On A Farm in France (slow) - Cheers (Series 001, Episode 014)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/.

Cheers (slow) 

Too slow? Try the faster version in the previous post. 

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

Julian was a Polish guy who worked with us during our working holiday on a farm in France.  He didn’t speak French or English very well, and we didn’t speak Polish at all, so it was sometimes very difficult for us to understand each other.  Nevertheless he tried very hard and would talk all the time.

He especially liked it when we sat down for a glass of wine or beer in the evenings, not because of the drink, in fact he was a teetotaller, but because he loved the rituals related to drinking.  He got involved when we chinked glasses, making sure he looked everyone directly in the eye, like the French tended to do and he joined in with our toasts.  We taught him to say ‘cheers’, as the English do, and ‘santé’, as the French do, and afterwards he insisted we say ‘prost’ with him, which we did thinking it was the Polish way to say ‘cheers’.     

One evening, once our drinking rituals were complete and we’d settled down with our drinks to play cards, someone asked Julian about the word ‘prost’.

“What does ‘prost’ actually mean?  Where does it come from and why do you say it?” 

“I don’t actually know,” replied Julian.

“It’s the same for ‘cheers’,” I said, “I say it all the time, but I don’t know what it means, or why we say it.”

“Ah yes,” said Julian, “it’s the same in Polish, we say ‘na zdrowie’ but I’m really not sure why.”

“You say ‘na zdrowie’ in Poland?  Don’t you say ‘prost’?” I asked, a bit confused.

“No,” said Julian.  “I was saying ‘prost’ because I thought it was French.”

“I’m sure it isn’t French,” I said, “the French say ‘santé’, we were saying ‘prost’ because we thought that was what you say in Poland.  I wonder where ‘prost’ comes from then?”

“I have no idea,” said Julian,  “I learnt it in France from two guys I was working with on another farm; I’m sure they were French.  What were their names?  Oh I remember, Otto and Hanns.”

On A Farm in France (fast) - Cheers (Series 001, Episode 014)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/.

Cheers (fast) 
Too fast? Try the slower version in the following post.

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

Julian was a Polish guy who worked with us during our working holiday on a farm in France.  He didn’t speak French or English very well, and we didn’t speak Polish at all, so it was sometimes very difficult for us to understand each other.  Nevertheless he tried very hard and would talk all the time.

He especially liked it when we sat down for a glass of wine or beer in the evenings, not because of the drink, in fact he was a teetotaller, but because he loved the rituals related to drinking.  He got involved when we chinked glasses, making sure he looked everyone directly in the eye, like the French tended to do and he joined in with our toasts.  We taught him to say ‘cheers’, as the English do, and ‘santé’, as the French do, and afterwards he insisted we say ‘prost’ with him, which we did thinking it was the Polish way to say ‘cheers’.     

One evening, once our drinking rituals were complete and we’d settled down with our drinks to play cards, someone asked Julian about the word ‘prost’.

“What does ‘prost’ actually mean?  Where does it come from and why do you say it?” 

“I don’t actually know,” replied Julian.

“It’s the same for ‘cheers’,” I said, “I say it all the time, but I don’t know what it means, or why we say it.”

“Ah yes,” said Julian, “it’s the same in Polish, we say ‘na zdrowie’ but I’m really not sure why.”

“You say ‘na zdrowie’ in Poland?  Don’t you say ‘prost’?” I asked, a bit confused.

“No,” said Julian.  “I was saying ‘prost’ because I thought it was French.”

“I’m sure it isn’t French,” I said, “the French say ‘santé’, we were saying ‘prost’ because we thought that was what you say in Poland.  I wonder where ‘prost’ comes from then?”

“I have no idea,” said Julian,  “I learnt it in France from two guys I was working with on another farm; I’m sure they were French.  What were their names?  Oh I remember, Otto and Hanns.”

On A Farm in France (slow) - Spaghetti Bolognese (Series 001, Episode 013)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/.

Spaghetti Bolognese (slow) 
Too slow? Try the faster version in the previous post. 


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

English cookery has a bad reputation, especially in France. Even though the people that we were working with, during our working holiday on a farm in France, didn’t know much about England, they had all heard about our reputation for terrible cooking.

We think this reputation is a little unfair, so, because we like to cook and we think we’re ok at it, instead of getting insulted by this attitude to our cooking, we gave ourselves the challenge of convincing our co-workers that English cookery wasn’t as bad as everyone thought. Generally everyone was impressed, all except for Alex, who took great delight in insulting our food at every occasion. Alex was however very lazy and he refused to cook, preferring to eat what we made…and then complain about it.

To start with, because we had very little food, these complaints were justified (although however bad the food is, if someone is too lazy to cook, then they can’t really complain about what they get to eat), but after our first delivery of food, the quality of our cookery improved. The food was regional and seasonal and courgettes were the main crop at the time. We didn’t really know how to cook the courgettes but we managed and even though we only had basic ingredients and equipment, we were able to make reasonably good food.

Or so we thought, but Alex could not be convinced. Our honey and mustard lamb was too sweet, our rhubarb crumble was too sour and our sweet and sour sauce… well that was too sweet, and too sour. Whether we fried the courgettes with rosemary, or grated them and served them with lemon juice, or baked them with cheese and garlic, he always found a reason not to like them. If we cooked anything ‘English’, it wasn’t good enough, and when we cooked French food, our English way of cooking would ruin it for him.

He would even insult our cooking before we’d made it, when we were just talking about making a fennel risotto he interrupted us to say how disgusting this English idea sounded, and when we told him it was Italian, he said that we’d find an English way to ruin it.

We had one success with our cinnamon swirls, he seemed to like these and even asked how we made them. They’re not difficult to make, but are quite fiddly as you need to make bread dough and follow lots of time-consuming steps, so I started to answer, saying “they’re quite easy, but…”, but before I could finish Alex interrupted me. “Ah yes, they must be quite easy if an English person can make them, it’s probably just like ‘pain perdue’.” Pain perdue in English is ‘French toast’, and it is stale bread fried in beaten eggs. It is very easy to make.

One day, our boss, Vincent, asked Alex to cook lunch for us all and so Alex made us a spaghetti Bolognese. It was fine, but it wasn’t particularly delicious, but Alex seemed to think it was amazing. “Now this is how the French cook,” he gloated. “I’d teach you how to cook like this but there would be no point because you wouldn’t be able to learn because your cooking is too…English.” He didn’t stop talking about how good his meal was and how bad we were at cooking until he left the table to have an after dinner nap, leaving us to wash the dishes and put the left-overs in the fridge.

Alex was late for dinner the next day and the food had already been served by the time that he had arrived. We were eating Bolognese again, and Vincent told Alex that I had made this Bolognese to see if I could make one that was better than Alex’s from the day before. Alex sat down to eat with the air of a restaurant critic. After spending a minute tasting it he said: “It’s not nearly as good as mine. The sauce is too sweet and there’s not enough garlic.’’ He had another forkful and added: “You’ve put the wrong herbs in; the flavour is all wrong and there’s a horrible taste of vinegar. It’s exactly what I expect from English people, in fact, I don’t think I can eat anymore”. With that, he put down his knife and fork dramatically, folded his arms, made a face and looked away in disgust.

Alex was expecting a reaction but nobody said anything. A little surprised, he turned back towards the table to find that the reason no-one was saying anything was because we were busy trying to stop ourselves from laughing. I hadn’t cooked the Bolognese. Vincent had made that up, in fact, Vincent had just reheated the Bolognese that Alex had made the day before. The food that Alex was refusing to eat was exactly the same food that he’d been boasting about making.

We didn’t tell Alex there and then why we were laughing, but the next time we cooked him something he ate it without complaint, said thank you, complimented us and even washed up, so I think somebody must have told him at some point.

On A Farm in France (fast) - Spaghetti Bolognese (Series 001, Episode 013)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/.

Spaghetti Bolognese (fast) 
Too fast? Try the slower version in the following post.

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

English cookery has a bad reputation, especially in France. Even though the people that we were working with, during our working holiday on a farm in France, didn’t know much about England, they had all heard about our reputation for terrible cooking.

We think this reputation is a little unfair, so, because we like to cook and we think we’re ok at it, instead of getting insulted by this attitude to our cooking, we gave ourselves the challenge of convincing our co-workers that English cookery wasn’t as bad as everyone thought. Generally everyone was impressed, all except for Alex, who took great delight in insulting our food at every occasion. Alex was however very lazy and he refused to cook, preferring to eat what we made…and then complain about it.

To start with, because we had very little food, these complaints were justified (although however bad the food is, if someone is too lazy to cook, then they can’t really complain about what they get to eat), but after our first delivery of food, the quality of our cookery improved. The food was regional and seasonal and courgettes were the main crop at the time. We didn’t really know how to cook the courgettes but we managed and even though we only had basic ingredients and equipment, we were able to make reasonably good food.

Or so we thought, but Alex could not be convinced. Our honey and mustard lamb was too sweet, our rhubarb crumble was too sour and our sweet and sour sauce… well that was too sweet, and too sour. Whether we fried the courgettes with rosemary, or grated them and served them with lemon juice, or baked them with cheese and garlic, he always found a reason not to like them. If we cooked anything ‘English’, it wasn’t good enough, and when we cooked French food, our English way of cooking would ruin it for him.

He would even insult our cooking before we’d made it, when we were just talking about making a fennel risotto he interrupted us to say how disgusting this English idea sounded, and when we told him it was Italian, he said that we’d find an English way to ruin it.

We had one success with our cinnamon swirls, he seemed to like these and even asked how we made them. They’re not difficult to make, but are quite fiddly as you need to make bread dough and follow lots of time-consuming steps, so I started to answer, saying “they’re quite easy, but…”, but before I could finish Alex interrupted me. “Ah yes, they must be quite easy if an English person can make them, it’s probably just like ‘pain perdue’.” Pain perdue in English is ‘French toast’, and it is stale bread fried in beaten eggs. It is very easy to make.

One day, our boss, Vincent, asked Alex to cook lunch for us all and so Alex made us a spaghetti Bolognese. It was fine, but it wasn’t particularly delicious, but Alex seemed to think it was amazing. “Now this is how the French cook,” he gloated. “I’d teach you how to cook like this but there would be no point because you wouldn’t be able to learn because your cooking is too…English.” He didn’t stop talking about how good his meal was and how bad we were at cooking until he left the table to have an after dinner nap, leaving us to wash the dishes and put the left-overs in the fridge.

Alex was late for dinner the next day and the food had already been served by the time that he had arrived. We were eating Bolognese again, and Vincent told Alex that I had made this Bolognese to see if I could make one that was better than Alex’s from the day before. Alex sat down to eat with the air of a restaurant critic. After spending a minute tasting it he said: “It’s not nearly as good as mine. The sauce is too sweet and there’s not enough garlic.’’ He had another forkful and added: “You’ve put the wrong herbs in; the flavour is all wrong and there’s a horrible taste of vinegar. It’s exactly what I expect from English people, in fact, I don’t think I can eat anymore”. With that, he put down his knife and fork dramatically, folded his arms, made a face and looked away in disgust.

Alex was expecting a reaction but nobody said anything. A little surprised, he turned back towards the table to find that the reason no-one was saying anything was because we were busy trying to stop ourselves from laughing. I hadn’t cooked the Bolognese. Vincent had made that up, in fact, Vincent had just reheated the Bolognese that Alex had made the day before. The food that Alex was refusing to eat was exactly the same food that he’d been boasting about making.

We didn’t tell Alex there and then why we were laughing, but the next time we cooked him something he ate it without complaint, said thank you, complimented us and even washed up, so I think somebody must have told him at some point.

On A Farm in France - Potatoes (Series 001, Episode 012)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

Potatoes

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

One of the main problems that we faced whilst on our working holiday on a farm in France was food.  Our first challenge came on the first night after our hosts had dropped us off at the cottage where we were staying.  Soon after meeting the other two lads, Alex and Julian, who were living and working with us, we got hungry and asked them what there was to eat.  “There’s loads to eat,” said Julian.  “They feed us really well,” added Alex.  This seemed like good news, but the reality was not so good.  “There’s loads to eat” wasn’t altogether a lie, technically there was lots of food but it came in the shape of a huge bag of courgettes and potatoes, nothing else, no herbs, no spices, no ‘store cupboard ingredients’, but although it wasn’t going to be delicious, at least we weren’t going to go hungry. 

Alex and Julian weren’t very helpful in coming up with ideas of how to cook an edible meal so we decided to just slice everything up and fry it.  They weren’t very helpful when it came to cutting up the food either; in fact we worked out quite soon that they weren’t very helpful at all.  There was also very little in the way of cooking equipment.  Alex found us a saucepan to cook everything in, but it was tiny, and the food (enough for 4 hungry adults) couldn’t all fit inside.  The small size of the pan was matched by the small size of the flames from our gas hob and, if it were indeed possible to cook potatoes with this set-up, the earliest we would be eating would be breakfast time.

We searched our little kitchen for a frying-pan but there was nothing.  What we did find was an enormous old metal watering can that, after a quick clean, did the job of a frying-pan perfectly well, even if it didn’t really look the part.  The potatoes didn’t take too long to fry up in our make-shift pan, and although our meal was boring, we were at least fed.

We were quite proud of our frontier style innovation, but I wasn’t keen on eating the same thing every day, so I wondered what food Alex and Julian usually ate and I worked out that they must eat something other than potatoes, because whatever they ate must be something they could cook in their tiny pan but I couldn’t work out what it might have been. 

“So when you have more food, what sort of things do you cook?”  I asked.  

“Just simple, seasonal things really, but we’ve not had any food deliveries for nearly a week, so recently we’ve mostly just been eating potatoes and courgettes,” said Julian.  

“How have you been cooking the potatoes?” I asked.

“Just in that little pan,” said Alex.  “Until you found that watering can, it was all we had.”

“How did you manage to cook them properly?”  I asked.  “It must be nearly impossible in that tiny pan.”

“Yes we think it’s impossible,” said Julian, “in fact, this is the first time that we’ve not had to eat our potatoes raw.”

Alex and Julian had been eating raw potatoes the whole time that they had been at the farm, and for the last week they had been eating raw potatoes every day.  The next day we called our hosts and asked if they could lend us some pots and pans, and send us up some food.  They apologised about the food, but this actually wasn’t their fault.  Apparently, when Alex and Julian ran out of food, Alex was supposed to call our hosts to tell them, and then they would deliver more food the next day, but Alex hadn’t phoned, and our hosts had therefore assumed that there was enough food.  Our hosts also explained that they owned another holiday cottage next door to ours that had a fully stocked kitchen and that we were welcome to use it.  

Alex and Julian, it appeared, had known about this other kitchen the whole time.  We found it hard to believe that anyone would eat raw potatoes if there was another option, we suspected at first that they did it because they were too lazy to go next door and cook them properly, and this wasn’t far from the truth.  In fact, there was an elderly neighbour who lived between the two holiday cottages, who would often see them walked between them, and ask them to do something for her, like chop some wood or fix something or move something heavy, and, because they were lazy, Alex and Julian preferred to eat raw potatoes then help this lovely old lady with her chores.

On A Farm in France - Coffee (Series 001, Episode 011)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

Coffee

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

Whilst my girlfriend and I were on our working holiday on a farm in France, one of our jobs was to turn fruit into jam.  On our first day of jam making, we were told that we would start work at nine o’ clock in the morning, but when we arrived at the workshop on the dot of nine, it was closed.

We waited for half an hour, then went into town to see if we could find Colette, who was the mother of our host-family, and therefore our boss.  We found her in town doing the grocery shopping.  We asked if we could help but she said she was ok, and that we could go back and wait for her at the workshop.  She said she would be down shortly to show us what work we had to do.  She gave us a key and told us to let ourselves into the kitchen above the workshop and have a coffee while we waited.

We were back at the workshop at about ten o’ clock.  We made coffee and sat down to drink it but Colette still hadn’t returned by the time we’d finished, so we went into the workshop to see if we could work out what we had to do.  There were no fruits to do anything with, and there was nothing else obvious to do, so we had another cup of coffee.  We don’t drink much coffee (we much prefer tea), and the caffeine was already making us feel very alert.  At eleven, our boss finally arrived.  We asked what she wanted us to do.  “First things first,” she said, “I need a coffee.” 

After coffee, we went into the workshop but before we could start work there was a knock at the door.  It was one of our hosts’ English neighbours.  She was eager to meet other English people and although we said we were happy to work now and chat later, Colette wouldn’t hear of it, and so we went back upstairs for a coffee and a chat with the neighbour.

The neighbour left after a while and we went back downstairs to the workshop, eager to get to work because we were buzzing from all the coffee, but our boss was on her way back up, and she told us not to start work as it was half past twelve and time for lunch.

After lunch, and yet another coffee, we went back to the workshop but when we got there we realised that the fruit hadn’t been delivered, so we couldn’t start doing our work and so Colette asked us to drive to the farm that they were buying the fruit from, and pick it up for her.  We arrived at about two thirty but there was no-one there so we waited for a while and then decided to go back.  As we were leaving we met the farmer, who told us he’d just delivered the fruit and was sorry for the delay.  He also told us that one of our boss’ children had banged his head at school, and so our boss had taken him to see a doctor.  There wasn’t much point in going back as we didn’t know what to do with the fruits, so when the farmer suggested we have a cup of coffee with him, we said yes.

Feeling quite jittery and hyperactive after all the caffeine, we made our way back to the workshop and got in just as Colette was returning from the doctor’s with her child.  Before we started work, she insisted that we have a quick coffee to calm her nerves as she was understandably worried about her child, even though he was fine.  At about half past three, I went into the workshop, found the fruits and started washing them ready for peeling them.  My girlfriend was looking after Colette’s son whilst Colette went to pick her other kids up from school.  As she was leaving she had a phone-call from her husband, Vincent, who had run out of petrol on the way back from a farmers’ market, and needed her to bring him some fuel.  She couldn’t do this and get the children from school, so she asked me to pick them up for her. 

I collected the kids from school, and when I got back their mum still hadn’t returned, so we gave the kids something to eat and kept them busy.  When Colette arrived, she insisted that we have another coffee and when we went back downstairs to wash and peel the fruit, the caffeine was making us feel very nauseous. Just as we were starting work, Vincent came in and seeing us working looked at his watch and said that it was five o’ clock, and that we should stop work.  When we protested he said that we weren’t legally allowed to work more than a 9 to 5 and that he didn’t want us working anyway because we were both sick, pale and shaky and looked like we were about to faint.  “You’ve worked way too hard today,” he said, “tell you what, come upstairs and I’ll make you a nice cup of coffee.”

On A Farm in France - Raspberries (Series 001, Episode 010)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 


Raspberries



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

“Raspberries are our most important fruit.  Without a good raspberry harvest, we could go bankrupt.” I remember our boss, Vincent, telling us this as we were about to start our first day of work on our working holiday on a farm in France.


“Your first job,” he told us, pointing to one of the two fields full of raspberry plants, “is to cut all the raspberry canes in this field down to ground level, new canes will grow from the plant, and they produce more fruit than if I just left the old canes to fruit again.”

We did as we were told, and at the end of the day, as we were finishing cutting the raspberries canes in the field, Vincent came over to see how we had done.  Whilst we were chatting he suddenly slapped his hand against his forehead.  “I don’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve made a mistake, I made you cut all the raspberry canes down, but these raspberries only produce fruit when the canes have been growing for a year, I should have made you leave the older canes, because we won’t get any fruit from the new canes this year.”

“There are loads of plants that have grown wild next to the field, we’ve not cut them down at all, could you just transplant those?”  I asked.

“Yes, we could transplant them into this field,” said Vincent, looked relieved, “I think there are enough, it’s just a shame you’ve wasted all your time.  We’ll start work on that tomorrow morning.  Lets go in for dinner now, and a well earned glass of cider.” 

The next day we transplanted the raspberries that had grown wild into his field.  We had finished by lunchtime and Vincent was pleased with our work.  The day after that we were working on the second raspberry field.  Our job was to transplant raspberry plants from where they were too close together to places where there were large gaps in the rows.  At lunchtime, Vincent came down to see us.

He told us that all the plants that we replanted yesterday had died.  “I meant to water them yesterday,” he explained, “but I completely forgot about them after all those ciders.  I went to water them just now but they’d all wilted, I don’t think any will survive.  Unless some more magically appear from somewhere, it doesn’t look like we’ll have many raspberries this year.”

Vincent did seem to be learning from his mistakes though.  “This time,” he told us, “I’ll set up a sprinkler system for the rows that you’ve been doing this morning so they’ll definitely have enough water.”

We weren’t working that afternoon, or the next morning, so we spent the night camping in the mountains, and we didn’t get back to the farm until the afternoon on the next day.  The first thing we did was go to see how the raspberries we’d replanted had done.

As we half expected, they were all dead.  We went to tell Vincent, who was fixing the gate at the entrance to the farm.  “Oh no, not again.” he cried.  “Yesterday I disconnected the hose for the sprinkler system so that I could water the plants in the greenhouse.  I must have forgotten to reconnect it.  What am I going to do?  Unless some more magically appear from somewhere, we’re hardly going to have any raspberries this year, or next year.  We’re going to be ruined.  My wife’s going to kill me.”

“Hello,”  someone shouted.  We all looked round to see that Vincent’s neighbour, who was also a farmer, was calling him from the drive.  “I’ve finally got around to neatening up my fields, I’ve spent all day pulling up plants.  I started a fire and was just going to burn them when I thought that you might want them.”

“What plants do you have?” asked Vincent.

“There are apple trees, rhubarb plants, and blackberry bushes if you want them,” Vincent's neighbour replied.

“I’ll come and have a look, we can probably use some of them.” Vincent didn’t seem too interested.  He was obviously more worried about his failed raspberry crop.

“Help me take those bags down to the fire, and then I’ll show you what plants I have.” said Vincent’s neighbour pointing to a dozen large white sacks sitting at the end of Vincent’s drive.  We all went over to help him with the sacks.  “It’s a shame that we have to burn these, but I just don’t have room for them and I know you have hundreds already. 

“What are they?” I asked.

“Raspberries of course, the fields were a mess, I had to pull up hundreds of them, all varieties and all ages, I just don’t have room to keep them.”

Vincent spoke slowly.  He looked like he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or not.  “It is a shame to waste them,” he said “maybe you could leave them with me.  I can probably think of one or two places where I could grow them.” 

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

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

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

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).