Part 325: Pasta Disaster

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. Thoughts on our FI timeline, and some bizarre experiences dining out.

Weekly Update

It’s been a very eventful week that started with my Nan’s funeral. The funeral was at one o’clock on Monday. The crematorium is around fifteen minutes away by car. I started trying to book an uber at quarter past twelve, allowing what I thought was more than enough margin. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, uber was insanely busy. A bus wasn’t an option as the routes don’t line up neatly, and timetables are unforgiving when you’re already running late.

At 12:52, I finally secured a driver. By the time I arrived, the service had already begun. I slipped into the chapel quietly, aware that I’d missed the opening moments. Afterwards, I was told that I’d been mentioned early on. There’s a particular kind of frustration in knowing you were present in words, but not yet in body, and it comes with a feeling of having let someone down, even when circumstances were outside your control.

When I was first born, I spent some time living at my Nan’s with my mum, who was very young then. We didn’t talk about it much, but as a young boy I remember time spent there clearly. Sitting at the table playing cards with her. The kitchen was always busy with the comings and goings of my aunties, uncles, and cousins. Mountains of home-cooked chips appearing as if by magic, eaten alongside slice after slice of buttered bread. Huge pots of stew that seemed to last for days. Endless mugs of tea, made without asking, just placed in front of you because that’s what you did.

From what I was able to witness, it was a lovely service. Warm, respectful, and genuinely reflective of who she was; a loving woman who meant a great deal to the people around her. It felt like a fitting send-off. I wish I’d been there from the very beginning, but I’m grateful for what I did see, and for the chance to sit, listen, and say goodbye in my own way.

I didn’t stay long at the wake as I didn’t feel comfortable.  It was in a small pub that was very cramped and busy.  I was already on edge a little from the stress of being late, and so I had a drink with my Mom and spoke with a few family members, and then made my way home.

It was Oana’s birthday this week and we’ve had a couple of meals out to celebrate, which I’ll go into more detail about later.  We also had a huge bike ride on her birthday itself.  We covered just over 45km in our longest ride to date.  

There’s one part of the route we took where we encounter a fair few people walking their dogs and occasionally we will stop and have a chat with them.  This time we saw a guy walking a staffy on a leash.  The dog was friendly and came bounding over to us.  I think the walker was worried at first that we would be scared or annoyed, but we both fussed over the dog which we learned was called Bonnie.  She was excitable and playful, and would jump up at us both for head scratches.  After a few minutes our bottoms were covered in muddy paw prints but we didn’t mind.  You can’t be mad when another living creature is that happy and excited just to interact with you for a few moments.  

Pasta Disaster

Before I get stuck into this, it’s worth setting some context. Oana and I are foodies. We’ve been fortunate enough to eat in genuinely excellent restaurants across multiple continents, from steak houses in Syracuse and barbecue joints in South Carolina, to Michelin-starred venues in Berlin and street food stalls in India.

We judge food by context. A kebab from a backstreet Turkish place in Sliema is not held to the same standard as a nine-course tasting menu served in a former gold merchant’s basement in Prague (a meal I still rave about ten years on), nor should it be. Different settings, different expectations.

What is consistent, though, is our love of food as an experience. It’s our main vice. We care about the theatre of it, the pacing, the service, the atmosphere, and the sense that someone, somewhere, actually gives a damn.

Which is precisely why this evening was so disappointing.

We booked Psalter for what should have been a genuinely meaningful evening: a birthday and a (belated) anniversary, clearly stated at the time of booking. To be fair, and fairness is important, the birthday was acknowledged. There was a thoughtful handwritten card, mentioned by the first waitress when we were seated. A genuinely lovely touch.

The anniversary, however, was completely ignored. Not mentioned once. When you explicitly flag a double occasion and only half of it registers, it immediately sets the tone. Not disastrous on its own, but the first hairline crack in what turned out to be a rapidly collapsing façade.

The first course arrived promptly: cheese tarts, a small fish tart for me, and a beetroot one for Oana. On the plate, these were excellent. Beautifully presented, delicate, wafer-thin pastry, technically impressive. Unfortunately, they were delivered by a waitress who appeared to resent both the food and our existence. My plate was slammed onto the table, and my dish was introduced with the immortal phrase:

“Salmon-tuna-whatever.”

In a fine dining restaurant. Just let that sit there.

A third waiter then appeared to explain the dishes properly, though with all the warmth and engagement of someone announcing train delays. This was also the point at which it became clear that we were not being looked after by a waiter, but by an endlessly rotating cast of strangers. Within ten minutes, we’d had four different members of staff at the table. No rapport or continuity. Just vibes.

Bread with Marmite butter followed which was genuinely excellent and we accepted an unprompted offer for more. We, reasonably I would argue, assumed it would arrive shortly. It didn’t. Two courses later, we had to ask where it was. Apparently expectations are a personal failing now.

The winter squash tart with lovage, black garlic and squash purées was fine. Not particularly to my taste (thick custard textures remain deeply suspicious), but the purées were well balanced and clearly skillfully made.

Then came the cauliflower cheese. This was the high point of the evening. Faultless. Rich, comforting, beautifully executed. With the eventual arrival of the second helping of bread, it briefly felt like we were eating in the restaurant we’d booked rather than the one we were actually in. We could happily have eaten multiple bowls of this alone and left satisfied.

This, unfortunately, was where things began to unravel completely.

After a 36-minute wait, strange given the earlier pacing of a dish every fifteen minutes or so, the next course arrived. My salmon looked excellent and, to be fair, was genuinely enjoyable. Oana, however, was served what was described as agnolotti, a description delivered by the same waitress responsible for “whatever”, and therefore already on thin ice.

Agnolotti, for the avoidance of doubt, is filled pasta. What arrived was not filled. It was not sealed. It was not properly cooked. It consisted of large, clumsy, uneven squares of pasta dough, raw in places, leaking water into the sauce until the whole dish tasted like diluted washing-up water. It was plated with random splatters of cheese and absolutely no sense of care, refinement, or pride.

It wasn’t just bad. It was embarrassing.

Throughout the meal, staff had asked how things were at the end of each course. When Oana left almost the entire pasta dish untouched? Silence. No question. No concern. No curiosity. The plates were simply cleared, and the evening trudged on.

The meat course arrived around twenty minutes later. Tasty enough, but the portion was extremely small, and the rosti had the unmistakable air of something pre-prepared and reheated without enthusiasm. Other tables were offered additional gravy. We were not.

We accepted the cheeseboard because, astonishingly, we were still hungry. It was acceptable, but again, the portions were miserly for the price point.

Dessert arrived promptly and was fine although my ice cream had almost completely melted. By that stage, we were ready to leave.

The background details continued to undermine the experience. The table was visibly stained on arrival, and we cleaned it with a tissue and some hand gel. Crumbs accumulated throughout the meal without being cleared. A coaster was provided for the water bottle but not for the glasses, which promptly sweated condensation all over the table. The music, a mix of Linkin Park, Pulp, and other similar artists felt wildly at odds with the fine-dining image being projected. Less “special occasion”, more “pub with ideas above its station”.

Had we paid full price, we would have felt completely cheated. Even at half price, it felt poor value. We raised our concerns on the night and were offered a £20 reduction, which barely acknowledged the issues. At that point, we were too worn down by the experience to argue further.

Afterwards, we sent an email to Psalter detailing the good and the bad in a fairly balanced way.  The reply came from the chef-patron, Tom Lawson, and it was a masterclass in boilerplate indifference. Generic, hollow, and completely devoid of ownership or reflection. If this is how feedback is handled at the top, the rest of the evening suddenly makes a lot more sense.

We won’t be returning.

This was meant to be a special night. One occasion was ignored, the service was erratic and at times rude, and one dish was so poorly executed it bordered on parody. The inconsistency, lack of care, and complacency on display were staggering.

We genuinely wanted to enjoy it. We left disappointed, hungry, and wondering how long reputation alone can keep a place like this afloat.

One last point about food is that Oana and I decided to drastically reduce the amount of meat that we eat in our diet.  We are almost entirely veggie at home, but will still eat meat on occasion when we go to a restaurant.  It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while because we think we could all do with reducing our meat consumption.  It’s better for the environment, and better for the animals.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Ragnarok: Chess Team Book 4 by Jeremy Robinson and Kane Gilmour.

Watching: Spartacus (Netflix).

Reading: The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko by Derek Tyler Attico. 

Spartacus, the show, is great fun.  It’s vulgar, graphic, funny, and horrific.  The production value is lacking at times, but it’s a good story based on real history.  I watched the show before I knew anything about the actual history, and I was subsequently surprised by how faithful it was to what we know about those times.  I mean, it’s not exactly a documentary, but it doesn’t seem to veer too far off course.

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £129,062.01.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £114,880.70.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £510,374.32.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83. 

Total Debts: £174,692.83.

Total Wealth: £335,681.49.

I keep circling back to the same question, usually late in the evening when my brain is tired enough to stop pretending it doesn’t care. When can we actually retire? Not the Instagram version of retirement, where someone in linen trousers claims they “escaped the rat race” at 37 and now appears to exist permanently on a sun lounger, but the real version. The one that still has inflation, broken appliances, market crashes, and the quiet background anxiety of not wanting to screw this up.

I’m 42 now, turning 43 later this year. Oana is 37, turning 38 early next year. We’re far enough along that this question feels legitimate, but not so far that the answer is obvious. We’re not starting from nothing, but we’re also not at the stage where money has become abstract. Between us we’ve built up roughly £130,000 in Stocks and Shares ISAs, £23,000 in Premium Bonds, and around £158,000 in pensions. We have a £175,000 mortgage, and a pile of student loans that sit in the background doing what student loans do best: acting like a slightly annoying graduate tax rather than something that meaningfully dictates our decisions.

On paper, it looks fine. Sensible, even. And yet the question still nags. Is this enough to stop working?

For a long time, I kept framing retirement as a single moment. One day you work, the next day you don’t, and somehow the spreadsheet just agrees with you. When I finally forced myself to slow down and actually walk through the mechanics, that illusion didn’t survive very long. The problem, it turns out, isn’t pensions. Pensions are almost boring in comparison. The real problem is everything that comes before them.

In the UK, early retirement lives or dies on one inconvenient fact: you can’t touch your pension until your late fifties. For us, that potentially means twenty years where everything has to be funded from ISAs, cash, and other non-pension investments. This stretch is often called the “ISA bridge”, and it’s the hardest part of the entire plan. If you want to spend £3,000 a month for twenty years, you’re suddenly staring down the barrel of well over half a million pounds of accessible money before pensions even enter the picture. Seeing that written down has a way of cutting through optimism very quickly.

At that point, the idea of retiring “as soon as possible” with no compromises stopped feeling bold and started feeling careless. So instead of trying to force the numbers to fit the fantasy, we changed the question. Rather than asking how we could replace our entire current lifestyle forever, we asked something much simpler: what does a good life actually cost us?

When we stripped away a lot of noise, the answer surprised us. We don’t need £3,000 a month. We could live very comfortably on £2,500. That’s £30,000 a year. It doesn’t feel deprived. It doesn’t feel like austerity. It just feels intentional. And that single adjustment quietly transforms the entire plan.

From there, something finally clicked. Instead of obsessing over pensions or trying to engineer clever withdrawal strategies, the focus became very clear: build the bridge first. The plan that started to make sense was boring, slow, and oddly reassuring. We keep working for now. We invest £20,000 a year into each of our ISAs. We leave pensions alone and let them compound in the background. We don’t dabble in side hustles or half-retirement. And when the bridge is genuinely complete, we stop working entirely.

Right now, we already have about £153,000 that’s accessible. At £30,000 a year, that’s roughly five years of life already sitting there. By continuing to invest £40,000 a year into ISAs and assuming fairly unremarkable, non-heroic growth, the maths starts to do something interesting. After around eight or nine years, the bridge is effectively built. Enough to cover roughly twenty years of living costs and carry us comfortably to pension access age.

That puts full retirement somewhere around my early fifties and Oana’s mid-to-late forties. Which sounds absurdly early until you realise it’s not the result of some exotic strategy or extreme deprivation. It’s just the outcome of focusing on the right problem and giving it time.

The irony is that pensions, the thing most people fixate on, end up being the least stressful part of the whole picture. Ours have sixteen to twenty-plus years to grow, with ongoing contributions while we’re still working, and no pressure to fund the bridge at all. By the time we reach pension age, they don’t need to be extraordinary. They just need to be adequate. Later still, the state pension becomes a bonus rather than a lifeline.

The biggest shift in all of this wasn’t financial. It was psychological. Letting go of the idea that retirement has to be immediate to be meaningful changes everything. What we’re actually building isn’t an escape from work at all costs. It’s optionality. The option to stop. The option to slow down. The option to say no.

And the strange thing is that once you stop trying to force retirement to happen right now, it often arrives sooner, and in a much calmer form. Not today, clearly. But not “someday” either. With restraint, consistency, and a willingness to sit with the waiting, we’re probably talking about less than a decade. Close enough to feel real, but far enough away to still sleep at night.

And honestly, that’s exactly where I want this to sit.

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.

If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional.  If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:

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