Day 7 – Week 1 done

• Distance – 10km
• Total Distance – 50km

Well, that’s Day 7. Hard to be all that jovial after the rather grim events in Paris today – so I’ll keep this short. Slightly longer today – a lovely 10km run through the wind and rain, along the beach, up a hill, around the town and back along the beach again. My feet are taking a beating, with bloody toenails and searing pain along the bottom, but that normally clears up in a few days. I was talking on Facebook again today about ultra marathons., I have run an ultra distance a couple of times (just over 60km) when training for an 80k (which didn’t happen due to an organisational cock up). I swore the training burden was too high and I’d never get myself back to that point again – but it’s a lingering ambition. I think to make it happen I’d need to agree to do it with someone else – that would provide the impetus to train (and the motivation on the day to finish) – but I don’t think it’s a 2015 target. Perhaps next year….

Sigh. Anyway – I’m fairly depressed with the world in general. So that’s that for now….

Day 1 – Welsh Feet…. Welsh Roads?

• Distance: 6km
• Total Distance: 6km

So, Day 1 of Janathon. Quite a lot has changed since the last one. I’m no longer in France, no longer with my original partner (and midway through a bitter split) and no longer capable of running 500km in a month. I now live in the sleepy seaside town of Aberystwyth in West Wales. Aberystwyth is famous for many things – its cliff railway, its camera obscura and (most importantly) the fact it has only a single escalator (which runs upwards). Aberystwyth is divided from civilization by a couple of A-roads that wind their way through mountain ranges so treacherous that even Hannibal would think twice about crossing with his elephants (I’m not talking about the A-Team’s Hannibal – as due to the complete lack of airports in the region it would be easy to get BA Barracus to visit without resorting to drugged milk). What am I doing in this remote corner of the world? Well, with a view to getting back on the job market I’m wrestling with a Master’s degree in Food and Water Security at the 116th best university in the UK. I am a Master of many things, but this is my opportunity to get a piece of paper that proves it. So far it’s going quite well, although generally speaking the summary of the degree appears to be the world is finished, there is no hope and we’re all going to die.

Still, chin up eh?

Running wise for the first 3 or 4 days I’m going to be plodding around France as I’m staying with a friend here at the moment. I started off today with a gentle lollop through the Sarthe countryside in sub-zero conditions. 6km in all, at an ambling pace, but I felt fine and it was nice to get out and about after months of stooging about writing essays or running on a treadmill. After last year’s incredible (worth pointing it out for the third time) distance I think I’ll be a little more reasonable this time out and just aim for a comfortable top 10 finish. I’d like to do a couple of half-marathons in the spring and summer so this is a good way of kicking off the training as well as reducing the additional runthomasrun that I’m building up around my waistline….

Good luck to all the other participants. Apart from Andrew Fletcher, my nemesis. I don’t think he’s doing it this year, but he will remain my nemesis until I select a new one.

Janathon… Day… er 9, 8… 7?

I bet you were worried.

My sudden, terrifying disappearance.

Two whole days missed. No kilometres logged on RunningFree. My second place in the leaderboard becoming third. Then fourth. Then fifth. I could hear the hushed whispers…. Has it all got too much for him? Has his body crumbled under the strain? Has he been hit by a small white Peugeot van and smeared messily across the French tarmac? Has he been spirited to the fourth dimension by a 16 foot talking beetroot wearing a fake moustache?

No. None of these things.

There have been a few technical issues, now resolved. When I say “technical issues” I mean an issue of me not using technology to provide updates because of my general laziness.

However, my distances have now been logged, and I stand proud on 137km so far this month (on foot) and 49km (on the bike). This puts me comfortably back in second. Hopelessly adrift of fletchea, granted, but not out of the running (ho!) completely. To be fair, I don’t see fletchea doing any pedalling, so I think I should get to add my bike distance and running distance together. Sounds fair no?

It was an interesting run today. Well, I ran 12km this morning and then another 9km tonight, but the latter was the more interesting of the two. I changed my night running strategy today. I figured that running late at night isn’t without risks. I live in the middle of nowhere. It’s quite feasible that if I set off for a long run at 11pm on a day with the temperature below freezing, and fell into a ditch and broke my ankle I could perish of hypothermia before I encountered another human being. I should point out that I wear the same thing if it’s 30 above or 10 below. Shorts, T-shirt, socks, shoes. It’s warm enough if you’re running, but the moment you stop? Ooooh boy. I suppose I could wear full length lycra leggings and one of those puffy running jackets but I’m far too stylish for that. Even if it means certain death if I stop running.

Anyway, while running through scenarios in my mind of me being chipped out of an ice block in 500,000 years time by a future civilization and pondered over (“what was the sparkling bracelet upon his foot? Was it perhaps a mating ritual?“) I decided to experiment with running 5km circuits close-in to my house, figuring that even if I broke my ankle I could probably crawl home before becoming entombed as a human mammoth.

Amazingly I encountered some runners! Real ones. I occasionally see a few people shuffling round in shell-suits puffing and wheezing like an old steam tractor, but my strategy to go round and round the local village finally put me in sync with two local people who seemed to know how to run properly. Being France what could have been a lovely moment where two groups of people could meet and share a singular love of a sport was instead a bizarre social encounter which left me puzzled for a while afterwards.

First of all one of the runners (both male) was wearing a luminous sports bra. Let us call him Pierre and his friend Jean-Paul (I have no idea what they were called, but it seems reasonable). Neither Pierre or Jean-Paul had torches or generally fluorescent running gear. Considering it was pitch-black this seemed peculiar. The only means of alerting passing cars to their presence was the luminous sports bra. Admittedly he was wearing it over a T-shirt, but even so… It’s not really pertinent to the story, but I thought I’d mention it.

After we had exchanged pleasantries, I enquired how far they were intending to run. 15km, came the entirely reasonable reply. Did they run all the time? I asked excitedly (having never seen anyone in about 2 years of running in the area who looked like they took the sport at all seriously). Oh yes! came the reply. Every Tuesday and Thursday, and sometimes Wednesday at 6pm. Now, I can’t be sure this is a lie, but considering I’ve run through the village at about 6pm about 200 times and NEVER SEEN ANYONE EVER I thought this was a bit odd.

We chatted a bit, but whether I was invited to join them in the future or not, I don’t know….

This is what puzzles me. I taught a French class the other day (well, I taught a class of French people about English) and we talked a lot about the differences in culture between France and the UK in terms of social interaction. For example. In France the phrase “Oh yes! I’d be delighted if you wanted to come and stay at my house! Stay as long as you like!” actually, genuinely means “come and stay at my house as long as you like!”

In the UK the phrase “Oh yes! I’d be delighted if you wanted to come and stay at my house! Stay as long as you like!” means “stay in my house for 2 or 3 days tops, after two weeks the sight of you will make me want to vomit and if you stay any longer I will personally stab you to death when you sleep with a rusty screwdriver“.

The French don’t understand this. Their social interactions are very blunt, rather than a tapestry of little white lies. But they also sometimes say very little and expect you to decipher meaning from tiny gobbets of information. It could be that by proffering information on the exact timing and location of their mini-running club that they would be delighted for me to tag along in future. They might even expect it. I don’t know. It’s all very confusing.

But anyway, apart from the luminous sports-bra I was shocked at their relative lack of lighting or visibility equipment. When I enquired as to why this was Pierre said he knew the road like the back of his hand. Which is fine I guess. But when it’s pitch black you actually need to find the road you know like the back of your hand before you can demonstrate your hand-related knowledge of said road. He seemed adamant that head torches were bourgeois accoutrements and entirely unnecessary . I didn’t argue. One thing you learn early on in life is never argue with a Frenchman wearing a luminous sports bra.

A maxim for life. You might want to write that down.

We ran together for 5 or 6km before we parted. The set off up the main road, disappearing into the rain, cloud and light fog with only a thin strip of luminous bra-strap keeping them alive. It was a peculiar meeting and one that lingered long after it had finished.

The question remains – do I run tomorrow at 6pm, try to meet up with them and try to learn more about these mysterious, phantom runners, guided purely by glowing lingerie. Or should I continue to run alone?

I think we both know the answer to that.

Janathon – Day Trois

I AM LEADING JANATHON! 3 DAYS IN AND I’M IN THE LEAD! TREMBLE BEFORE ME MORTALS! TREMBLE BEFORE YOUR NEW RUNNING GOD!

Not that I’m bothered or anything. You know. It’s just for fun. Just for fun….. m’wha ha ha ha ha!

Anyhoo.

I went into the local sports shop today.

Using simple mathematical reasoning I’d worked out that I was going to get through running tops faster than I could wash them, so it was time to invest another 6 euros in a cheap bit of sportswear manufactured by exploited child workers somewhere in South West Asia.

I’m a bit like Henry Ford when it comes to running gear. Any colour as long as it’s black. But as I reached for yet another black running top I stopped and thought “NO”. I took a stand  against my personal monochromatic tendencies today. In a moment of wild abandon I bought a red one. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, or are aware of my general moaning, I’ve always disliked red. I was quite upset when my chunky Garmin 305 GPS was only available in red. I complained endlessly about it to anyone who would listen. When people stopped listening I started complaining to the pets. When they stopped listening I just started having internal dialogues with myself. Like Gollum.

But as I admired myself in the mirror before setting out for my 16.37km run today I noticed I was practically red all over (Joke: What’s black and white and red all over? Answer: ME). Red top, red GPS, red trainers and (I’m going to be open and frank here), red pants. For anyone American reading that’s pants in the underpants sense. For anyone British reading this that’s pants in the pants sense. For anyone else reading this then STOP THINKING ABOUT MY PANTS YOU DAMN BLOODY PERVERT.

I have embraced red. Red is indeed the new black. To begin with I was a little self-concious. I felt like a human strawberry gambolling through the French countryside. But I did notice that rather than the usual wing-mirror grazing I tended to get from French motorists, for once, they steered well clear of me. Fear the strawberry. Respect the strawberry. If I can twin this with my existing approach to terrifying French OAPs late at night I think I can take my campaign of terror to a new level.

I also bought a luminous yellow band with sparkling (red, yes!) lights on it. The idea is, I think, to strap it around your wrist or thigh (if you’re wondering how they manufactured something with a strap capable of adapting to a standard wrist and a standard thigh, then they didn’t, it’s hopeless) and any approaching cars spotting you late at night think they’ve encountered a low flying UFO and keep well clear. I’m not the most masculine of blokes, but the thought of strapping a luminous garter band on my thigh and running around late at night as I sparkle like Tinkerbell is certainly going to be an interesting new life direction, but one I’m ready to take.

I’m half hoping I do get knocked over. As I lay in broken heap on the road and the driver runs towards me in a panic I can wheeze “…you didn’t believe in fairies…. then this happened…. I hope you’re happy”. I can then do a dramatic death rattle and disappear in a puff of glitter.

Leaving just a faint red outline on the road.

Janathon – Day Deux

So, day 2.

I’m bored already to be honest. No, only joking.

The run today (14.3km) was fairly engaging. I high-fived a passing cyclist and a random green metallic Ford Focus beeped at me. If that’s not high octane excitement then I don’t know what is. Not quite sure about this mysterious green car. I’ve seen it about for months, and every time it goes past it always beeps furiously. I don’t know anyone with a green Ford Focus, so perhaps they’re just beeping out of a sense of solidarity. Perhaps they like my shapely buttocks. Who knows? The strange thing is that every time they go past I can never catch sight of the driver. By the time they beep, they’re already gone. Which is a Bob Dylan lyric I think. Or perhaps not. Anyway. It’s some sort of phantom car I reckon. Driven by Death. Or someone with a green Ford Focus who has kept it from me for reasons of embarrassment. I might be hallucinating it, but to be frank if the best hallucination I can come up with is a boring family hatchback with an invisible driver then I’ll probably need to knuckle down and actually start taking some proper drugs.

High-fiving the cyclist was fun though. A real sense of camaraderie and togetherness with a fellow athlete that is all too rare on French roads. Normally even dragging a smile from a passing garcon du sport is more difficult than getting blood from a turnip. In this wanton, dangerous, split-second – where my lycra-clad cycling brethren decided to throw Gallic caution to the wind and touch my palm as he passed – I experienced a sense of sporting closeness I have rarely experienced while out and about. I think he recognised in me another TRUE ATHLETE. Not the shuffling adverts for the local sportswear shop already feeling the pinch just 48 hours into their New Year’s resolution, oh no. But a hardcore distance runner, forged as he was on the unforgiving tarmac we both made it our daily duty to conquer. Either that or he was drunk. Which to be frank is probably the most likely explanation.

I wrapped up the day with a 16km cycle to go and get the milk. I got a free cheese today because of a broken cream promise.

I’ll leave that last statement deliberately ambiguous to try and inject a little bit of excitement into this blog.

It’s not working is it?

Janathon Day 1

So, here we are again. This Janathon thing.

I think I came eighth last year with about 350km run through the month. I was hopelessly adrift of the more hardcore runners – the top guy placed did double that, or something ridiculous. But, it doesn’t hurt to try for a magnificent top 5 placing, so this year I think a target of around 450km fits the bill. This is around 15km a day, entirely doable. Unless you miss a day, and then things get messy. Or you get injured. Or you just can’t be arsed.

Today was the first of a formula I’ll be repeating frequently. A 15km slow, endurance run in the day (with the backpack) and a faster 5km speed run late at night in the pitch black (without the backpack). it was good to see the hordes of fair weather runners out today on the usually deserted roads. 2 or 3 weeks time they’ll all be back indoors cramming Brie and red wine into every orifice and pretending they’ll get back to it at some point. I love a fresh faced New Year runner though – all kitted out in 250,000 euros worth of sweat-wicking fluorescent body suits and military-grade satellite navigation systems. Red faced, puffing, dragging their feet like a partially paralysed turtle. Happy days!

Anyway, back to me. The additional motivation of Janaton should be useful in getting me churning some serious kilometerage this month, but the looming 80k I need to run in March will probably be the bigger incentive. I have shook off many of my niggling injuries, with only a bad right hip still causing problems, so I should be able to train. But, critically, it’s whether I can train enough so I don’t collapse halfway through the Paris ultramarathon and need to get resuscitated  by a Frenchman. Who in my nightmares is normally played by Gerard Depardieu.

So you can see why I’m worried.

BAD WEEK – WEEK 2 AND A BIT

What a hellish week that was. It all kicked off with a well intentioned run last Saturday (er… the last but one Saturday) where I was aiming for around 20-25km. It was hot, and from the off I didn’t feel entirely good about the endeavour. After labouring to 15km I stopped in a village about 10km from home and felt so dizzy and sick I had to compose myself for a good 10 minutes before I could move on. It was now blazingly hot and I think I had dehydrated pretty spectacularly. This is never usually an issue (I’m not a big drinker when I run), but as the week progressed I think it was fairly clear I had a lurgi of some sort (which I didn’t know at the time) so perhaps this contributed in some way….

Having no money and there not being any shops open anyway as it was midday (yay, go France!), I decided to jog/trot/walk 5km to a village I knew of that had a water fountain in its graveyard. This short hop was utter hell. It seemed to go on forever. By the time I got there and crouched in a dark corner next to a gravestone swigging water out of the communal watering can I knew I was having a bad day. The 5km back to the house was also pretty bad, even though I walked it, but at least I wasn’t thirsty. It was comfortably, by some margin, the worst running experience I’ve ever had, and I took it quite hard.

Well, after that the rest of the week was pretty terrible too. My asthma was awful, keeping me awake at night and I felt sick, weary, dizzy and generally off colour. I managed to rouse myself slightly for my running club’s six monthly VMA (Vitesse Maximum Aerobic) test. This involves running around a track, going faster and faster until you collapse – which sounds less fun than it actually is. I put in a reasonable performance, but the rest of the week was a series of laboured 5 and 10k runs I hated. My bad right leg was also playing up, which was making me extra miserable. To top it all off, on the last run of the week I realised I’d forgotten to charge the GPS which switched off mid-run – this corrupted the data sitting on the watch I hadn’t uploaded and I lost days worth of cycling and running info as I had to hard reset it after it recharged.

I tell you, on Friday of last week I was about ready to chuck the whole lot in and choose a new hobby.

Thankfully Sunday and Monday of this week have been much better. I did a perky 5k yesterday which I was expecting to be awful, but turned out to be OK, and a decent 10k tonight that felt pretty good – it was a hilly course and I didn’t get much lung or leg gyp. I also feel almost back to normal and my breathing seems to have settled down, so that’s good. Asthma really sucks. I notice one of the kids now has a cold, so I imagine I had something nasty but without the usual sneezing and coughing. So yeah, hideous week all told.

In brighter news – I finally assembled the elliptical trainer I bought the other week at the supermarket (it took hours and hours thanks to the terrible instructions). I haven’t used it in earnest yet, but it looks like a promising way of supplementing my training with a bit of lower impact endurance building. It also means I can train and work my way through the backlog of DVDs and TV shows I’ve never got round to watching. Yay!

So, not a very amusing update, but it’ll take a while for my humour glands to refill….

FIN

So it’s over. 31 days of hell, finished. Finis.

Lets look at the stats:

Total km: 350

Total amount of time running (hours): 34

Place on Janathon leaderboard: 8

Average km run each day: 11.29

PB’s achieved: 0

Times I ran as fast as I could: 0

Blog posts: 31

Blog posts that insulted the French: 31

Regrets: 6

Welts: 1

Bad backs: 2

Pairs of shorts consigned to dustbin due to excessive groinal ventilation: 1

Contact lenses lost in haystacks: 1

Pensioners scared: 3

Onions consumed on pizza: 0

Haircuts: 1

Good haircuts: 0

Piglets: 10

ZEST4LIFE: 0

Public wees: 16

Porcelain Jesus: 0

Chance of me doing this again, expressed in binary: 0

 

Big thanks to Cathy for organising the event, and I might see you all for Juneathon… maybe.

Utilitarian cheese

Ye gods!

The rain.

I forgot what a bloody nightmare it was doing anything in the rain when you have glasses. I also regret my “cheapest lenses possible” policy, as what with the coating of water and the steaming up (and the dark and a failing headtorch) I constantly felt like an Italian cruise ship captain struggling to stay on course.

At least I didn’t trip into a lifeboat. (Too soon?)

Still managed 10km, but I’d pulled my back out a bit as I woke up and since I’ve been out running it’s been absolute agony. Hopefully it’ll sort itself out overnight.

I thought today, rather than take a few more cheap shots at the French (tempting though that might be) I’d list the five things I most miss about the UK. (What this amounts to is another thinly disguised list of things I don’t like about the French)

What I miss most about the UK

1) The BBC

You pay a licence fee in France. Or at least some sort of charge for having an ariel on your house and it’s roughly the same amount as the UK licence fee. But while the UK offers multiple commercial-free TV and radio channels for your money, as well as a suite of on-demand and catch up services online, the French licence TV basically appears to just allow you to watch fat, sweaty men discussing politics, or badly dubbed German cop shows interrupted with adverts every 3 minutes. I can’t stress how wonderful the BBC is, and you only really appreciate this when you don’t have ready access to it. Thankfully, tuning to the World Service in the car I can have a little oasis of Britishness in the middle of Franceland, but when I hear people complaining about the licence fee (especially people who pay 25 quid a month for Sky) I want to scream.

2) People in villages

Bit of a strange one, but I really miss the general “life bustle” of the UK. In France if it’s cold; dark; raining; hot; windy; foggy; October through February or lunchtime nobody leaves their homes. It’s genuinely weird. Most villages in France, most of the time, look like they’re preparing for a zombie attack. Houses will have their shutters closed and only the occasional stray dog will break the silence as it skips through the tumble-weed. In contrast people in the UK make the best of any opportunity to go outside. If the weather tips the right side of hurricane then villages are packed full of people wandering about, gossiping and passing the time of day. The contrast is so striking, whenever I cycle through the UK into France it always makes me feel very homesick.

3) Cheddar

You have to accept that the French are largely going to consume their own homegrown cheeses. Cheddar isn’t a big thing here. Our local supermarket carried a couple of UK brands of cheddar for a while but you couldn’t help notice that week after week the shelves remained fully stocked, and fairly soon they gave up on the idea. Inevitably I’ve had to transition to the French equivalent of cheddar known as Comte. It’s the same sort of utilitarian “works-with-everything” cheese as cheddar is, but it tastes a little more…. complicated. After a while you get used to it, but I miss a nice plasticky Tescos cheddar.

4) Takeaways

I used to live in Scotland near some quite scummy towns. As everyone knows the worse the town, the better the takeaways, as they can’t afford to sell bad food or they’ll get their windows stoved in. Nothing on the planet matches a dirty, MSG-laden Scottish Chinese. I’ve been back to the UK many times, and I’ve often found myself in Portsmouth or Dover with time to spare, desperate for a decent Chinese takeaway, but there isn’t one. In fact, thinking about it, I’m not sure I’ve found a single decent Chinese takeaway anywhere in England or Wales. You can get Chinese takeaways in France but they aren’t the same. They take them a bit too seriously – they’re a little too healthy and you can’t get egg fried rice. The French also don’t understand kebabs. I once had an argument with a kebab “artisan” near Caen that hand-making his pitta breads and putting organic salad in the kebab was missing the point entirely.

5) Driving

Generally driving on the continent is pleasant. Less speed cameras. Better maintained roads. Less traffic. But I crave driving with people who understand roundabouts. Where priority is always given to the person on the main road, not a random punter merging from the right. Where flashing your headlights to say thanks rather than “get out of my way” is the norm. Where people can overtake without pretending to be Ayton Senna. I also don’t like changing gear with my right hand.

So there you have it. My ideal day would be driving through some heavily populated villages, listening to Radio 4, eating a cheese sandwich and patting a bag of hot, filthy Chinese food by my side.

I am a simple man.

A firing squad, budget crisps and Sting

22.5k on the bike, and 16km on the feet, putting the runthomasrun cat among the pigeons on the Janathon leaderboard and putting me within sniffing distance of sixth. I AM SNIFFING YOU.

Thankfully tonight’s run was an altogether more pleasurable affair. Not because it was any easier (as each day goes by I get more and more fatigued, and slower and slower) but because I experienced it at a natural brightness level (it was still dark, but not ultra-dark).

Why?

Because the phone call came through at about 10am this morning.

A morose man – with a tone of voice suggesting he was about to announce that my entire extended family had been wiped out in a gas explosion – informed me that my glasses were ready. ONE DAY ahead of schedule. Admittedly the schedule was already running 7 days and 23 hours longer than I expected, but you need to take good news where you can find it.

Back on the bike, and back into the local town I went. I figured nothing could possibly go wrong again. It didn’t. I am now the proud owner of a new “stylish” pair of glasses, with incredibly thick cheap lenses, that nip my right ear like a beaver and are so small that my world has become vertically letterboxed.

Still, mustn’t grumble. At least it’s bright again. I’m sure the OAPs of France will rest easy in their beds once more.

All the talk in France today is about the credit rating downgrade. If you don’t follow world economics basically Europe is up poo poo creek without a paddle. France is taking a battering from the credit rating agencies, and the National Front are on the rise ahead of the presidential elections in four months time. As a foreigner in this land with a long, tortuous blog complaining about the country I expect I’ll be first against the wall when the next revolution comes. Still, I figure if the firing squad need regular eye tests I’ll be safe for a while yet.

That said, with a potential shooting in mind, I thought I’d say something positive about the French today. That’s what I thought. When it came to action, things became trickier.

I finally remembered the thing I admire most about the French. It is the fact that they produce some absolutely cracking budget range crisps. I’m not saying the UK doesn’t do a decent entry level potato based snack – in fact we may be the world leader – but France does some terrific stuff too. I will warn you upfront – if you’re thinking of taking a voyage into French crisp heaven you need to steer clear of their nut flavoured crisps. Who in their right mind wants a peanut flavoured crisp? Wrong.

But where France beats the UK is in the provision of economy crisps that don’t really taste of anything. You might think that’s a bad thing, but France have nailed a number of crisp lines that feature a sort of anti-taste. These wonderful crisps taste of mouth, which means you can eat loads of them without feeling sick/full/satisfied.

It’s like sex with Sting.

The French have perfected Tantric Crisps.

With a Tantric Crisp you have an extended promise of a taste orgasm, but ultimate disappointment. But Sting will tell you the voyage, of course, is where the pleasure is. Only with a French Tantric Crisp can you truly experience an extended sensual experience unmatched by any Quaver or Monster Munch.

Probably the best example of Tantric Crisps are the miraculous Sabor Bacons. These crisps are only available from L’Eclerc (the French equivalent of Tescos) in their budget range. They are 38 eurocents for a surprisingly large bag and look a bit like a fat Frazzle. If you were grading crisps on taste from 10 to 1 these would need a score assigned on a different axis. They literally taste of nothing. Put a handful in your mouth and you wouldn’t know. In fact sometimes you can have a few in your mouth and suddenly realise 4 hours later when you lie back to go to sleep and start choking.

There is simply nothing on God’s snack based earth that compares with a bag of Sabor Bacons. I would go to war for a bag of Sabor Bacons. They truly are one of the greatest things the French have given to the world, and yet only a handful of people know about them.

Now, admittedly, as a first entry on our list of great things about France perhaps a bag of economy potato chips isn’t what a nation would aspire to, but we have to start somewhere.

Mainly because it’s the only thing I can think of at the moment.

Until tomorrow!