Category: France

Shoot me the sherbert, Herbert*

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

So, we’re back in foreign climes again, or as my friend Richard would say, the land of ecouté et repeté.

And, given that this part of my marathon training plan calls for a horribly tough training week, what better time to lace up, and head out the door, much to the surprise of the French residents hereabouts, who tend to regard anyone not wearing overalls and driving a tractor with deep suspicion. And yesterday, out the door I went, with a certain amount of trepidation, to try for a rather hilly 20-miler.

All good up to about mile 15, where I aimed to take on (as we runners call it) a drink and a gel to see me through the last quarter of the run.

I had been slightly influenced in this by a presentation on sports nutrition that I went to a couple of weeks ago. Now this had been sponsored by the lovely people from Lucozade, and reminded me, probably quite unfairly, of the posters that I used to see at school advertising drug use. Well, not advertising drug use in the traditional sense (although if you jotted down some of the numbers in the boys toilets then you’d probably be alright for a lively weekend. However, you needed to be reasonably alert – I knew a boy who swapped his moped one Friday for what turned out to be an Oxo cube.) I mean advertising that drugs use was pretty much A Bad Thing, and that people who dealt in such wares always gave the first few hits free.

And so it turned out with the Lucozade man, as he described how important it was to get nutrition into you during a marathon, and that the London Marathon would be supplying all runners with Lucozade gels and drinks on the course. Anyway, all interesting stuff, and in true Nick O’Teen (remember him?) style, he invited us at the end of the talk to help ourselves to as many free samples as we could justify to ourselves. Which, looking at some of my fellow runners, was quite a generous justification. Standing outside the scrum, I asked a friend if she could pass me a couple of gels, which she duly did, and off I went, happy that I could try the gels out (For Nothing!) before I set off on a race proper.

So, at mile 15, I had stashed a bottle of water and a gel, and picked them up almost without breaking stride. I should mention at this point that the weather at that point featured what I believe weathermen call ‘squally’ winds. I think this just means the wind blows fairly random directions, and I evidenced this earlier in the run when I spat out of the right side of my mouth, only for the spit to complete a 270 degree rotation of my head and land in my left eye. Anyway, let that be a lesson for all sportsmen to keep their saliva in their mouth at all times. Back to mile 15, and I expectantly bit the side of the wrapper off the gel, and squeezed the contents into my mouth. There followed an odd sensation, which was a bit like eating stardust sweets mixed with the inside of a sherbert dip. Not unpleasant, but not quite how I expected a gel to feel. About half way through I realised that I wasn’t eating a gel at all, but a single serving Lucozade powder. At which point, two things happened. Firstly, running along at a reasonable pace, I was briskly followed by all manner of insects, who were for some reason attracted to a runner caked in sweat with a unshiftable layer of raspberry sherbert all over his face. And secondly, I remembered about osmosis. Osmosis, you may recall from school, is where water diffuses across a semi-permeable membrane, such as you might find, oh I don’t know, maybe in your stomach wall. And if you put a concentration of powder that absorbs water into a stomach when you’re nicely dehydrated, you can almost feel the particles of water dragging their way across the stomach. I really don’t know if this is an exact physiological description of what happened, but it certainly felt like it at the time.

The rest of the run wasn’t quite so much fun as the first bit. The flies disappeared after a while, and I dragged myself back to the house.

‘How was your run?’ enquired Mrs E.

‘Finished.’ I said.

*If you get this reference, then good on you. I miss Norwich in the 1980’s.

What I did on my holidays (that I regret)

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Five things:

1. Moving a very very very heavy stone bench up a hill, to get a better view.

2. In a very alpha-male way, keeping the resultant pain in my back quiet from Mrs Emu. Who is, by profession, a nurse. Specialising in pain management. And who had earlier advised that it was a stupid idea to try to lift said bench.

3. Trying to go for a run, to get the stiffness out of my back, a day later.

4. Not being able to sleep, getting up at 3.30 am, and making the mistake of looking at the Blackberry.

5. Discovering the source of our rodent problem in the kitchen at 3.35 am, and not being able to chase the little blighter, on account of my back not working.

All in all, not the best week to stop smoking.

However, am pleased to report that we now have a lovely and delightfully situated bench, upon which weary travellers can rest their chronic back problems. And we have tracked down the mouse to his/her hiding place in the cupboard with all the newspapers, where he/she had fashioned a splendid nest of supermarket receipts inside a shoe box. It only took 6 of us to catch him/her and encourage him/her into a cardboard box and away from the house. Whereupon Mrs E commented that it was by far the biggest mouse that she’d ever seen. Almost, in fact, the size of a r**.

The holiday continues…

The Dame, part 2

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To my delight (and a certain amount of surprise), I’ve had lots of feedback to the last blog about the deer and the mis-translation.

Given that until now, I thought I was only really writing this for the questionable benefit of my wife and regular reader Mr S Bean (really), the heat is now on to come up with something vaguely interesting for future episodes. In the meantime, you might be interested to know about part two of the dead deer saga…

After the initial debacle, cycle rides and runs past the ex-Bambi’s mother became a little more challenging. Nothing like 30+° weather and a rural environment to bring out a little accelerated decomposition. On day one, the boys told me, there were a few maggots (by the way, you might want to stop eating before you read this). By day two, there was a pretty unpleasant smell from about 20 yards away. By day three, this had extended to about 50 yards, and unfortunately on day four, we all had to cycle past ex-BM on the way back from a day out. We held our breath from about 100 yards out, and pedalled furiously. Jr Emu #1 was first past the scene of the crime, and looked to his right at the key moment. We all sailed past without looking, intent on getting past without having to breath in, except for #4, who is the inquisitive sort.

Having exhaled and breathed in some relatively un-putrid air moments later, #1 impatiently broke the news:

“She’s had her head cut off!”

#4 confirmed this, and thanked us all profusely for the nightmares that he expected as a result of his first and last view of ex-BM.

Now, this begs a number of mystery questions, and as you can imagine, conspiracy theories currently abound in the family Emu. My personal theory is that someone wanted to get the whole beast home, but only had a hacksaw and a bicycle. Mrs Emu is convinced that somewhere nearby, there’s a sitting room with a new hunting trophy above the fireplace.

In any case, by the next day, someone had thought to cover the carcass with lime. The smell had gone, but the mystery remained…

That was nothing like a dame….

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

We’re in France, and staying, as ever, in the middle of nowhere, with limited vocabulary and all sorts of potential hazards to remind us that this is the way to have eventful holidays. No sitting by the pool for us, no siree. Normally when we get here, the grass has reached around the height of a small child, and we regularly lose one as a result for the first couple of days.

Anyway, being the fit family, and having an even fitter family staying with us, no small commotion from this morning as six or seven of us came in from runs and bike rides, with news that there was an injured deer, hit by a car, on the road that runs near to the bottom of the house. There’s another blog to be written about the deer hereabout, and how they are an inspiration for us all to give up running and drive tractors, but that will have to wait for now. In the mean time, there is a deer with a broken neck on the side of the road. Breathing, and looking every inch just like Bambi’s mother.

We didn’t think the gendarmes would be particularly interested in the accident, so decided that the best next step would be to tell Yaside, who runs the Tabac in the nearby village. So off we rushed, with mission in our minds and a french dictionary by our sides.

‘What’s the french for deer?’, said Mrs Emu

So I looked it up – ‘Chevreux’, I said, ‘or Daim, if it’s a female’. Which it was.

Rushed into the Tabac to break the bad news. Now, what we were trying to say was that there was a deer with its neck broken, about 3km down the road, and we weren’t sure what to do. We should have twigged that the questions about whether there were any witnesses or police on the scene weren’t the sort of enquiries that normal French folk make about a dying deer.

Unfortunately, given that Daim looks and sounds a bit like Dame, what Mrs Emu had actually said was that there was a woman 3km up the road with a broken neck, but still breathing. And that if Yaside got a move on he might be able to have it for his dinner.

All of which is a bit embarrassing. I really think we’re fitting in here.