The First Disaster!

Last week was a bit of a disappointment all round, topped off nicely by a complete disaster on Friday afternoon.

As I said, I wasn't too impressed by the fish dishes we prepared, and have only just got the taste of the "poaching broth" out of my mouth. But worse was to come last week. On Friday morning we were treated to a couple of hours with a nutritionist, drafted in primarily to address the "breast cancer ladies", a party of around 10 women who were spending the morning cooking healthy stuff in the kitchen, so basically they wanted us out of the way, and therefore handed us to the nutritionist first. The first section she talked about was on the basic biology of the digestive system. As soon as she mentioned the word "saliva" I started drooling (this is not to be confused with the type of drooling I was doing in the Amazonian Alana's presence). Once she started to describe the initial digestive processes in the gut mine came out in sympathy, producing all sorts of interesting sounds as it kicked into gear, convinced a substantial amount of food was about to come its way. Unfortunately none did, so by the time we broke for lunch I was absolutely starving, but at the same time quite relaxed from staring at Powerpoints for a good couple of hours. We sat around waiting for the "ladies" to finish, and swap places with us. Then a rumour started going around: we were to have a surprise assessment at 1 o'clock. No other information could be gleaned, but at 1 we were ushered upstairs and given an hour to prepare what has to be described as some fairly basic stuff. Unfortunately, everyone's brain had turned to mush by this point, so we all ran around like headless chickens for an hour, failing to deliver what had been asked.

Lizzie advised us that we were all "terrible", and that "If you can't produce two simple sauces and a couple of poached eggs in an hour you want shooting". I think that's fair. All except one failed the assessment, and I don't know who that was. We have to repeat the exercise next Friday. Next time I will pass easily, I know, but it was certainly a lesson in keeping focussed, and revising and practising the basics. I sloped off back to Sheffield for the weekend, where I managed to boil an egg for Sunday breakfast to restore a smidgeon of personal pride.