Roasted Bambi at Gatwick

So it all went wrong because a deer decided to commit suicide in front of a train near Gatwick. That Nice Lady Decorator was due to board a train to join me in London for brunch at The Canteen in phlegm encrusted acres or Spitalfields as it is sometimes known.

The deer managed not only to get run over, but in a thoughtful last gesture, as it was a Sunday, decided to cook itself on the live rail as the train carried on to Gatwick. Roast venison, how lovely, although I hear it was a bit overdone. This has the effect of destroying the train timetables, so the carefully laid plans for That Nice Lady Decorator to travel up to London (where I had stayed the night before) to meet for lunch we’re err… derailed as it were. Thus lunch was abandoned and some 4 hours later, after they had no doubt mopped up the last of the venison, I managed to get a train back to Arundel myself.

I found her at the Kings Arms, where she has been for several hours in bad company. The beautiful flame haired siren Carolyn was mostly to blame, as usual, but the sultry goddess Sandra and one-eyed Colin The Pirate (there is only one I in Colin) were also culpable. The piratical one was sporting a very fetching sweater which he claimed came from C and A, but would not have looked out of place at the V and A. One might say it was a jumper too far. I have a picture of him today, using a paint roller in a very piratical way.

Colin the pirate on a roll

Also in the pub was Terribly Tall Timothy Taylor. For some reason a theme running through some of the conversations was bingo. He related a story about his mother who, some years earlier, had developed a passion for bingo bordering on the obsessive. When TT tried to wean her away from the game, she admonished him by saying that Picasso had been through his blue period, and she was going through her bingo period. He also said that bingo had interfered with his opportunity to befriend Mark Knopfler in a pub on Tyneside. Mark has just walked in to a small pub with only a few people at the bar, and after a brief chat, TT said he couldn’t stop because he had to keep a previous appointment at the local bingo hall.

It was yesterday that I was invited to the Old Codgers lunch otherwise known as the No Parsley Club luncheon on 13th December. I have never consciously thought about it before, but they are right. Whenever a meal is served with that ubiquitous sprig of parsley, we all subconsciously think “what is the point of that?” then you have to pick it out of your meal and dispose of it. I like the whole concept of a No Parsley Club, and I feel I may encounter some like-minded free spirits at this worthy event, maybe even some new customers for the foreign exchange services of Currencies Direct.

Last night then, after a certain Decorating Operative had crashed and burned (in not quite the same way as Bambi, above), and having failed in her plan to burn cook a roast lunch based on some goose breasts she had bought at last weeks Farmers Market, replacing it with baked beans and eggs on toast, I was persuaded to go to The Eagle where some kind of music quiz was taking place. I think TT ( for it was he who did the persuading) thought I would be his trump card, assuming I must know something about music, rather than the music business which I do know about, and I fear I did not live up to his expectations.
Chris France
@Valbonne_News