Tennis and toast

Like many Brits, I took advantage of the extra long Jubilee weekend, to escape from Jubilee celebrations with a short staycation in the Cotswolds. And very twee it was too, with beautiful houses built from Cotswold stone with roses hanging from their porches, and coachloads of Japanese tourists tramping up and down the main drags of Chipping Campden with their various photo-snapping gadgets. Of course there was no real escape from the Jubilee anywhere in the UK, and the Cotswolds was no exception - in our neck of the woods their celebrations took the form of a concert in the village green featuring some X Factor finalists I have never heard of but who no doubt either hailed from the region, or were a bit low on celebrity-propelling gigs. We are a frazzled family at the moment, between long working hours, school exams, increasingly hellish commuting whether by tube or by bus, and general administrative chores taking their toll, so we were all in need of a break. One of the nicest things we managed to pack into the weekend was tennis - we are all pretty indifferent at it but most of us enjoy the attempt. Playing tennis with only one working foot presented several logistical challenges, not least a mental wrestle against my basic competitive urge which says, go for it! when a ball goes wide. Schooling yourself to go only for balls within your immediate range is a pretty counter intuitive exercise for the best of us, but I like to think of it as a key exercise in discipline. But even being able to hit balls from a more or less stationery position beats sitting with your leg in plaster and your foot on ice, so it was pretty damn tremendous progress, and I am a strong believer in banking progress, no matter how small. And frankly, any exercise was a necessary after the enormous breakfast of which we had availed ourselves at the B&B where we had spent the night. Scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, croissants, pancakes, hot chocolate, cereal, fruit, tea/coffee, and toast. We despatched the lot. Except the toast. Funny thing, toast. How you like your toast is an intensely personal thing but if you can rely on one thing in B&Bs it is that by and large it will arrive cold and crumbly. Perhaps this is just inevitable. After all, timing is everything in the cooking of toast, and if you leave it for longer than a few seconds you have lost the window of opportunity. That is just too long for restaurants and cafes, so perhaps the answer is just not to have toast when eating out. But given the wide variation in performance of toasters, gadgets which seem to have personalities and lives of their owns, the challenge is not that much smaller at home. Our toaster broke recently, and when I replaced it we all went through a crisis. Number 3 in old toaster yielded perfect toast; number 3 on new toaster yielded charred remains. Perhaps the only way to have perfect toast is via an open fire, toasting fork and tongs. In which case, we should probably all give up and reach for the Pop Tarts.