Dom Davis (The Blog)

The Zozo has a quantity (I want to say six, but it could be 7) of arachnids, specifically tarantulas that she keeps at home. I remain mostly ambivalent about these house guests as, despite being anathema, they are in individual holding cells, which are placed into a locked spider containment unit in the living room. Besides, unlike your common or garden spider, they are quite cool to look at ,through the safety of the glass and 3mm Perspex barriers of course.

These spiders need feeding on a fairly regular basis and are fed a diet of live, or very recently live insects, mostly cockroaches and crickets. For a long time The Zozo was breeding a colony of cockroaches in the bathroom (safely ensconced in a double walled container before you panic) but it seems the wee beasties have munched their way through these as they no longer appear to be there. The current dish de jour would seem to be crickets. These live in a small box within the spider containment unit to keep them happy until such point as they become food.

We’ve recently had to move things about in the house. Willow will very soon outgrow her Moses basket so the living room has been reorganised to house the cot (Willow resolutely refusing to sleep upstairs). To accommodate this the spider containment unit has been moved upstairs onto the landing, which has presented a hitherto unexpected problem: chirping.

Crickets, as you may or may not know, make a chirping noise using their hind legs and you can quite often hear one of the crickets in the house doing this, especially during the night as my head is about 2m from them. What is surprising is its not the noise that I find disturbing, it’s that there is not enough of it. Having lived in many foreign countries and having, as I do, colonial roots, I am quite used the night sounds of the tropics and rather enjoy hearing the night time chorus of crickets, frogs and cicadas. It tells me that outside there is a tropical paradise, warm weather and good food. Hearing a single cricket somehow has the opposit effect. It causes to remind me that I am not in tropical climes, it’s cold outside and I’m going to have to leave the house in the dark and go to work in a few hours.

That said, the chirping does have one useful purpose: it tells me the internal holding cells of the spider containment unit have not failed and we do not need to look towards implementing the Hammer Down protocol should the second level containment fail. Its not quite the motion sensors and laser tripwires that I wanted, but The Zozo won’t let me have those because she thinks I’m being silly.

Next week The Zozo and I are off to the Algarve for a short break. Our original holiday plans were two weeks in Barbados with The Zozos parents but Nubbins arrival meant we needed to rethink things.

I’m trying to remember the last time I had a summer holiday and we’re probably talking nearly 20 years ago. All my holidays since then have tended to be spring, autumn or winter holidays.

Usually when we go on holiday The Zozo and I do things as neither of us are sitting on the beach doing nothing people. For this holiday we have nothing planned. There’s a parking space at the airport booked, flights and hotel. That’s it. I still need to work out how to get from the airport to the hotel, although I suspect it will be via taxi. Once there we will relax, unwind, stock up on our sleep and generally do very little. It may be our last chance for a long, long time

There is something about the Full English Breakfast which not only puts it in the top 3 of all breakfast types but that seems to be impossible for foreigners to copy. I’m not sure what it is, but finding a good Full English outside of the UK is rare.

The Americans, as far as I can tell, come closest but they use the wrong type of bacon and overcook it. That said, when in America, you should be doing proper American breakfasts since they too rate in my top 3 and the crispy bacon works well with a stack of pancakes or a waffle. They’re useless when it comes to tea though. Seriously, Americans take note: filling a half drunk cup of tea with hot water without prompting is like pissing in someones beer to fill it up. You just don’t do it. Also, if we’re working with teabags and hot water in a mug then new teabag for each mug full, OK?

The Europeans don’t have a blind clue how to fry an egg, resulting in a rubbery disk and, in the majority of countries, they don’t have the correct bacon either. Tea appears to be a collection of ‘fruit infusions’. This is not tea! I want black tea, preferably English Breakfast tea. And no noncing about with Earl Grey. We’re doing things properly here. Thankfully the Europeans do do a nice line in pastries, crêpes and waffles so it’s not a total write off, just don’t expect breakfast to cure any hangovers.

The Malaysians, due to the Muslim contingent, don’t appear to do pork, or at least not in public food dispensing places. This means they fail at The Full English before they’ve even started. The sausages are heavily processed chicken or beef affairs in the style of hot dog sausages, not big fat butchers sausages (hell, they could get away with beef sausages if they were real ones, the sausage area is one where you can experiment and innovate), and the bacon is ‘beef bacon’. Yes, exactly. Beef bacon seems to be cut from the same part of the cow as you’d get bacon from a pig and comes in thin, salted and fried strips. It’s sort of like hot beef biltong in taste, but not quite. It’s certainly not bacon, and I’m not convinced on its suitability for the breakfast table. Like the Europeans the Malaysians can’t fry an egg to save their life and the rubbery mess sits there next to the strangely large baked beans looking unappetising. Finally, the butter seems to taste odd. This may be a function of it being constantly melted in the heat and then being put back in the fridge. The Malay take on The Full English is, therefore, a complete travesty, but one of our own making. You see, the Malaysians don’t eat Full English Breakfasts for breakfast. No, they eat nasi lemak and other such goodness. Breakfasts that, unless you’re in serious need of curing a bad hangover, rate as my number one breakfast foods.

The fact that foreign climes are having to attempt, and thus balls up completely, our fine breakfast cuisine boils down to the large majority of British holiday makers who won’t eat any ‘foreign muck’. They are, as far as I’m concerned, missing out and have made it so that some mornings in Borneo I wasn’t able to have curry for breakfast. I want these people publicly flogged so the next time I go out there I can eat Malaysian food for all three meals.

In the meantime the first meal we had on our return to Blighty was a massive sausage and bacon sarny with real bacon and proper sausages. Pigs were harmed in the making of this meal