Family Nan

There’s not much that I can say about this that the picture doesn’t tell. This is a really big nan. At first glance it was reminiscent of some kind of flat fish or ray, designed to sit on the sea floor and blend with the pebbles and detritus whilst sucking up bits of plankton or something (I’m not very good at animal stuff). Incredibly it performed a similar function because there were no crumbs and the linen was startlingly white beneath where it had sat at the end of the meal. It’s actually advertised as a ‘family nan’ but a table of varied ethnicities didn’t stop the waiters from letting us have them. There were ten of us in “Omar’s” in Bradford and we had two big breads on our table.

Competitive spirits were fostered at the sight of this unwieldy dough and several times a voice from the other end offered scorn at my southern inability to make more than a slight tear in the nobbly beast. If I had a restaurant I’d have family size everything that was cheap- it’s amusing and it fills people up. It always used to annoy me in my work canteen that they’d only give you a couple of potatoes per portion or a kid’s size serving of chips (as well as paper plates and suicide proof cutlery). How much is a potato? ‘Give people a bastard plateful and they will keep coming back'- it doesn’t take much to work that one out. Make something especially large and they’ll take photos of it and blog about it.

The whole ‘family’ size thing reminds me of when I was working in Austria. They had this big fad for describing anything in multipacks as ‘family pack’ (In English). No-one believes me when I relate this but I swear it’s true- I stopped to answer the screeching wail of nature in a service station somewhere up the Brenner Pass. Whilst enjoying the relief I read the following on the machine on the wall: ‘5 Kondom- Family Pack!’.