Batten down the hatches

Normally when you feel the need to break wind, your body's early warning system lets you know in many mysterious ways.

Subtle pressures build up, and normally coincide in the catastrophic event itself. Of course the precursors are there, like beans ('Blazing Saddles'), fruit or pop. It's a very effective way of clearing a room, or causing a domestic, so it pays to listen to your inner self once in a while.

When the world chooses to break wind in the form of angry weather there is a satellite dedicated to detecting the early signs. Unfortunately it appears that due to maintenance issues the ability to use 'QuikSCAT' to monitor wind will diminish, and there is no planned replacement. We can but hope for a flatulent free future world.

With the prospect of yet more relentless rain with little warning, sitting in my back garden and fashioning an Ark out of my neighbours fence seems like a good option right now.

I saw two guinea fowl earlier that would make perfect first passengers.

Back to odours, I find that pears really set me off, in fact so suddenly that a dedicated orbiting honeycomb of expertly configured wind sensing satellites could not detect the oncoming of a pear fart.

I have started getting my fruit and veg delivered from a local organic farm (whatever organic really means). What I like best about this is the lucky dip approach, the veg is covered in plenty of free mud, and there is no plastic packaging to contend with.
Pears are making lots of guest organic appearances, and I am bored of just munching them raw. I often have partial bottles of red wine knocking around just beyond their best, combine those with a few wise words from 'Delia Smith' and the magical world of poached pears is revealed. I must say they are delicious.

I am not an accomplished chef, so any dish I make has to be easy. This one is simple.

Peel two or three unripe pears. Warm half a pint or so of red wine with a couple of cloves in a saucepan. Add a few spoons of sugar, depending on the wine. When the sugar has dissolved put in your peeled pears, bulbous end down and simmer for 25 mins. Take out the lovely plump blushing fruit and reduce the red wine down to a thick sauce. Serve pears with the sauce and a lump of ice cream, or mascarpone. Spend quite some time alone...

It's just a flesh wound

I spent lunchtime yesterday at a fine local Italian restaurant. Fried squid followed by pasta with meatballs all washed down with a little Montepulciano and the perfect espresso (which I chose not to spit out like the man in the film 'Mulholland Drive').

I sauntered home on my bike later that day only to be rudely flattened by a car crossing the cycle path from a hidden driveway.
Luckily I escaped with a few cuts and bruises, but my front wheel was buckled. As it happened the passenger in the car was an ex-bicycle repair man, and putting on his superhero cape he tried to straighten my wheel, to no avail. Dejected, I waited on a wall for a taxi to transport me and my broken steed home.

My beautiful lunch which had been so innocuously digesting was now disturbed, petrified in the pit of my stomach.

This was my second car collision in two weeks, and I am beginning to feel like Monty Python's 'Black Knight', "It's just a flesh wound!". Cycling in and around Cambridge is quite simply dangerous.

While contemplating my close shave, the taxi driver told me that he was run over once and was so incensed that he punched the perpetrator. This was far from comforting. He then went on to talk about his Thai Kickboxing skills. Mistakenly I mentioned that I was learning Kung Fu, at which point he stated that it would be rather fun if I tried 'to do a runner' as we could have an interesting fight to resolve matters.

On arrival home the cash flew out of my wallet and we parted company.