Perhaps it's a result of not overdoing the boozing and the socialising, but I still have not succumbed to post-Edinburgh lurgy,which is a bonus. Though I am still very tired, a condition not being helped by all the driving I am doing. In a little over a month I am running the Royal Parks Half Marathon for SCOPE -
Sponsor me here if you feel so inclined and I have let the training slide. Today in Nottingham I went to the hotel gym and managed a five minute run. I will have to go very fast if I am going to complete the thing in that kind of time. But I am determined to get healthy again and after eating a lot of rich food this week my girlfriend and me decided we'd not go to Paris next week as planned, but go back to the health farm instead.
The drive to East Anglia was untroubled by dromedaries or tragic brides, but we had some time to kill so stopped off in Swaffham for a cup of coffee. There are two large wind turbines nearby which give a futuristic edge to this market town and put me in mind of a 21st Century version of Children of the Stones, crossed with War of the Worlds, where the giant spinning structures gradually edged towards the town and destroyed all in their wake. It's a shame when even useful and world-saving technologies make your mind immediately imagine the worst of science. We saw a cafe that looked rather quaint and olde worlde from the outside, a cottage with beams in the walls, promising tea cakes and cappuccinos, but inside it was a somewhat more down to earth caff, with an impressive selection of fruit machines. I didn't mind too much - we were only killing time, so I went up and asked for a cappuccino (which was up on the menu behind the counter). "I am sorry, we've run out of cappuccio" was the somewhat unlikely and Monty Python like reply. It's surely tricky to run out of a style of coffee in a cafe. You would have to run out of coffee or milk. You can't run out of a type of coffee, can you? But looking around I suspected that you could, because they had no espresso machine, so I suspect the cappuccinos that they offer (if they ever actually have them) are those ones you get from a packet and just add hot water to. Never mind - I looked back at the list - "Just a black filter coffee then please."
"Oh we don't do filter coffee," the girl replied cheerfully. "I know it's a bit confusing because we have listed filter coffee on the menu, but we don't do it. We only do normal coffee." She indicated a jar full of instant coffee granules on the counter. Yes, that was a bit confusing. The way their menu had loads of stuff on it that they didn't have. And that those things were reasonably basic types of coffee, the one thing that you would hope a cafe would have. Especially when it says it has them. I think had they had a sign outside saying, "We only do Nescafe" I might have gone elsewhere, but I headed back to the 1980s and had granulated coffee and chuckled at the girl's comment about it all being a bit confusing.
When we arrived at our friend's house, their 2 year old daughter saw me and started crying. Children are excellent judges of character. But she had done this the last time I had come to stay, but I had won her round to such an extent that she actually cried when I left as well (because she wanted me to stay, not cos she was still crying from the horror of seeing me). Didn't the tiny idiot remember how brilliant I was? No she didn't. She was making a point of refusing to look at me, then occasionally testing her resolve by looking at me from between her fingers and then crying again. She was older and more mature now and maybe she wasn't going to be convinced by my juvenile shtick. But I am a professional comedian with a 5 star review from Broadwaybaby.com (I wished I'd brought my Chortle award with me to prove to her how great I was) so I knew I could make her laugh eventually. Though so far, only tears.
The breakthrough came after half an hour when her mum was asking her what noises certain animals made. She did a good tiger impression and then I did one too. She looked over at me surprised, clearly thinking, "Hey, he also knows what sound a tiger makes. We have something in common. Maybe we can be friends." Little did she know that she had accidentally chanced across one of my areas of expertise. I know what noise pretty much every animal makes and I was able to do quite a few for her and every time she laughed more at my mimicry skills. We were now friends again. "Don't forget that I am brilliant next time I come here," I told her, "I don't want to have to go through all this again." But she was going to spend the night at her gran's as we went out for dinner and I suspected I would have to prove myself again in the morning.
But that's show biz.
