Dairy Day

 

This is my diary, and so sometimes just plain old diary things go in here. This morning before most people had even gone to the door to retrieve the paper, Steve and I had glugged down a cup and a half of coffee and dressed in bike clobber. Steve got the bikes out and checked them over whilst I put my eyes on. He is my everyday bike slave. 

Last evening Steve was my head chef as he cooked me the best burgers that either of us had ever eaten with only our usual huge salad bowl full to the brim with nice healthy leaves and tiny cubes of raw vegetables. After that I was the washing up lady which is a self appointed position, since I have a ‘He who cooks does not wash up’ rule. 

Then we settled down for a bit of telly together and watched the last two episodes of ‘Spotless’ that does contain the current full ration of sex and violence but also has such a variety of characters that have all knitted in together brilliantly over the series. On checking who has been in what online, the thing that grabbed my eye was not that the big time baddie boss was played by Brendan Coyle, who was I think, the Butler in Downton Abbey… not that I ever watched it, but that there were five directors each charged with two episodes each and the same thing more or less applies to the writers. Now that, surely guarantees a surprise change in the plot here and there. It has been an excellent and very different story, about a man with a crime scene cleaning business who gets hopelessly tied into a secondary cleaning business with the bad guys. Good starting point for the viewer but not for the characters, bit dodgy for them. 

Even after all that, I slept like a top until the alarm went off this morning. I knew what Steve; who was my coach this morning, instead of my chef, or the bloke who holds my hand when we watch the box in the evening, had planned for my today’s training session. HILLS. We have a big event coming up next month and my bike training usually involves flat rides on quiet roads in the summer and loads of turbo training indoors in the winter; we are both agreed, that at very close to seventy seven, I am too long in the tooth to go out on my bike in the rain. The race we have entered is in Gdynia, Poland on the Baltic Sea, a half Ironman. Once you turn out away from the sea and on to the bike ride there, there are hills, fifty six miles of them. 

It is not the hills that bother me though; it is the horrible traffic on the main roads here, so that is why, we were out at first light and did much of the ride that faces us at the end of August in the Worthing Triathlon. From home the route took us to join that Worthing ride and then climb over the South Downs via Long Furlong and the A24 to the turn around and then not quite heading for home but instead in to Worthing for a stop at Starbucks for coffee and a snack, before riding down to the sea front and home again. This was all done and tucked away before breakfast time in some households. 

Steve has now turned into the food shopping person who is obsessed with fresh produce that must be bought daily. I am not allowed to take part in that operation. We are very much a ‘his and hers’ jobs home, both doing the jobs we prefer and never arguing about it.