The Blade Journal

Today I went on a double outing, fuelled by some dry Fruit Loops and the Blonde’s half eaten cheese sandwich. We have power. We have good catches. Our draw-through needs work, however, as the hand heights are not in unison. There is a nice mix in the boat, including, in a strange twist of fate, a Romanian-German Hebrew at stroke. Two 6:30am outings a week do take their toll, though. Sometimes I need my special little heater to defrost afterwards. I am usually unable even to get back into my house, as my hands are too numb to pick the keys out of my pocket to be operated with any dexterity. We performed in a winter head competition a few weeks back, and beat several Second boats in our division. What will become of us chasing an unfairly placed St. Edmund’s boat stacked with Germans and North Americans, is anybody’s guess. At least seven out of eight of us are Englishmen, thus giving us a moral victory already. Next week is the Robinson Head competition: A side-by-side affair that requires guts and nerve. Watch this space…

The Blonde and I have entertained recently. We offered, among other things:

Halal milk bottle sweets.

American ‘natural’ Cheetos (only for The Blonde).

Lychee puddings (only for Ru).

Jelly Beans.

Yeo’s chrysanthemum juice with vodka.

White wine left over from Cambridge Limmud 2006.

Publix root beer with rum.

Tamarind juice with rum.

Marks and Spencer’s Alpho mango cocktail mixer with water and vodka. (mainly water).

We also popped off to Bilbao, by ferry. We forgot to bring money on board, and our cards did not work in any area other than the canteen, which was only open for a couple of hours. The journey lasted 36 hours, after an enjoyable stay in a Linton Travel Tavern in Portsmouth, which had actual keys on the doors. I bought a large boat, with a sail, on the ferry, like a Yok would build as a hobby. For this, rather than for any food, the card worked. We stayed at the Five Star Sheraton Bilbao, which has windows that one closes with a button. We went to the Guggenheim museum, glanced in the atrium, and went on our way, to Salamanca, rejoicing.

After the five hour train journey from Bilbao to Salamanca, we stayed in an ex-convent, which had a free minibar, where we partook of coke and Fanta Limon/ Naranja *in bottles*. It was misty in Salamanca, and it was very emotional to be back after seven years away. We went to the supermarket, and bought, among other things, red shoes, red jumpers, and a small green plastic motorbike for me. In Salamanca we had burgers, Filets o’ Fish at McDonalds, and lots of white asparagus, which came alongside egg and cheese toasties in the Plaza Mayor. I also had lots of pudding. I decided to fly British Airways back to England, rather than easy jet, because of my class.

As soon as we got back, we fought, hit, punched and screamed for five days at the Cambridge University Press booksale, where supposedly damaged new books were added to a big table every few hours, every day, straight from the presses. The Blonde tricked me into giving her a Cambridge Spinoza book, by displaying the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare before my eyes, despite the fact that several copies of this book would become available in the following days. Each soft cover new book was only priced at TWO POUNDS! Just TWO POUNDS! I bought many treatises, but I include below only the Cambridge Companions I purchased, which are my favourites.

The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood
The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel
The Cambridge Companion to Dosteoevskii
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays
The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin
The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schliermacher
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture
The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature
The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy
The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies
The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Italian Novel
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare
The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth
The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer
The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory
The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov
The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry

I also bought at full price (around sixteen pounds each):

The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology
The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards
The Cambridge Companion to Jesus

The Blonde also tricked me/ snuck in front of me/ snuck into the sale when I was not there, and purchased, among others:

The Cambridge Companion to Kafka
The Cambridge Companion to Proust
The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature.*

I also popped off to The Cinnamon Club, in Westminster, for a familial dinner, as a surprise guest-of-honour.

I ate the following:

Indian-Tomato amuse-bouche

***

Carpaccio of cured organic salmon with onion seeds, horseradish ‘raitia’

Selected Naan breads

***

Roast saddle of ‘Oisin’ red deer with pickling spices

***

Tamarind glazed caramel banana tarte with Indian spiced Ice Cream.

***

A selection of mineral waters.

*She read the latter mockingly on the train journey from Salamanca to Bilbao, as she had bought it before I knew the sale existed, while I was in Hutchinson Island, Florida, USA, where I got some 85 degree sun for a week in a Vistana Beach resort.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 9:53 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.