What will you want for dinner or shall we eat out? A few weeks ago there was the tussle with “Can I have your birthday list?” resulting in a virtually blank piece of paper. After all, an Aston Martin DB9 is no more likely than being stuck on a desert island with a broody Charlize Theron.

Most of the meals we’ve had out have been pretty dreadful too. Expensive, badly cooked food with wine unfit for vinegar. The worst being in a Brighton MexTex restaurant with a Les Routiers sign above the door. Only after reluctantly paying the bill we learned it was from a restaurant the chef ran in another town some years before. It is just so frustrating when 50 miles away in France just about any restaurant’s 14 Euro menu will be scrummy and even the cheapest plonk drinkable. We even tried one of Gordon Ramsey’s nightmare kitchens in Hampshire, unfortunately before rather than after the great man gave them an effing seeing-to. That one burned down in mysterious circumstances not long after the TV show was broadcast.

The answer can only be cod and chips on the beach in old town Hastings. Bought from the Fish Hut, where the cook’s apron is as greasy as the spoons. No Les Routier sign but a far more valuable certificate from Hastings Beaver Scouts voting it the best chippie in town. The portions are far too large and eaten while walking between the fishing fleet pulled up on the beach and throwing chips to flocks of gulls hovering above us. Especially baby ones with spotty grey feathers who haven’t learned the tricks of begging.

The only other meal worth repeating is from the Still and West. Sitting in the window overlooking Portsmouth harbour. It’s a bit like being in the stern cabin of HMS Victory. Her Majesty’s ships pass about 20 feet away, their crews lined up on deck to enter harbour at eye level with you as they cruise by. Fish platter for two with chilled Muscadet sur lie please.

What of software?
Ask a similar question about software and the answer comes easily. What is the best you have used? Both of us said QuarkXPress without thinking. We’ve lived with it since version 3, though nearly switched full-time when inDesign 2 arrived while QXP 5 was still running in Classic. The latest QXP 7 has leapt ahead in terms of usability, speed and with an interface based on a long-established design. We were loud and vehement in our slating of QXP 6 but even inDesign CS3 is flawed in so many departments that it’s going to take Adobe a long time to dig themselves out of some of the holes.

Other packages have transformed our work: PostScript, PDFs, Photoshop and Acrobat have been as life-changing as XPress but not without side effects. Plus of course, Mac OS X, especially Quicklook and Time Machine, iTunes for revolutionising music and CoD United Offensive on line, EyeTV with CyTV for the fun they give. iDisk is so darned useful being linked closely to the Mac and iChat is a brilliant idea waiting for the world to catch up. Some programs have been around as long as we’ve been using Macs, such as Fetch, the most reliable FTP app even if we use Transmit in preference because of the support for webDav and columns view.

And now the baddies
We hate Microsoft Office with a vengeance, in fact everything MS because they sell products that seemed to have been made by 1970s British Leyland and updated by local government ever since. MS can even buy-in a great piece of work such as iView and turn it into the stinking pile now called Expression Media. Adobe products aren’t far behind. After using most for the last 30 years we still fight with them and will never forgive Adobe for buying and dropping Freehand which was always a better package than Illustrator.

Second worst to those… hmmmmm.