Popular demand

A few of Nedra's friends have been commenting on the lack of Paris photos of her, in fact having had a quick look at Ned's blog, pics of her are few and far between. Therefore I am going to take this opportunity to post some lovely pictures (and some rather funny pictures) in an attempt at reaping revenge on her after posting the fag ash lil photo of me in her slide show! I have cheated slightly as there are two photos from last Christmas, but it was too tempting to resist. ( I wish I had that sleeping beauty pic that Dave took last week on her camera but alas it was not to be!)

Nedra enjoying very late night churros and chocolate with Steve and Dave.

Nedra enjoying herself immensely

Nedra in sepia doodah looking appropriately solemn / pissed off in Père Lachaise cemetery

Et la pièce de la resistance....

Nedra taking advantage of herbal treatment.

Googlewhacking

Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure should come with a heath warning. The whole way through the show I kept thinking 'hurry up now, Dave. Finish up. I have to get google whacking.' It is so addictive, I have literally wasted an hour and a half in search of a googlewhack. For those of you who don't know what one is let me fill you in. A googlewhack occurs when you put 2 words into the google search engine, they have to be real words contained in www.dictionary.com and they can not be on word lists etc. When google does it's search of millions of pages and only returns one possible page then you have yourself a googlewhack. I am happy to say that after spending over an hour glued to my PC I have managed to find my very own googlewhack.

myxomatosis feotus

Now see if you can find yours. (By the way the Dave Gorman show was very funny too, worth a watch).

Better late than never

Halloween completely passed me by this year what with me and Nedra being in Paris. There was no dressing up as a 'Hooker from Hell' this time as I did once with Sara about 9 years ago. We got good treats going round the block that year!

I pulled out the old limerick and haiku lesson today in one of my advanced groups and a student of mine came up with this fab halloween Haiku in about three minutes. Highly impressive!

Halloween party
Boys and girls dressed in costume
Sweets fill their pockets

Happy belated Halloween !

Love or Hate ?

He is one of those people you either love or you hate, some people would refer to him as a tosser from Essex and others, myself included, as absolutely pukka! I should point out that it is mainly men who can't stand his guts, perhaps that's because he can still be a lad about town while cooking up a storm in the kitchen, and he's quite cute to boot.

I have two of his cookery books, Happy Days with the Naked Chef and Jaime's Dinners and I will hopefully be getting Jaime's Italy, his newest offering, at Xmas. I find his recipes so easy to follow and they taste fab. He seems really down to earth and anyone who sees the importance of sorting out school nutrition and helping underachieving dropouts to get a career going is alright by me.

I made dinner for my friends on Friday night and with the exception of the Delia Smith Dauphinois potatoes and the shop-bought pudding it was all pure Jamie. Cheers geezer!

Remember remember the fifth of November...

It's days like today when I wish I could be at home in Huddersfield, eating parkin and bonfire toffee and watching the pretty Catherine Wheels and rockets zooming into the sky and cheering as they burn that Mr Fawkes atop of the crackling bonfire!

Unfortunately, it cannot be. But not to fear I will still have fun and games when Dave and Nedra come round for dinner tonight. That reminds me I should stop fannying around on here and go and get some cooking done!

A Wonderful Weekend and a Dragon

I have finally found the time to get my Paris pictures onto the computer. I like this one of the Moulin Rouge which I took in Sepia so it looks all old.

I had a great time visiting lots of places that I hadn't been to on my previous trips to Paris. It was a tiring weekend as we tried to jam-pack everything in to such a short space of time.

Nedra wanted to go to the Père Lachaise cemetery and at first I was rather dubious, not being one for walking around any graveyard be it famous or not. However, after I got over the creepyness of the place I had to admit that it was pretty amazing. Some of the graves were like little houses and they had beautiful stained glass windows inside. We walked around all of the main churches, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur and Sainte Chappelle, which was stunning. We went to a flea market where Nedra fell in love with about 95 million old postcards ( here she is flicking through a stack). We went to the Musée D'Orsay( a little disappointing since we couldn't find the painting that looks like Neds), the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art and of course to the Louvre where I saw the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory. I had never been impressed by the Mona Lisa when I had seen her in books but she was breathtakingly beautiful. I found her quite captivating. Of course a visit to the Louvre wouldn't have been complete without stopping by the inverted pyramid, a must see for any Dan Brown fan.

On the whole the trip was cool, unfortunately the woman in the hotel seemed hell bent on pissing us off at every possible opportunity. Dragon! It was quite funny hearing Nedra demanding 'Où est la douche!' and then her marching back upstairs to tell me that the shower was broken and the toilet was poop stained. I was always told that there was nothing worse than a woman scorned but I think that Nedra without a shower comes close.

We were delayed going and coming back and unfortunately had to spend some time in Charles De Gaulle airport which was nothing like I remembered and more like an Ethiopian bus station. The Parisians claimed "Nous somme prets pour les jeux olimpiques!" Having spent a few days trying to master the bus and underground system and having passed through CDG I must say that I think not!