Amateur Time Travel

The fat is getting nice and hot in the pan on the gas ring. I reach into the freezer to get the frozen mushrooms, they're a little frosty but seem ok. I toss one into the fat, which immediately causes the ice to melt, then boil, expanding rapidly pushing fat everywhere. Over the edge of the pan into the flame below.

My immediate reaction, which I realised very shortly was exatly the wrong thing to do, was to grab the pan and pull it away from the flame. This would have worked better if the flame lived entirely outside the pan, but now I was holding a pan with a six foot flame in.

I ran outside and threw the pan into the garden, it wouldn't do any harm there since we didn't really care for the garden.

Nobody asked about the scorch mark above the cooker or why there was a pan in the garden.

I'm sitting next to a Japanese businesswoman on the flight from Osaka to Haneda - I've been flying all night, redeye from Helsinki, after a day there which turned into an evening in Tampere too. Its a morning flight for the locals but I'm the most jetlagged I have ever been. We strike up a conversation during which coffee arrives. I'm perhaps a little over-animated and while the stewardess is sneaking the cup onto my tray I wave my arms to cause the coffee to fly, soaking all three of us.

I had figured there'd be buses to Dereham. How wrong I was, so I set out on foot along the road, with my thumb out hoping for a lift, but not expecting one. It was my first, and as it turns out, only, hitching exercise. I'd been walking for a couple of miles along the A47, it was getting dark now and I'd nearly resigned myself to missing the gig, when someone finally took pity on me and gave me a lift to the outskirts of the small town, from where I could walk to the centre. I was tired and hungry by the time I got there.

It was a Dr & the Medics gig, one of the most fantastic I ever saw, and I saw them a lot. I met the Dr after the show and turned into a babbling wreck.