On A Farm in France - Jam (Series 001, Episode 009)

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Jam

Click above to listen.  You can get the .mp4 here, and the .mp3 here (opens in new window).

Julian was a Polish guy who worked with us during our holiday on a farm in France.  He was completely hyperactive and capricious, and he often acted more like a naughty child than an adult.  This was often annoying, but it was hard to stay angry at Julian, whatever he may have done, because he was a lot of fun and a really nice guy.  At first we thought that he was not very bright, but he was actually a fantastic artist, and was brilliant at logic problems and was the only one amongst us who was able to complete the Rubik’s Cube that we found in the cottage where we stayed.

The first thing that struck us as strange about Julian was that he always walked around with a spoon in his hand.  The second thing that we found strange was the amount, and how often, he ate, especially considering that he was in good physical shape and was, in fact, incredibly strong.  Not only would he eat more than everyone else at mealtime, he would also eat huge amounts throughout the day.

Julian wasn’t very good at cooking, and so would instead eat anything that we left lying around, even if we specifically told him not to eat it, so we had to hide everything that we didn’t want him to eat.  If we made bread for breakfast the night before, it would be gone by the morning.  If we turned away from food we were making, even just for a second, there would be less of it when we looked back.  In fact we sometimes had to physically restrain him to stop him eating our food, and because he was so strong, sometimes we couldn’t, and so we just had to watch him eat it.

When we finally started hiding our food, so that there was none lying around for him to eat, Julian was forced to cook.  The only thing he knew how to cook was pancakes, but he would make them whenever he had a spare minute, even getting up in the night to cook them.  For the first 2 days, he ate the pancakes with a small amount of jam.  When we first arrived on the farm our hosts had generously given us 30 jars of home-made jam.  After a while though Julian just ate his pancakes with nothing on them.  We presumed he must have got bored of eating jam all the time.   

On the third day of our stay at the farm I decided to make a dessert.  There were only enough ingredients to make something simple, but as I’d found a jar of chocolate spread at the back of the fridge, I decided to make tarts. I made the pastry for the tarts with no problems and I was going to fill some of the pastry cases with the chocolate spread and make the other pastry cases into jam tarts.  When I searched in the cupboard for the jam, however, I found that it had all gone and all that was left were empty jars.

I thought immediately that Julian must have eaten it all on his pancakes, but then realised that there was no way he could have eaten 30 jars in 2 days like that, because he only ever put a small amount of jam on his pancakes.

“Do you know where all the jam has gone?” I asked Julian, turning to face him.  “No” he answered, but he said it in a strange way, and with a guilty expression on his face.  He was holding something behind his back, and then I noticed he had chocolate spread on the side of his mouth.  I looked behind him and he was indeed holding the jar of chocolate spread, which, apart from a spoon sticking out of the top, was now empty. 

The idea that someone could eat chocolate spread with a spoon, directly from the jar, made me smile at first but I quickly stopped laughing and instead looked at Julian in amazement as I realised why he carried a spoon around with him all the time, and why there was no jam left.  He had been using his spoon to eat the jam, directly from the jar, and had managed to eat 30 jars of jam, in just 2 days.  It’s no wonder he was hyperactive!

Click above to listen.  You can get the .mp4 here, and the .mp3 here (opens in new window).