Wearily, I suppose it is the tradition of bread: the food of life, the base of sustenance, the very basis of hospitality and shelter, next only after water; one of the two things you can't refuse to share whilst a trace of humanity remains.  Cigarettes come in a late but fighting third.

But I hate bread crust and crumb, and always have done ever since I just didn't like it very much and was told how much I should.  I've been bred to deny my bready loathing and try to overcome my hatred at every turn and slice.  I try to hide all my hatreds.

The loaf lying on our table provokes me, there-there now, and considering that I do hate bread I eat plenty of dough. 

Bread 'fills you up and doesn't kill you', which is not bad.  The trouble is, I've always thought 'not bad' isn't necessarily good, and 'not bad', unless used in admiration or irony, is rarely very interesting.

Each breaking wave in bread fashion gets my hopes up.  Each travel where bread I haven't seen or tasted has to be offered and has to be eaten, has me wondering whether maybe here bakers have cracked it; and this time it won't be more of the same jaw stodging, tooth clogging, tongue bland indissoluble pulp.

I hate the soft and the hard, the crushed wheat and the toasted; I hate it leavened and unleavened.  I hate poppy seeds sprinkled on top of ochre crust that's as soft and uncrustlike as milk skinning over a gentle flame.  I hate the indigestible, uncooked, decorations of whole grains of wheat, I hate them when they fill the bag with the bread in it.  I hate the sprinklings of raw flour.  I hate bread bins and bread baskets for their ubiquitous smugness, their self proclaiming importance, for their pride of place, for getting in the way on crowded restaurant tables.

Will it offend efendim if I ask to have this bread taken away?

I hate communion wafers and Lord choose Jews for bad bread; dirty grey and bitter rye, and bagels and challar glazed with honey so I could weep at the waste of bee labour.

Pretzels, I hate them . . . and black bread.

I hate breadcrumbs.  With each and every bready transaction, crumbs litter hopelessly, uselessly on the breadboard, sticking in the saw teeth of the bread knife.  I hate bread knives, unwashed, slickly ever clean from the bread's cutting . . . never making enough crumbs to feed the birds but plenty to bring the mites, weevils, roaches and mice; never enough crumbs to bread the chicken or fish, to make the stuffing for the poor turkey; no, we buy breadcrumbs from the shops for that and I despair when I see packs of 'Fresh Bread Crumbs' for sale!  I see the lurking hand of marketeers and accounting executives and imagine a sweep, scoop 'n' bag machine beneath the bread slicer.  I see my child self grating a stale loaf into a big bowl in my Grandma's kitchen.

I hate pitta bread even while it has the great virtue of crumblessness.  I hate peasant white, and loathe baguettes and ekmek.

I hate the ash of toast spraying from the knife, sooting over plate, table cloth, napkin and suit; carbon grits in the marmalade and butter, on kitchen surfaces and floors; skumming up the bottom of the sink; the scatter detritus smouldering in the tray of the toaster.  I really hate toast, and toast is better than bread.  I hate pizza base, thick or thin 'crust'.

Crust! I hate the word.

'Eat your crusts!'   Yes, eat up those crusts away from the 'crumb' and butter, away from the jam on the edge of the sarnie.  Just crust.  And if I were hungry, I'd eat crust.  If I were that hungry I'd cry out for it.  The hungry die for the lack, but I'm not hating bread like that.  Just crust, so uncrusty that a finger prod sees crust bounce back, or so hard and flakey, so solid, so chewily cudlike, so draining of saliva.

My heart sinks at the prospect of bread and butter pudding.  I wonder what Summer Pudding has to do with summer and hate it even more if it has blackcurrants, for reminding me that nothing is ready in the summer.  Summer is the ripening time.  Autumn is Harvest.  In summertime we eat the last stale dried up scraps from the previous year and the thin bitter early fruits, the creams of young early births.  Nobody wastes fresh strawberries on bread.

Give stale bread to the goat, to the pigs or the fowl; use it as bait or let stale bread go to mould and mulch.  Don't make deserts out of it.  Don't add stale wine to anything - if it is inedible or undrinkable, throw it away!

I hate wafer bread, and crispbread, cornbread and ryebread, wholemeal, whole grain, malted, and I can't abide breadmakers.  I hate the smell of yeast even in beer and I quite like beer.  I hate the kneading, the rising, the waiting, the baking for the disappointment of getting a loaf of dullard bread: or rolls, or baps, ciabatta, brioche, cottage rectangulars, damper, flat, focaccio, lavash, matzo, or pumpernickel - all plain pan, pain plain dull.

Bakers had the good idea of sweetening bread and it had to be tried.  Nutty seeds and granulars replaced with dried fruits, the dustings of flour with dusted cinnamon and sugar.  Why dust the darn stuff with anything?  The dust falls off and it's still grisly within, but one batch of loaves has little chance to stand out against another.  Bread isn't pretty and the baker has to try every trick.  Even ever-so-secure in the market place as bakers are, no baker can afford to bake bad bread, or not worse than the neighbouring bakery bakes down the road.  If the flour has grit in it, or chalk, or chaff or pest, chemicals or preservatives, one baker better have no more in the loaves than in any other loaf about town.

But, what else can go wrong if you're a baker?  Poor people will eat anything they can get their hands on and buy whatever cheap can be had.  The rich hoof for themselves but when the bakers go bust, when the bakeries close down for want of fuel or ingredients, when no bread can be got - everyone is in deep trouble.

There's no loafing idly about town without the lumpen sight of bread on common display.

What a dull staple, but that's what it is and Christ broke bread to represent Himself.  He had a precursor miracle, a rehearsal with 'loaves and fishes', and I've always thought of sardines on toast . . . which is the best way of getting bread down me.  It is a nigh criminal waste of sardine but if there aren't enough, eke them out with bread.

That's what bread does, it stretches and extends, rendering the rich palatable, the bland less bland by comparison, and never making the awful better.  Burger and . . . bap, see what I mean?  Or, perhaps you don't.  Think 'bread and marge'.

Bread fills in the corners like rubble.  It's foundation material.  It gets grain into us.  A convenience food that satisfies our gatherer ancestor instincts, neatly bi-passing the chore of finding seeds to eat one by one.  Where the local seed is rice, there's no need to bother.  Rice areas are less bready but there seems to be little else to do with maize, and wheat; that strangest and most wonderful of grasses, but mill it down to flour.  Flour solves the problem of turning seeds into food.

'Stottie Cakes' they're called, but Stotties are bread.  What is the matter with cake and biscuit?  What's wrong with scone?

Why use flour to make so much bread?

If we didn't have it, we'd have something else and, sure we'd be hard pressed to invent that something now, and, I'd possibly hate that even more than I hate bread. 
I hate Indian breads less: roti, naan, paratha and puris.  Chapatis work for me and the Mexican tortilla almost cheers me up, out of my hatred, for bread does possess the virtue of adaptability.

But, cinder croutons in soup, soda bread, bread sticks, ready toasted toast for the microwave, door stop sarnies, club sandwiches; triple deckers tied with sticks surrounded by chips.

Serving 'french fries' with bread says it all.  If bread were any good in the first place as opposed to being brutally bog-standard essential, we should settle for it.  We would, if it were half-decent instead of passingly passable compared to all the barely edible rot that bread has been before.  We shouldn't have to give it out at all when, as in this restaurant in Turkey where she sings of love and loss, there already is rice, frites and pastas of choice.

If I am hungry, I'll eat anything.  I'd fight for bread to get it or ensure we have it, and I offered the loaf to my dining companions again.  The napkin was accepted.  There were no takers of bread.

We are still hungry and eat more, still hungry but not 'that' hungry.

I am deeply suspicious of those who say they like bread.

'Oh.  Yes?  Just bread?'