Nine hours in …

(or at least it was when I started typing this post.)

So, competition update. We’re nine hours in, and I have the first two entries already. That’s seriously impressive.

All the more so because the form manager I was using for people to upload their entries to has decided that now is a good time to not work. Because of course it did.

There’s a question that usually come up at this point, that involves the word “else” and the word “what”. I’m not going to ask that question. Call me superstitious, but it’s something I’m just not willing to risk doing. Murphy has apparently taken up residence on my hard drive.

True story – the last time I used that phrase out loud was when I was in college. A group of us decided that we’d had enough of the rubbish food, so we   commandeered the one of the tutors’ kitchens and threw ourselves a dinner party.

First problem: the person who was deputised to put the meat in the oven didn’t realise there was a difference between Celsius and Farenheit, and so had put the oven on to a temperature that can best be described as “tepid”.

Second problem: this was not discovered until the meat had been in there for two hours.

Third problem: the tutor had what he told us was “everything you’ll need” by way of cookware, and what I would describe as “one saucepan, a breadknife, and a chopping board”.

We were doing roast beef and veggies, and a lemon pudding for dessert. So we had to go round all the other tutors we could find to try and get the bits we needed. My memory is a bit hazy on when exactly we did this particular scavenger hunt, but I think it was the day of the dinner, rather than a sensible, non-panic-inducing time in advance.

Forth problem: the electric hotplate we were using to augment the other things tripped the switch on the power board it was plugged into, and we didn’t realise this until about half an hour into what we had thought of as “the cooking time”.

This was the point when I looked around at my fellow diners – my hungry, frustrated, put-upon fellow diners – and said out loud the thing which I no longer say out loud.

And then blacked-out the whole college.