Teddybears never left this picnic.

So, this is my first ever blog, or post on a blog, I dunno, I fail at all this modern technology; if one was to imagine someone who just crawled out from underneath a rock and entered the twenty-first century, that is I.  I feel that, straight away, there are two key points that I must stress about myself before we begin our . . . whatever it is that happens on these sorts of things;

 1) I am a vegetarian, and
 2) I am, what my dear friend Richard terms, the ultimate bumbler.

For those who need to revise the term, see below;

Bumbler - (noun) To bumble. An individual prone to finding themselves at the centre of whimsical, laughable, awkward and ultimately  ridiculous situations.

Cast your mind back a few years (oh buttons, its actually a fair few years ago now; I'm old!) to the summer of 2007, and I spent the summer in Belgrade doing research for my dissertation.  Well, foreign languages are far from my strong point (instead I am gifted with a rather flambuoyant command of my native English) and I was equipped with only a very basic grasp of both Serbo-Croat (I don't care what the Croats say, its one language - there's my input to the ol' Yugoslav split) and the Cyrillic alphabet.  I scanned the menu with a fair amount of eyebrow furrowing for a suitable meat-free Balkan delicacy, and came across something I translated as 'bean soup' . . . . . . . .

The positive - I managed to get seven out of the eight letters correct.

The negative - . . . . . . the 'n' was the incorrect letter . . . . it was actually an 'r' . . . . 

So there I sat, alone in a subterreanean restaurant, with a huge grissle-encrusted slab of bear in a bowl with a dash of gravy thrown over it.  I am ashamed to say that, at this point, vegetarian Michael was vanquished by stereotypically-thrifty-northern Michael and . . . . . . . . . . . I ate it >.<

At this point I'd like to point out that I tried to find a picture of 'bear soup', but google came up with the following as the top result for the afformentioned word combination;

. . . pah lets go for it: here is 'bear soup', according to google images - enjoy!

Since then, I have eaten a fair few dangerous animals in all manner of exotic locations.  I have also eaten shark in Bulgaria (doing m'dear Poppy a favour there, obviously) and a crocodile burger in . . . erm, Chesterfield market place.  Next on the hit-list is an eagle, but I can never catch one . . . might need to do a bit more levelling up before I can catch myself an eagle.

I recently moved to South East London from Chesterfield (no, I know you don't know where Chesterfield is, but it is best described as Sheffield's cancerous growth) . . . and then it transpired that where I lived in that there Lundun place is quite hideously illegal, so by tomorrow I shall have legged it back up north with my pride in tatters (macho law forbids me to admit when I am wrong. so this doesn't 'alf grate on my stubbornness.) 

I will fill all in on the "how's" and the "why's" tomorrow, and grudgingly admit publicly to some people that they were right and I was wrong (to name just a short smattering, I know Gareth, Julia and Jojo all registered their alarm fairly early on) but, as a wise man of unequivocal intellect once said, "meh", and it is with that I bid you adieu.