Tomorrow is Pancake Day!

I love pancake day. It's the only day some years that we make pancakes, crazy but true. Crazy because I love pancakes so much. I always used to put lemon juice and sugar sprinkled on them but actually my wife showed me how to make them even better by using the juice of an orange instead of a lemon. I will endeavour to photograph my efforts tomorrow.

Anway, I mention this because I picked up my daughter from school. The first thing she couldn't wait to tell me was that she was giving up chocolate and Macdonalds for four weeks because they weren't very good for her! She gets Macdonalds once a week on a Wednesday because we're all usually late home and the kids have been doing gym and stuff and are really tired and hungry and it's easy and quick. (how many Ands can I get in a sentence? I probably haven't used that many since I was at primary school myself!) And she gets chocolate even less, except in December when she gets a little everyday. Well, I told her that I was very pleased and that she reminded me we needed to get the mix for some pancakes tomorrow. But before I said anything else she had me agreeing to giving up chocolate and Macdonalds too. Well, OK I'm not usually back early enough for Maccy D's on a Wednesday anyway so I can live without a Big Mac but CHOCOLATE? FOUR WEEKS? I don't think I've ever done that. That means I'll have to gorge myself on all the chocolate I bought at the weekend (to last me a week) tomorrow. We call it Shrove Tuesday but I'm so ignorant and not generally very religious I don't know if it's called that across the pond.

Here's a strange coincidence: in the story below I never knew Olney was famous for this and it's not that far from us, though I've never been there. Wikipedia tells me that although it has a Milton Keynes postcode it has a Bedford dialling code! What crap you can sometimes find!

Going for gold in the pancake olympics

One of the most famous pancake races is held at Olney in Buckinghamshire over a 415 yard course. The rules are strict; contestants have to toss their pancake at both the start and the finish, as well as wearing an apron and a scarf. The race is followed by a church service.

Since 1950 Olney has competed with Liberal in Kansas, which holds an identical race, to see which town can produce the fastest competitor. After the 2000 race, Liberal was leading with 26 wins to Olney's 24.