Warn The Town, The Beast Is Loose

On Thursday night we had an early christmas/team building dinner with my work team.  After much deliberation and then much negotiation, we opted for a private hosted wine tasting session at Vinopolis , followed by a self guided tour, followed by a 3 course meal. I am not much of a wine buff and so it didn't really interest me, but I could see how others might find it interesting.  We learnt about different alcohol strengths and how you can tell by swirling it round in the glass and looking at the 'legs' dripping down.  The more legs you have, the higher the alcohol content.  Other things I learned included: Corked wine is only corked if the cork is bad, a wine isn't necessarily 'corked' if you find bits of cork floating in it - smell it first to see if it smells bad. Wine is usually only produced in a narrow band of latitude around the world, usually between latitudes 30 and 50, however other countries (maybe due to global warming, but mos

Back in August, I got a mail from Eurostar saying they were celebrating their 20th anniversay (wow doesn't time fly), and to celebrate, they had released 10,000 seats at £59 return.  Bargain I thought, and quickly enlisted Gemma and Samia to come with me for a day trip. Fast forward a few months and Gem has a broken foot (drunk dancing on tables is never a good idea) and can no longer come, so it was just me and Samia on a romantic date to Paris.  I got up ridiculously early due to my inability to plan appropriately and got to St Pancras a full 40 minutes before I needed to.  Samia on the other hand, was early too, except she was early at the wrong station.  Numpty! She'd turned up at Euston and had a panicked fast walk down the road to St Pancras. As we were only there for the day, we decided to hit the most popular tourist spots, starting with a walk down the Champs-Élysées.  We got an all day travel pass (€6.90) and hopped on line 4 to Châtelet, then line 1 to the Cham

As the blog post title suggests, last weekend was mainly about eating. And cycling.  But mainly eating. It started with Vietnamese on Friday night when I met up with Bex and Jen.  I had Pho Bo, which was very disappointing and tasted nothing like the Pho we had in Vietnam.  4 points out of 10.  We ended up in a very spangly posh cafe near Piccadilly Circus that did the most beautiful cakes - I was good and didn't have one but Bec and Jen indulged and they looked delicioso and I had to wipe the drool from my chin.  On Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed, shoved eggs and toast down my gob and trotted on over to Peckham Rye Park Run with Liz.  I stayed at my own bumbling jog pace just in front of an injured lady, a 10 year old boy and an old man.  Half way round the first lap and they were no where near to be seen - not because I'd left them in my wake, but rather they'd overtaken me and I was all alone.  Sigh.  It would have been easy to give up and that firs