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Woah, what a title! So many different levels! What? Have I been abducted? No, I just thought, you know... sometimes along comes something that's pithy, terse and succinct, and that's too damn good not to use. Oh come on! You'd have done the same. Anyway, it's better than this entry's working title "Colombia, Backpack, Graham". Hmmm, is it too late to start again?

FARC off.

Graham Perkins
2006-08-21 12:41:33

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to do and they had a lot of their relatives from Medellin staying around the town and coming over to visit most days. Most of my time there was just spent playing with the children and drinking and dancing with the adults. Between them they all kept cooking up long-overdue healthy tasty food. When we had fish they found it hilarious that it hadn't crossed my mind to eat the head and as much as it pained me, I dutifully indulged them (and under their guidance I was really shocked to learn just how few parts of a fish's head can't be sucked, plucked or eaten).

I kept threatening to cook something up before I left. I suppose the onus was on me to come up with something simple, flashy and above all as quintessentially English as war. The good Lord alone knows why, but to that end I stubbornly decided on Beef Wellington. Beef fucking Wellington, I ask you?! That square meal that I, for one, eat at least three times a day.

It was doomed from the start. I mean, what's a country coming to when you can't buy frozen packs of ready made puff pastry from your local supermarket? No matter; I'll just make it myself... how different from pancake batter can it really be? Hmmmm, what's next on the list? Oh, of course. The goose pâté. What's that, Señor? You don't stock foie gras because as a country you're languishing somewhere around the third world? Well, I'll just take the tub of luncheon meat; that fat-tongued mockney twat Jamie Oliver'll be the first person to tell you it's a fine alternative for mashed-up bird bits...

Thinking about that last substitution, I gave it the go-ahead purely and simply because luncheon meat, too... was pink. As for the beef tenderloin, well that just seemed a little pricey, really. Just give me that hunk of leather that those flies seem so satisfied with...

So, with the help of my able-bodied assistant some four hours later it was ready. OK, hands up all those who think that Carne de Vaca Wellington was a resounding success. Yeah? Really? Well then, let me tell you something: It tasted like the back end of an arse. But none of that mattered because, washed down with lashings of cheap wine cartons I can't think of anything that's made so many people laugh so much! (I wish I still had the photos I'd taken from those weeks, but I lost them all along with yet another camera. I don't really want to talk about it, but rest assured I finally decided that I'm done with buying cameras until I move to Japan, so unless I carry on stealing photos this blog's going to get a whole lot duller.)

A couple of days later, and it was time to leave. Instead of just threatening to leave and staying deciding to stay another night. Friends of the family gave me a lift back to Medellin and, well, being Medellin maybe I'd just hang around for another day or two before deciding where to go next.