when the bee stings

Soup is great isn’t it?

Soup is comfort food, nourishing and warm, there’s nothing better on a cold winter night.

I make great soup. Freshly chopped leaks and spring onions, sweet potatoes and yams, borlotti beans, chick peas and chopped fine beans and a handful of spinach towards the end, just to blanch it.

Then I add a can of soup, because I haven’t worked out how to actually add flavour yet.

But it’s scrummy with a big hunk of fresh bread.

Soup is good. Hot toasty dogs in front of an open fire are good. The tops of babies heads are good, fresh towels, crisp laundered bed sheets, a glass of rioja, hot buttered toast and tea…well, you get the picture. These are a few of my favourite things.

Lower down on my list of things to do when it’s raining outside is sitting in the middle of an astroturf pitch trying to bite back tears. Whoever it was that was charged with designing the soles of astro shoes was definitely overqualified. Make them grip they told him or her, and they did. If they’d told this person to design a condom the finished product would have been a microscopic mesh of carbon fibre and ruthenium capable of withstanding twelve atmospheres, deep space and being fired through a toilet wall without spilling a single tadpole.

Unfortunately this particular savant got astro soles instead. So when my meagre body decided to change direction with all of the feeble acceleration that I can muster, it was glued to the floor with the same coefficient of friction as a formula 1 tyre. Something had to give and it was my knee with an audible clunk.

On the bright side, I’ve found a comfortable way to sleep with it, but it does involve a lot of pillows and contortions, a sort of page 27 of the single man’s guide to the kama sutra…last night the covers rode right up over my head while I was asleep.

Maybe the soup was a bad idea on reflection