I FEAR I am turning into a grumpy old woman. My husband says I have always been grumpy, even when I was young. My children also say I have always been grumpy, and that I have also always been old. But this is different. Little things, minor irritations which would have passed me by years ago, really are starting to get my goat.

Take last weekend. We went out to a lovely restaurant for a meal with friends. The setting was stunning, the food was delicious. There really was much to praise, and very little to complain about, until the “Yorkshire ham and wild garlic arancini with wild garlic mayonnaise” I ordered arrived and it wasn’t at all what I expected. Because it wasn’t a succulent piece of Yorkshire ham with some garlicky thing on the side, it was deep-fried rice balls, with flakes of Yorkshire ham, coated in breadcrumbs. “But you ordered the arancini,” said my husband. “And everybody knows arancini are deep fried rice balls.”

“I don’t,” I glared at him. “But I suppose I should have asked the waiter,” I conceded. “Well, if you’d done that, you really would have looked stupid,” said the man who seems to have forgotten he was brought up on a traditional British diet of fish fingers, sausages and mash and roast dinners and didn’t always know his navets from his noisettes or his pignoli from his porcini. As someone not embarrassed to confess that I don’t always know my oignons when it comes to unnecessarily complicated menus in foreign languages, I protested, grumpily.

This restaurant, like so many others nowadays, prides itself on serving locally-sourced Yorkshire fare, most of it grown or reared within a five-mile radius. But why do so few of these often highly creative and accomplished establishments not feel the need to work with words which have germinated and blossomed in this country too? “What is wrong with describing a dish as ‘Flakes of Yorkshire ham in deep-fried rice balls’ if that is what it is,” I grumped. While I always use the Google Translate app on my phone to translate the menu when I’m abroad, I don’t think I should have to use it in Yorkshire. When I was in Rome for a long weekend recently, I happily used Google, as all the menus were written exclusively in Italian. But then that is what I expected. I didn’t see any English words used to describe dishes, nor were there any French, Greek, Danish, or anything other than Italian.

When you’re on a night out, you generally want to relax and chat with friends. On this occasion, the restaurant served up lots of little tasty dishes, which was a bit different and, as it turned out, thoroughly enjoyable. But it did make ordering slightly more complicated than usual, and it would have been much too time-consuming, and required far too much thought, to pester our waiter for detailed descriptions of every dish.

Anyway, I had my rant and we headed home, along picturesque Yorkshire country roads, which were littered with potholes – treacherous potholes, which wreck our cars and put lives at risk. They’re a symbol of the damage done by short-sighted spending cuts in austerity Britain. But don’t get me started on potholes, because that would take up a whole column, all of its own, maybe even a series. And I think I’ve done enough grumping for one morning… A FRIEND took her children to Northumberland recently, but her five-year-old found it wasn’t quite what he expected when they got there. “But you said we were going to Linda’s farm,” he wailed.

THE same child couldn’t understand why, during his primary school assemblies, they referred to toy soldiers after every prayer. His mother didn’t know what he was talking about: “We all have to say ‘Army men’ at the end,” he explained.