Ghastly trepidation

I think the hallucinations are partly down to the diet. There was a moment today where I thought I could see the sun but it turned out to be headlights coming over the hill. We were walking at Kithurst Hill near Amberley in the South Downs, wrapped up in 6 layers of clothing, wearing woolly hats and gloves trying to keep out the cold. I am again beginning to scan the websites offering winter sun because after the last week of gloomy weather and a few days at the weekend in the permanent twilight that is all we can expect up north, unless the sun comes out I can see a dash to the sun coming on. If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain…

The only thing that brightened my day (apart from anew customer for Currencies Direct) was the sale of a dozen more copies of my new book, The Valbonne Monologues. I know how much this will not please my least enthusiastic fan, the Wingco, who likes to describe this column and my writing as “ghastly”. I think his expression. in today’s photograph of him, was captured just after his wife had just bought her own copy, or it could have caught him mid fart. In either case it looks like trepidation was involved.

The Wingco in distress

Eating is back on the agenda again today after yesterday’s 600 calorie nightmare. If I lose much more weight I will become a black hole, disappearing up my own anus. With a trip up north on the very grey horizon for the end of the week, I wondered if any of the local inhabitants actually had as many as 600 calories in any day, but a short examination of this typical daily diet of lard, chip butties, suet and fat made me realise that 6000 per day was nearer the norm, in fact given the cold emanating from the tundra that is omnipresent in Yorkshire one probably needs 6000 a day just to maintain body weight.

You may be permitted to ask what drags me to this northern out post and it is not what but whom. That Nice Lady Decorator has a school reunion and it seems that one of her contemporaries at school was a member of The Pogues, and he has written to book and will be reading from it in Leeds on Friday evening. Why I have to be there has never been explained to my satisfaction but I fully intend to drink as much of the locals brews as possible over what will be a long, very very long, weekend.

One of the highlights of the Easter break will be meeting up again with Lady In Waiting, Rachel Surtees who will again try to deny the obvious attraction she has for me, but I know. It is in the stars, the square must be circled, she knows what I mean. At the moment she gives the quite convincing impression of being content in the arms of her gruff northern husband, her very own bit of rough, John “Chuckle Brothers”, Surtees. He is so-called (by me) because of his ill-advised involvement in trying to relaunch the career of this err… comedy act after retiring from his successful position at Yorkshire TV, where he is fondly remembered for being responsible for closing down the YTV bar in a cost cutting exercise. I must admit I found his intention to wor with them more amusing than their act.

Also, I hope once again to be meeting Steve “yeah yeah yeah” Jackson and his very a much more intelligent and engaging wife, the lovely Rowena. We are due to have lunch at one of the only pubs in Yorkshire that might get away with being located in the Home Counties, The Crab and Lobster at Asenby. I do hope that the hanging Judge John, our cricketing judge whom we met last year on a cricket tour to Australia, might also be there, unless he has sentenced himself to a prison term by mistake.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News