OK, I confess to being a foodie. No, not one of those arty types who likes having a vast continent of white plate with a couple of small islands of food in a small sea of something we used to call gravy but is now called jus – I mean hearty, filling food which costs considerable less than the designer stuff, especially when you consider that, having finished your 17-course “fine dining” meal you need to call at the next fast food joint to fill the gaps.

In a way, we are lucky in the UK for being so completely cosmopolitan.

You can find food from any country you care to name (though frequently its authenticity is open to debate).

There is a downside to this, however. On one of our cruises we met a nice couple from Twenty-Nine Palms, California. The following year they were coming to the UK for a vacation and emailed to organise a meeting. We’d had some light-hearted banter about food on the cruise – I seem to remember some jibes about McDonalds – so we would, we decided, treat them to traditional English cuisine when they visited.

We could have done (and in retrospect should have done) a pub or a fish and chip restaurant, but we wanted something a bit more up-market. We searched our brains and found nothing – that’s not too surprising; there’s a lot of vacant space in mine – so we tried the good old Internet. I Googled “traditional English restaurant Cheshire” and one popped up at the top of the list containing exactly those words. I clicked and clicked and eventually found “Sample Menu” – that click produced a page starting with “Lasagne” and continuing with “Beef Stroganoff” – traditional English????

Anyway, back to the subject, Ian. Last evening we decided on Indian food. We went to our local favourite in Warrington – built in an old cottage that was once used by Oliver Cromwell, hence its name The Cottage – only to find it fully booked, so we went in search of another. Now I should add at this point that Warrington is to food as Alaska is to wearing bikinis, so the search was always going to be fraught. We like good food, as I said, and have been to so many restaurants that have niggled and niggled at us with poor food, poor service, inflated prices and so on. We go in open-minded and end up complaining about the place. For all I know, we are blacklisted now as habitual complainers, but I’d rather tell places what I believe is wrong in the hope the situation will improve. They, on the other hand, seem to think I’m after a reduction in the bill and that their food/service/prices are perfect.

We ended up at a place in Stockton Heath, a one-time village that has been absorbed by the spread of Warrington but has been reinventing itself with some trendy shops, bars and restaurants. The turnover is rapid, with new establishments opening all the time, usually at the expense of something that didn’t work. We found a place called Cardamom and were warmly welcomed by the staff. It was busy, but they had several tables unoccupied so we were able to find a place. The food was excellent, but again a few niggles started to creep in. One of my forksful of my Special Biryani had a sharp sliver of chicken bone, despite the chicken being quoted as “boned”. The accompanying curry sauce had sweet peppers in it; very delicious until one turned out to be a whole green chilli pepper, seeds and all. It nearly blew my mouth apart. The place claimed fresh and authentic ingredients and recipes, yet when it came time for desserts, they could only offer Ben and Jerry’s ice creams straight from the freezer, whereas by craving was for gulab jamun or rasmali. We asked if they had mango lassi but they did not. Finally, when we came to pay, their card machine was not working, so they needed cash or a cheque, neither of which we had enough of to pay, so I had to go out to an ATM to get cash.

Now all those niggles would normally have me moving into complaint mode. But not this time. They apologised for the bone and the chilli, despite the fact the bone was simple human error and the latter my own stupid fault. They apologised for the lassi and the frozen desserts, assuring us that if we came again and phoned ahead they would be there. They apologised for the card machine – I suggested they change the place’s name to Amom since they had no card – and said we could mail them a cheque or pay next time we came. And, as I said, the food itself was superb.

So where did that leave us? Where we’d been so many times, annoyed with little niggles and swearing never to go back? Not a bit of it. They were so friendly, so human, so customer-focussed that we know we’ll go again. We’ll tell people about it. We’ll take friends. In short, they made us feel valued and special. Herein was a lesson in life – don’t criticise people for their mistakes, or even their shortcomings if they care, if they are like us: imperfect, fallible but human and friendly. If only the positive about people influenced us more than the negatives what a better world this would be.

But it takes thought to see the good when it’s all too easy to see the bad. Sure, this realisation made me feel some humility for my own frequent intolerance, but it also gave me a warm feeling that I’d been with new friends and that maybe my own faults are tolerable too.