Grumbleduke

Greetings from Boot Camp. We are slowly getting stronger, fitter, faster, but it hasn't been easy. The regime is going well and we are dumping some tonnage.

Highlights:

Had one of my best meals ever last night. Matthew picked up a roadkill pheasant during our morning 10-mile yomp and worked on presenting sliced breast with a superb jus reduction, and elements of chili and ginger. Better than restaurant quality and certainly the best game dish I have ever had.

Real food for the gladiators.

Last year, Matthew found an interesting bush in his garden, and decided it would make a good lentil style broth.

Luckily we googled it first. It was Hemlock, and we would have all been dead.

Bodies found, like a looney cult, off to see the stars.

Foraging is allowed for the bootcampers, berries and wotnot.

But we are a bit early in the year for that.

We took our coffee break at the 6 mile mark, however, Martin, or Grumbleduke, as he is now known due to his constant complaints about the lack of food, snaffled 5 biscuits. One by one, dipped them into his hot chocolate and stuffed them greedily down his gob — the pig!

Reminded me of the old Billy Bunter cartoons where he would nick a cake from the school tuck shop or secretly get stuck into his hidden cache of jam tarts.

As a result, Martin was the first boot camper to be expelled for eating biscuits and he’s on a train home.

Our numbers were swelled with the arrival of ‘Woody’ Woodcock,  and more to come over the weekend.

However it is the end for me as I have to work this weekend, The Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, and then fly to Moscow on Monday.

My feet are red raw, blisters all over them, after each step by tortuous step in the morning hike.

I ache, have been so hungry that I could no longer eat, and bent in two by a sadistic ex-Royal Marine!

Fantastic, can’t wait for the next one.

Love to all,  byeeeeee.