Fat Tuesday
Today a few years ago I would have woken with a severe hangover and some half-hearted vows to give up something bad for me. Today I just woke up with all the symptons of a hangover but without the fun memory bits.
Yesterday was the end of Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday in America and generally just an excuse for bars to make money by selling cheap beer and bundles of unhealthy bar food. Of course we call it Shrove Tuesday in Britain, and a pancake frenzy is a tradition in our house, although we had ours on Saturday.
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Whatever it is called around the christian world, yesterday signals a food fest before lent begins today, Ash Wednesday, a period of a 40-day fasting period. My healthy other-half always gives up something for lent, and I get encouraged to follow suit. I suggested something innocuous like carrots or ham, but that apparently wasn't acceptable, so we settled on cheese but then this got extended to bread as well. Thankfully red wine wasn't thrown in for the hat-trick because basically those three food groups could easily make up my daily diet.
So if you could please refrain from mentioning bread and cheese in the comments section for the next forty days I would be grateful.
Epoisses – the King of Cheese.
That’s really helping Dave….
Mardi Gras has just been a new experience for me. It clearly is an excuse for the usually restrained to let off steam – on Tuesday morning the streets of Cologne were littered with broken glass, a fact I found odd until I realised what was going on. The (mostly) young people dressed in colourful costumes and streets blocked off for parades were also important clues. I unfortunately had to leave for Paris where nothing unusual seemed to be happening. It wasn’t Rio or New Orleans but still.