Saturday 9 April 2011

“To be a traveller is to see the goodness in everything” Charles Darwin

Recipe for the preparation of a nothing day:

Ingredients:
8 hours mist
1 shroud of cloud
80kms flat land
5-10km/h side wind
1 monotone of colourant
1 monoculture of vegetation.

Preparation:  
Take the mist and thicken to a steady drizzle, allow for short bursts of more persistent rain, interspersed by the temptation to de-vest, or de-skin waterproofs.  Take this primary concoction and add to the flat land, spread out to a thin humid layer.  Then add a slight wind, side delivery is best. Care should be taken here, as a tail wind will excite the mix, giving too positive a spin, and a heavy head wind will depress and deflate the recipe.  The seasoning of a monocultural vegetation is a vital ingredient and should not be omitted.  Warning to cooks: at no time should the prospect of blue sky or any semblance of a shadow be allowed to be enter into the preparation as it will only lead to deflated depression and inflated optomism, spoiling your resultant day.  Now cook your cyclist for six hours in a skin of Gore-Tex, ensuring that humidity is kept at a constant 110%, and temperature is held at 22°C.  This should ensure the prospects for mild non-clinical depression are kept on a potential constant.  Should the recipe be exhibiting signs of failure, I offer this ’cook's secret’: over the prolonged and delicate cooking period it helps if you can add the tantalising prospect of 'coffee relief'  This can best be achieved by placing names for non existent places on the map, and by building an extinct ‘Policial Control’ on the provincial border that from a few kilometres away looks like a truckers stop.  Placing the Cola delivery lorry in the vicinity, will further enhance this misconception.  Should your recipe still be failing, try a supplication to the Saints - St. Lawrence is your man, although some would adhere to Santa Delia of Norwich as being more efficacious.

The perfect cycling non-day was well under way, but in the end it turned out spoiled.  Two bright positives were inadvertently added to the mix, spoiling what was building to be a perfect creation.  The first was one of those momentary pictorials.  Two sows, with small litters of porkers are rooting through a roadkill carcase of a cow. I would reckon that they’ve visited this comedor on many occasions before.  Possibly the rain has softened the desiccated leather hide, adding some new flavour.  My view is of a pig’s butt, it’s tail twitching with porcine bliss; the rest is inside the cavern of the rib cage. It enlivens my day nicely, starting the decomposition and putrefaction process.

The second, and concluding curdle, is the apparition of a 'hospedaje', when none was on prospect or expected.  It comes at the last house, in the last pueblo, at the end of the day.  End of culinary creation.  Sorry Delia, and thank you Charlie Darwin.

What a great opportunity for publishing a dose of boring photos; there are a few……thousand.