Wiven-WOAH!

Day 2 of our UK trip and I am rediscovering driving skills long forgotten since my departure for the US 20yrs ago.  

Breakfast at our hotel is good, but basic.  No hot food (with the exception of a soft boiled egg - more on that later) so for our first full morning back in Blighty, we decided that only a Proper English would do.  Dad was meeting us at The Flag around 8.30am from which we'd set off for the Rose and Crown in Wivenhoe, an atmospheric suitably olde-worldy pub which apparently churned out The Full Monty every morning.  It was only a 5 min drive, per Google Maps, but oh my.  The amount of fun, disbelief and under the breath swearing that we managed to cram into that short amount of time was pretty impressive.  I don't know much about the provenance of Wivenhoe other than it's an awesome name to say and its a little village situated on the banks of the River Colne, about 3 miles south-east of Colchester.  It is pretty ancient (apparently the oldest buildings still standing in the town date back to the 1300's) and it probably served an important function for fishing and shipbuilding and smuggling grog and wenches, back in the Olde Days.  

What I do know for certain is that it wasn't built with the modern car in mind.  If you are taking a mode of transportation any wider than a horse, you are in trouble.   What looked like a very easy little drive on our Google Map quickly devolved into a series of "It wants me to drive down WHERE?" type questions as I wrestled our BMW Series 1 into progressively smaller and tinier "roads".   I realized as I took a sharp 90 degree angle turn from one tiny one way street into another one way street (in which another car was already coming down, thus requiring me to reverse back round that 90 degree turn), that there was probably NOWHERE in the entire Continental US that would have roads like this.  The country simply isn't old enough and roads would at least be scaled for horse and buggies.   As it was, navigating our way through this mish mash of teeny tiny cobbled streets elicited several "AAARRGHHHS" and "FOOOKING HELL" from yours truly - but I managed (beautifully, I might add).  I can only imagine it would be completely impossible - and incomprehensible - to our yankee brethren!  Through sheer luck and terror, I managed to navigate ourselves back out of the one way nightmare and actually find the one remaining on-street parking spot in the whole of Wivenhoe.  From there it was a short walk down to the water's edge to the Rose and Crown, for a well-deserved cuppa and Breakfast Valhalla.  

Grateful I am not responsible for the roof or window
repairs for this house

Mission finally accomplished (breakfast was OK - not the best, not the worst), we threaded our way back out of da Hoe and headed over to Dad's place (aka The Lodge).  We spent a couple of hours, chatting away over a Nice Cup of Tea, before jetlag claimed us and we headed back to The Flag for an afternoon nap.  In the evening, Dad had booked us into a Chinese restaurant a short drive away - there was a bit of traffic plus a triple roundabout that was entertaining to figure out how to navigate in real time.  

Sidebar about roundabouts here.  Americans don't really do roundabouts.  I can count on one hand the number of roundabouts (which are called "rotaries") in Illinois - and I get really overly enthusiastic when I come across one (just imagine my automobile as a puppy, bounding excitedly up to the intersection).  If, though, we are to convince our US friends as to the superiority of the roundabout as a traffic management system, then why oh why do we have to stitch multiple ones together in elaborate Fibonaccian-type patterns??  One roundabout - perfect.  Simple, elegant - in and out, bish, bash, bosh.  Two roundabouts?  Well, OK.  A bit more concentration needed here, but still close enough to the original idea to not lose where you are halfway in.  In, round a bit, round a bit, out.  Three roundabouts or more??  Come on now.  Halfway through one of those beauties and you've forgotten your name, your children's names, where you live and why you are even here in the first place.  And that's us native Brits.  God only knows what our funny talking cousins from across the pond make of this whole situation.  Total anarchy and chaos.  Love it.

This morning, we decided to skip the automotive excitement and have a nice quiet breakfast in the hotel instead.  There are 10 rooms here and it must be the off season, as there were only two tables set for breakfast when I came down at just after 9am.  I fancied just some toast and tea - so got the gerbils working overtime to crank the squeaky toast making machine.  Question is - how many go's round is this toast going to need?  It was pretty thick white bread (plus a slice of granary to help keep me regular) so I was thinking it was at least a Two-Times Round situation.  As my fellow Toast Aficionados will appreciate - its always a fine line between underdone and disappointingly floppy (ooer) to then PANIC with clouds of toast fumes billowing into the dining room.   The edible equivalent of taking a shower, I suppose.  (this actually happened to me once as I set fire to some brioche in a very fancy hotel in Zurich - utterly mortifying). Anyway, I was wrong as this bread proved highly resistant to the siren calls of the Maillard reaction and it took an unprecedented FOUR trips round the grills to achieve the perfect toasty color.

Next up in my personal breakfast odyssey this morning was my first soft-boiled egg in years.  Its a food I still associate with childhood and with Mum making you a boiled egg and soldiers when you were not feeling well or just needed a bit more nurturing.  By this time, ManpanionTM had joined me for breakfast (ordering an Americano) and was himself discovering the delights of the toast maker.  He noted my boiled egg remnants and decided he would also try one - so I then spent the next few minutes carefully explaining the strategy of eating a soft-boiled egg.  Americans eat a LOT of eggs for breakfast - scrambled, over easy, sunny side up, over hard, poached, hard boiled.  You name it, you can get it done Your Way.  Pretty much anything EXCEPT the soft-boiled variety.  You ask for a soft-boiled egg in the States and you will be met with blank stares.  The venerable Egg Cup is one item of kitchen tableware that is a very rare find indeed (that and tea cosies - good luck with finding those).  So ManpanionTMs experience with eating a soft boiled egg was precisely zero.  And we were gonna pop that eggy cherry of his right now. 

No idea why this photo loaded this way round. 
ManpanionTM is going in....

I coached him how to take off the top of the shell.  Tap, tap, tap with the teaspoon - but not too deep.  You don't want to release the yolky kraken before its ready.  Once the white is revealed (also giving you an early preview if your egg has been cooked perfectly or if its going to be disappointingly hard), then you can either just go for it straight away or employ a Pro Move and eat out the sides a little bit (steady) to make more room for the volume of your toast soldier.  Then, carefully gauging the optimal size of your toasty spear, its time to plunge it into that yolky goodness (don't forget a little bit of salt).  It is absolutely critical at this stage of the whole process to try and to avoid displacement of the yolk up and over the sides, as it will then run down the sides of the hot shell and instantly harden into a non- swipey yellow streak.  Yolk, wasted.  Suitably educated, I sat back and watched my protege dispatch his first ever soft-boiled egg like he'd been born into this life.  I was so proud.  As some point, ManpanionTM did seem to question why we wouldn't just remove the food product from its shell before consuming and whether all this palaver was strictly necessary.  I mean, he has a valid point, but its just not the Done Thing.  

So, that was breakfast.  Day 2.  I can feel my Britishness getting thicker by the day.  I think its getting to ManpanionTM too.  He just said "before I leave here, my teeth will be crooked and my accent unintelligible".   No, love - before you leave here, I will have you nibbling the chocolate shells off of Maltesers and licking the marmite off of Twiglets.  THEN you can call yourself a true Brit.

Now its time to head out to the throbbing metropolis of Great Bentley to meet Dad plus my nephew Thomas and his wife for lunch.  I am very much hoping for a significantly less eventful drive to the pub this time....

The lovely quayside of Wivenhoe