Yorkshire Pudding ….. September 2007

I’ve always been a creative sort  of a bloke. I remember building my first drumkit out of boxes and buckets in our garage, a computer out of cereal packets and a barbeque out of bricks. You may think the last item hardly qualifies in the category, but if you saw the finished article you could only really say it was a ‘creative’ effort.

I constantly hear songs in my head that I’ve never heard before and I’ve no idea where these come from. I try to get them down but they never quite end up the way I first heard them. I must have a hundred ‘ideas’ for songs on various snippets of recordings and scribbles on scraps of paper but just never find the time to work on them properly. One day I’m sure I’ll hit the jackpot and get the Christmas number one I’ve always dreamed about but for now I’ll have to resign myself to being a collector of ideas.

I like to enter competitions that require a certain amount of creative thinking, and this was rewarded only a couple of years ago when we got a call saying we’d won a fully inclusive holiday to Disneyworld with everything thrown in plus spending money – result! I’ve won a few other things over the years which encourages me to carry on and see what else fortune may bring.

Anyway, I won a competition at work recently to name a new division of the business that deals with electronic data transmission of gas meter readings on a daily basis. The winning name was “Pulse24” and they’ve already adopted this and set up a website and everything, and the initial prize on ofer was simply a bottle of champagne. Fantastic – but they changed it at the last minute when the competition winner was announced in front of the whole company. Regular readers would probably now be expecting me to announce some form of mitigated disaster, but no … they actually gave me a voucher for two to enjoy brunch at the Savoy, no less, with unlimited champagne, buffet lunch, and a jazz band at a table overlooking the river!

We first decided to try and take up the prize last June. I say ‘first’ as the plan was to drive to the train station, hop on the express to London and get a cab to the hotel. Great idea. So we stood and waited on the platform. And waited. And waited. No trains. No-one else on the platform. My superior observation skills were truly put to the test and it occurred to me there may be something amiss, but I couldn’t work out what it was. No trains, no people. After an hour of waiting I suspected there may be no trains to London. Lucie seemed to concur. We worked out that even if we drove to London we’d only get a couple of hours to enjoy our prize, if that. So we decided to cancel and try again some time later. On our way out of the station there was a bloke in the information booth. You would like to think that someone in charge of ‘information’ would actually be informative but this is obviously not a prerequisite of the job for Network Rail employees.

“There’s no trains. Engineering works” he muttered.

“So why didn’t you put a sign up then?” asked Lucie, despondently. “The slow trains are stopping on the other platform but we haven’t seen an express service in over an hour!”

“They are stopping on that platform, yes”

“We know that – we just told you”

“Mutter, mutter, Engineering works, mutter, mutter”

It wasn’t worth the effort, really. Anyway – we did eventually manage to get to the Savoy last week and I have to say it was absolutely brilliant. Your glass was never empty, the acoustic band in the corner knocked out some classic stuff by Santana and all things Latin Americano and we had three and a half hours of unadultarated luxury and indulgence. I was slightly perturbed at one point however. As I went up for a slice of beautifully cooked roast beef (melt in the mouth – just the best I’ve ever tasted) the chef glanced up having carved off a reasonable slice or two.

“That looks fantastic, mate” I told him.

“Yorkshire Pudding?” he asked.

I know I’ve got a bit of a beer belly but I thought that was a bit much, to be honest…