For the last three years I’ve used January to try and learn something new. Three years ago it was to try 31 days of exercise, two years ago it was 31 days of stretching, last year it was 31 days of learning to play the piano and this year it’s 31 days of… lunch.

I met a man in Tesco. I knew him, so it wasn’t weird. It would be strange to meet a man in Tesco otherwise. It’s not somewhere you would suggest to meet a stranger. A pub, a coffee shop, a cinema, the gym. Those are acceptable places to meet. But if someone says “Let’s meet.” And you say “where?” and they say “The Toiletry Aisle in Tesco Sauchiehall St” you’re going to have question. Questions like “Do I know my escape routes from this location?” and “How do I run away?”

I met a man while trying to solve yesterday’s filling problem. I still had coleslaw and wanted to finish the packet. But what to add to it? Sliced cheese or sliced ham or sliced chicken or perhaps, hear me out, some combination of all two or three? Madness, I know.

But I chose another option. I thought “This month is meant to be about trying new things so what goes great with mayonnaise and would be something different to try for lunch?”

And my brain picked: tomatoes.

As a filling.

Something neither cheese nor ham or chicken or even flat.

I picked a round filling.

And then, disaster. There were no rolls in Tesco! (Technically there were rolls, they just didn’t have any of the ones I wanted). I had to get croissants instead. (Other baked goods were available, but, as I had both coleslaw and tomatoes, I knew another crazy leap into the world of wraps would be a lunchtime experiment too far, like if the inventors of the cloned sheep called Dolly had skipped the whole idea of cloning a sheep and had gone straight to create an army of 100 Hulk Hogans).

You know what though. Unlike 100 pensioners ripping their t-shirts off with their bare hands, this turned out to be a decent combo. It could probably have still done with some meat, but, for a change, the tomatoes added a wee bit of bite and a wee bit of sweetness to the sharp tasting coleslaw.

Sometimes it does pay to experiment.

Bread: Tesco Croissant

Filling: coleslaw PLUS tomatoes

Taste: like an English picnic in a French park