When you tell people about an event or situation from your past, maybe as if you’re telling them a story, you sometimes may find yourself adding embellishments or exaggerating certain aspects for dramatic or comic effect. If you do this enough, if you tell the same story enough times, you may find the story is a stronger memory than the reality, in fact, the story becomes the reality.

I’m fully aware of this phenomenon, as I’m sure are most people. I also, it’s sad to say, sometimes play to an audience if something has some humour value. I went to Egypt in 1995 with a couple of friends and I had a really good time, and have some really good memories of that trip. One or two of those memories have become stories I tell my friends and one of them in particular is about the food on the boat. The chef liked to dress the food up (after it was cooked) to either look how it had before it was cooked, or to just make it look more cheery.

I reminisced about how he had dressed chicken up with happy faces, and about the time he served up mutton dressed so we knew it had been a sheep. I was pretty sure about the chickens, but sometimes I doubted my memory about the sheep.

Well, as you know I’ve been scanning my Egypt photos and it looks like I didn’t make this up, which is pleasing. So here for your delectation and delight are chickens with heads and happy faces, and mutton with a tinfoil head and horns, in case there was any doubt about what it might have been.

Enjoy (click them for full size images).