Just a quick note in case any of you still haven’t realised. Yesterday’s eruption news was an April Fool. The 3GKiliClimb challenge is still very much on! If you look closely at the article’s author you’ll find out her name means “April Joke” in Swahili!
Hope we didn’t panic anyone too much! S, J & O xxx
Sheila and I have been friends for over forty years and throughout that time we have shared various interests. Running, cycling and walking have been three of them. But rarely just walking, running and cycling. There usually has to be some ulterior purpose – usually foraging and scrumping (or thieving as Sheila prefers to call it) whatever is in season. We never venture into the Kent countryside without an empty rucksack or saddle bags. We have foraged for blackberries and damsons; scrumped apples, pears and even mulberries. Sometimes we’ve come back so heavily laden that we could hardly peddle. Once we even nicked a couple of avocado pears when walking in Spain. Visiting Sheila at her caravan in the summer, we’ve picked sea kale, sprouting broccoli and apples from the beach across the road. Sheila has even been on a foraging course with her friend, Mary, and found out how professional foragers go about it.
However, the best bit of scrumping was the most recent. On her return from the Amalfi coast last week, Sheila presented me with an enormous fruit which at first I mistook for a pommelo. It was, in fact, a huge lemon – almost the size of a football. This afternoon, I cut into it and found that the pith was an inch thick. I decided to turn it into marmalade and, from one lemon and two pounds of sugar, I now have five jars of delicious lemon marmalade – one jar of which will return to the scrumper who brought it all the way back from Italy.
This set me thinking about scrumping opportunities on Kilimanjaro – what booty will she bring me back from there, I wonder? Wikipedia tells me that the climbers will pass through five climate zones on their way up and that coffee, bananas and other crops are grown in the lowlands. Although it would be interesting to taste an African banana, (maybe they’re small like the Canarian ones?) I doubt that it would survive the journey back. Perhaps I’ll settle for a handful of coffee beans…