Friday 16 July 2010

Le Tour de France





G's step-father has an apartment in Avoriaz, right in the heart of the French Alps. Stage eight of this year's Tour de France just happened to be finishing there so it seemed fairly stupid not to make the most of a perfect opportunity. So last Friday we made the ten hour drive, arriving at two in the morning, creased, tired and very excited.

It was the most fantastic day, I have never experienced anything like it, the people, the colour, the atmosphere, the noise, the carnival and those amazing cyclists. And it was all there for free! It must be the only major sporting event with so many world class athletes that you can go and watch without spending a fortune on tickets.

Tuesday 6 July 2010

Vile Morsels No.1


I have been such a bad girl and haven't blogged for over a month! I have no reasonable excuse for this and I certainly can't blame my hectic social life or highly stressful career!

Due to a very small budget and the fact that we go out cycling as soon as G gets back from work at seven, we tend to eat quite lightly when we get home, shattered. There wouldn't be anything less boring than a daily photo and ode to the jacket potato?

I was recently remembering the most disgusting sausage roll I ever had to eat and this started me thinking about all the food I have eaten under duress, and how the hell I managed to swallow some of the vilest pap ever.

And so to that horrible sausage roll . . . . there was a girl with whom I became 'friends' on the basis that she lived over the road from me and we were both starting at the same secondary school. In my teenage naivety I looked up to her and thought she was the last word on every subject a teenage girl would need to know about - fashion, music, politics, boys etc.... in fact she was a complete and utter B*t*h and she ruined my life at secondary school. It seems fitting then that her mother is in fact the first recipient of my Worse Cook Ever Award and should be jailed for heinous crimes against sausage rolls.
It was the said girl's thirteenth birthday and she had invited four of us to join her for a picnic in the grim field next to her house. Her mother gave us some really grubby, greyed Tupperware boxes full of picnic 'treats' to carry the full fifty yards across to the grim field where we could sit on the barren ground, in January, and eat. Maybe it was a blessing that the first box contained the sausage rolls, this effectively killed my appetite and spared me the horrors that lurked in the other boxes. The cold, half raw sausage roll had the clammy texture of a fat finger that had been floating, bloated, in the sea for weeks; as I bit into it my teeth pushed through the thick pastry, that could easily have just been a layer of neat lard, and then came the nerve-piercing squeak as my tooth enamel scratched down against the gritty texture of the 'sausage' centre. I felt all the blood drain from my head as I tried to control the gag reaction that was desperate to launch the contents of my mouth into the grim field. I held it in for seconds whilst I grabbed a paper napkin into which, at the first unnoticed opportunity, I 'transferred' the yuk. Even now the thought of it makes me shudder. I have never in my entire life, so far, found a sausage roll that comes close to the sheer nastiness of that one . Congratulations Mrs. K!