Author: janh1

Part-time hedonist.

Cooking – the books.

Well honestly, I’m quite deflated. It’s like my souffle’s sunk, my meringue’s gone flat and my custard’s curdled. It seems I only have five of the Observer’s top 50 cookbooks ever!

This either indicates that I am hopelessly untrendy or that I am a lousy, seriously uninformed cook. Whichever is true, I’m not sure I can live with the shame. Well, ok, I lied about that. I just made shame my new best friend. Continue reading “Cooking – the books.”

The Business Plan

Betty sighed heavily. This gawky, nineteen-year-old with limp ginger hair and a pungent nylon parka was offering her a massage. It wasn’t easy running a valleys hairdressing business where people thought £8 for a shampoo and set was daylight robbery. Could the day get any worse?

Nigel’s sister Sian was a good little hairdresser; sassy and stylish and the elderly customers who still remembered the heady excitement of jitterbugging with GI’s in the Memorial Hall liked hearing what nights out with the girls were like these days.

Betty hadn’t believed it when Sian told her Nigel would ring her with a business proposition and now, looking at him standing there in her office, with acne capable of independent life and fingers fidgeting in his pockets, the prospect of him being able to give a massage, let alone a decent one, was about as unlikely as a Lionel Blair and a troupe of trained fruit bats tap-dancing their way across the Newport transporter bridge. Continue reading “The Business Plan”

Voice’s off

You don’t realise how much your voice contributes to your personality and the way people see – or rather, hear you – until you lose it.

And losing your voice is not like losing the car keys. You can’t have a hunt around for it and find with some relief that you locked it in the garage or threw it carelessly into the dustbin with a piece of old kitchen roll and the potato peelings. Continue reading “Voice’s off”

The rare Aegean sea pasty and curious creatures of the not-very-deep.

The guy had been to Sharm el-Sheikh. Red Sea. World-renowed diving site. But he didn’t go diving. So I had to ask why.

“I did a bit of snorkelling that’s all. I don’t really like the sea. It’s such an alien environment. It’s best left to the creatures who are designed for it.”

Seemed a terrible waste of one of the world’s best diving locations but yup, the sea is an alien environment, which is precisely why it’s endlessly fascinating. I can’t go into space, I can rarely go into the sky, I can’t climb mountains but the sea is always there. In the sea, you can feel like an explorer in a largely unknown world. Continue reading “The rare Aegean sea pasty and curious creatures of the not-very-deep.”

Pedal(o) power

You’ll no doubt feel completely indifferent to the news that my pedalo blister has almost gone.

Its arrival was unexpected and quite painful.   I was just getting over another injury (thrown by wave against coral-covered rock of St Nicholas Island causing v painful weals on thigh) when it I got the foot pain. I binned a pair of sandals thinking they were responsible, then discovered the cause was actually a squash ball-sized blister on the ball of one foot.

When you think about it, I suppose it was inevitable, really;   two cyclists on holiday without bikes. Continue reading “Pedal(o) power”