Got To Get Me Some Chickens!!!

I went for a run.  Because my friend Candy – long suffering wife to Starbuck’s leather thermos cup owner, Maserati driving Duncan – had a baby, Phoebe (yay!), and I invited the kids and Dad around for dinner as Duncan’s culinary skills run to dialling for Mr. Pizza.  To celebrate I baked my Death By Chocolate Cake and ate some, it would have been bad luck not to.

What is it about food and weight gain?  I ate the cake last Sunday and so for Monday and Tuesday I bounced around thinking gleefully that I had got away with it then woosh Wednesday comes along and I wake up with a protrusion.  It’s as if all the fat from the cake takes a little trip around my body for a few days trying to work out where would be the best place to land.  In my case there must be one hell of a party going on around my navel.

After the jog I wizzed by La Boucherie to pick up “une entrecote” for Lexi.  As a staunch survivor of the Swiss public school system she comes home on Wednesday lunch times.  I am grateful that the years of Jamie Oliver’s recipes have worked and Mademoiselle Lexi does not ask for pot noodles.

I have been reading JonnyB’s blog, PrivateSecretDiary.com and he recently had an unusual proposal in his Butcher’s in Norfolk.  He was approached by a TV presenter who invited him to appear on the telly.  So it was with trepidation that I entered the domaine of Monsieur Prelaz, my local Swiss butcher.  Alas I was the only one in there, not even jovial M. Prelaz was around so I couldn’t even flirt and had to talk about the weather with Madame P.

“Bah Oui….demain….hee hee hee…il pleut”, she pronounced gleefully.  (Tomorrow the rain returns).

It must be something about growing up in the countryside that makes them sound so jovial about the approach of more rain.

I returned glumly to the car thinking JonnyB was right about reality TV, 

“ They get you on to these things with a combination of promised stardust and ego-flattery”

and I was not falling for it either, just in case anyone was asking.

www.privatesecretdiary.com  is one of The Guardian Newspaper’s top 50 blogs.  He writes about his chickens (and his occasional forays to the pork butchers in his town in Norfolk).  It is some of the best blog writing on the net so go take a look.  In the meantime I will keep on writing about the Swiss, my kids, my friends, famous people, anything that annoys me and well, just plain old me.  Not a chicken in sight.  Perhaps this is where I am going wrong…

Copyright Jules Ritter April 2008