One for my baby [antikvár]

Eat the Cold Porridge 'You must eat the cold porridge,' he told me once. It's a Chinese expression. Cantonese, I guess, because although he carried an old-fashioned blue British passport and was happy to call himself an Englishman, he was born in Hong Kong and sometimes you could teli that all the important things he believed were förmed long ago and far away. Like the importance of eat ing the cold porridge. I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. What was he going on about now? Eat the cold porridge.' The way he explained it, eating the cold porridge means working at something for so long that when you get home there is nothing left to eat but cold porridge. And I thought - who did he share a fiat with out there? Goldilocks and the Three Bears? That's how you get good at something, he told me. That's how you get good at anything. You eat the cold porridge. You work at it when the others are playing. You work at it when the others are watching television. You work at it when the others are sleeping. To become the master of something, you must eat the cold porridge, Grasshopper. Actually he never called me Grasshopper.