Cake number . . . 2,392

I like these sort of calculations: how many months might I have spent standing in postoffice/tax offices/supermarket queues/waiting for a tyre to be changed; how many months in bed - or years, rather; how much time drinking tea? how many weeks listening to The Four Seasons while waiting to be connected to insurance companies/banks/electricity providers, etc.
Then there are the more interesting calculations: how many times must I have walked down our road into town and back? in thirteen years - say four times a week, on average - 52x4 =208, thirteen years  =2,704, probably round it up to 3,000. Considering the previous house-owners reckoned they had done the meander around fifteen times in eighteen years (they were very fond of their BMW) - I think we're doing pretty well, walking wise.
And onto Mark's cakes, at least since I've known him - twenty-three years.
Probably on average (very vague calculation following) he makes a cake twice a week.
104 cakes a year x twenty-three years = 2,392 . . . cakes. Not to mention all the bread, Parkin, flapjacks, etc.

This was one of his best, but then I often say that - they are nearly always amazing.




The only two failures I can recall: a beetroot cake and a Neanderthal version of a Battenburg.

Just an average dog walk . . .

Or not.
I was rushing yesterday afternoon as Mark needed the car for a gig so I drove up to the back of our town to where the dogs can run about in the vines.
I was surprised to see, in my rear view mirror, a blue car with a flashing light. Shit - police . . . what have I done - (sharp intake of breath on remembering the state of our front tyres). They waved me over and I stopped, desperately hoping that no one had removed the vital 'Carte gris' from the glovebox.
For a small French town, (and, actually, out of the town up a small road where I'm sure no drug trading happens) they were surprisingly well-armed: large black, what looked like machine guns, not to mention batons, and small steel canisters, (tea?)
    "Bonjour, Madame - do you know why we have stopped you?"
    "Err . . . non, pas du tout - filthy car?"
    "You did in fact not stop at the stop sign."
    But I did . . . "That's very odd, officer as I always stop at that sign, it being very difficult to see down the hill, and that someone might be driving up . . .
    "You did not so much as turn your head."
    I did, and I have these special eyes that can swivel left and right - perhaps yours do not do this.
    "Well . . ."
    We will have to fine you."
    Merde alors - "How much?"
The scary older one, who looked a bit like the policeman in Terminator, walked back to the car while the very young one who was fiddling nervously with his gun, answered my question.
    "It will be either eighty-five euros and three points on your licence, or thirty-five."
    "Can I have the latter, then."
    He shrugged and gestured to the car full of steaming, bored dogs.
    "These are très jolie, quel race de chien?"
    We talked about Spanish hunting dogs, dogs with three legs (after he noticed the runty one)
    "Mais . . . il n'a que trois pattes!"
    "Yes, he lost one in a police confrontation."(Not really).
The terminator gendarme re-appeared and informed me that I was to have a telling off and the smaller fine.
    "I will not give you the ignoring-a-stop-sign fine, but the one for ignoring signalisation - thirty-five euros."
    I was puzzled by this - if he meant indication then nearly all French drivers would be receiving thirty-five euro fines about every ten minutes as signalling is an extremely rare event.
    ". . . merci, monsieur - c'est bien gentil."
They got back into their car and I got into mine sighing deeply, but with some relief as they hadn't noticed the tyres.

                                

I drove to the usual spot, walked the dogs, got them back in, panicking a tad as I was late for Mark, and  . . . reversed into a ditch - revved a lot and managed to dig the car in deeper until I was sitting at an angle that made it difficult to open the door.
A man appeared, sucked in his teeth a lot and walked off. I called the 'assistance' and listened to Vivaldi while most of the psychiatric day centre patients came out from the building opposite and suggested interesting things I might do to move the car.
I got through to 'grunt' (assistance) and described where I was, although I couldn't remember the word for ditch, so I said hole. He informed me that if I was in or on gravel rather than the road I would not be covered.
While I was wondering how to respond a man appeared in a beaten Visa van.
He leapt out grinning and said it would be no problem to haul the car out. After hacking back about a foot of the bank, working out where the towing hooks were (me- sadly ignorant) and making several attempts during which quite a few other people had arrived to add handy hints on car moving, he did manage to drag the car out of the fossé (did recall word later on . . . ) with help from Mark and some of the residents of the psychiatric hospital pushing at the back.

Back to the present time - there's a cake cooling in the kitchen which I'm about to take to the man with the van as a small thank you even though he insisted with the biggest smile that he didn't want anything - "A pleasure".
If the world had more people like this . . .



              Here, do something with this bread roll 

Building 49

One of the places on this planet I feel most at home in is on the coast generally; whether it be a windswept corner of cliffs and thundering waves, a stretch of perfect sand and calm blueness or a quiet unsung non-tourist destination such as this. This, being a spit of land bordering one of the 'etangs' or sea lakes of the Southern French coast housing a collection of small, often hand-built-over- time low rise dwellings used for fishing, relaxing and probably escaping from the nine-to-five. Named generally "Les Cabanes de . . . . " - whatever the closest town or city is, this particular group are situated somewhere on the coast near Montpellier.
I took a turning off the autoroute having spied the muddle of tin and tile roofs, and parked up at the end of a gravel track glad to be away from the thrum of traffic then walked down the small road between the houses and their opposite patches of garden.
This dwelling was particularly memorable with its vibrant turquoise paintwork worthy of a Tim Burton movie. I sat for a moment on a flaking red metal chair hoping Johnny Depp might be about to appear dressed in a pink dressing gown with a tray of tea and cakes.

Diets don't work

They just don't. There, said it.
I was watching Telematin this morning, while attempting to go through my morning exercise routine and encouraging The Boy to do the same, when a really stupid ad came on for slimming cereal, then another for a species of cream that you smear on your legs to reduce flab, and then yet another for pills that you can take to 'burn off' the fat.
It's all such utter crap. Whatever the latest study has revealed, we are meant to move about a lot and not eat too many buns: that's it!
The slimming industry is a fiendishly lucrative one whether it be pills, meal replacement drinks or Martini flavoured breakfast cereal, and can also be dangerous . . . a friend of ours actually had to go into hospital as she had been imbibing a series of flab-annihilating potions in order to slim manically for a wedding. She was dangerously de-hydrated and almost lost a kidney. She did look a little thinner after a couple of weeks of hefty antibotics and throwing up a lot.
I have vague recollections of going with my mum to 'weight-watchers' in the 1970s. Held in a hall somewhere in Muswell Hill, the faithful would congregate and be in turn weighed and talked to about how many calories they had found or lost during the week. Mum did reach her target weight and was awarded a special brooch commemorating the event. She then sallied forth into the world of buns once more and put it all back on again.
You have to want, really want to do it, actually change the way you eat and exercise. Fad diets - Eating grapes and spinach for a week or gorging on flash-fried veal won't do it; boredom will soon set in and cake-lust with it.
It takes time too. I always find after winter, when I emerge blinking into the daylight, that to shed the desire to stoke up on bread and butter pudding or Mark's wicked cakes is almost impossible, but over a few weeks and a few hazardous checks in the mirror, something clicks and the want to feel/look better takes over - sometimes.
This year has been better; it took a few months but I'm back to what I weighed last summer, and I want to loose the wobbly thigh stuff, so onward and forward; I may fail when the chill sets in again, but I hope not.
So, the moving about stuff . . . cycling, swimming, walking, yoga, housework, taking the stairs, gardening, sex, whatever; it all helps, and more so if you have a routine that you can stick to so that if you collapse into a Death by Chocolate and three brandy & Babychams of an evening, you can burn some of it off again the next day, rather than: 'Shit, oh well, I might as well go for the kebab and chips this lunchtime.'

That's one of the keys points for me: have treats. If you don't allow cake or puddings sometimes, they become huge, quivering unobtainable yearned for-objects that will torment every waking moment of your life until you finally crack and eat a tub of Raspberry-ripple-choc-chip-fat bastards-delight on your own by the light of the open fridge at 3am.
The opposing views on what makes flab is interesting. I went to Slimming world with my cousins recently as I was staying with them. The main theme seems to be eat as much fruit, bread, pasta, etc, as you like but hold a cross up to any sort of fat and back away from it screaming. Other diets say eat as much fat as you want but purge the evils of bread, rice, cake and starch generally. Confusing . . .
Everyone is different and everyone burns stuff off at different speeds. Mark is tall and thin and could eat cake all day and nothing would happen. He can still fit into trousers from 1975. I think he worries it all off. I can just smell cake and the calories leave the oven, absorbing themselves surreptitioulsy into my thigh-flab. I get worried too but somehow it multiplies the fat cells.

Anyway, for anyone who is interested, this is the Hot-house regime.

At least half an hour of exercises first thing: a combination of stretching, yoga type stuff, crunches, lunges, etc; all easy to find on the internet - we had a lovely lady, bed and breakfast guest staying recently who showed us another load of exercises with weights - so useful, and these have been added in.
There is no excuse not to do this. If we have to be out of the door at 7.00am we do the routine at 6.00am. It's so ingrained now that I feel really unhealthy now if I miss a day.

Dog walk - if you have one, or cat/gerbil/on own; preferably up an incline of some sort.

Breakfast: eat whatever you want within reason, a whole lemon meringe pie, maybe not, but have the toast and butter not some vile '**** I can't believe it's not cow-substance, thing. Breakfast, as my Aunty Olive always said, IS important.

A good lunch, but maybe on a smaller plate than you might have usually; eat slowly, and don't stare at the computer/eat while driving with one hand on the wheel at the same time.

Another walk somewhere/bike ride/swimming session, etc.

Small supper, and if possible don't fall into the snack trap (this is my big challenge) crisps, chocolate, cheese, in the evening when watching TV/reading, whatever.
Salad is good for this: make a massive bowl of lettuce, other veg, nuts, fruit etc. It takes time to eat and the desire to nibble is overcome -  plus you sleep well if Beatrix Potter was right about lettuce being soporific.

Cut down on the booze. It's always easy to forget how much sugar is in wine, beer etc, not being as visual as say a cream-laden chocolate eclair, but it certainly is there - 120 calories in a small glass of red.

The main thing is to change everything a bit, not just latch onto a new diet. It feels good to notice a reflection that looks a bit more muscly and a little less 'puckered', and it feels good to have a few less aches from carrying the extra few kilos about. Kilo = bag of sugar . . . quite heavy.

Well, some ideas from the totally non-perfect but a wee bit more toned-up members of the Hot-house.

Time for some toast I think . . .