Seafood
Back in the early autumn we booked a rather last-minute holiday in a delightful little cottage in Normandy. We've been to northern France a few times over the last few years, but never got around to seeing Mont Saint-Michel, so I was quite keen that we'd get there this time.

Our cottage was right on the south side of Normandy, so it was a fair drive up to the coast, but we arrived to a rather blustery but otherwise fine day. Wandered around the town for a bit, and finally decided that some lunch wouldn't go amiss.

There isn't a lot of choice for places to eat in Mont Saint-Michel, and what is there is a bit pricey - up to that point we'd been good with the spending money though, so thought we might treat ourselves. Another thing on the to-do list was the 'assiette de fruits de mer' - a massive plate of mostly recently deceased sealife which I was keen to try. Theirs was a particularly impressive platter - it looked like enough for a family of five or six, and it was all mine.

Of course it was actually mostly shell and other inedible bits, and very fiddly to extract some of it, but eventually I was done - we paid and made our way back to the car park for the journey home.

We stopped at a supermarket on the way home to pick up a few provisions, and that's when I knew - the seafood was not staying down. I wasn't feeling properly sick, just sort of... odd. I looked around for a toilet - nothing. At this point we had about forty miles back to the cottage - little roads through little towns with very low speed limits.

Now I'm funny about being ill - I hate people making a fuss of me. I also didn't want to alarm the other passengers - Miss Photon and her little sister - so I decided that the best plan was not to mention how I was feeling. We returned to the car, and I started driving, watching the miles count down agonisingly slowly.

The closer we got, the worse I felt. I could feel the burbling - I knew it was going to be bad. I'd started feeling clammy with fifteen miles left - somehow I'd managed to just about convince myself that I didn't feel ill, it was just a figment of my imagination, then I'd go over a bump and the illusion was shattered. Five miles to go, and the sweat was trickling down my neck, and I knew it was going to be close. Very close.

We made it, just. I was out of the car, through the front door, grabbed the washing up bowl (chundering into a sink is a rookie error) and got to the bathroom with less than ten seconds to spare before my digestive tract performed some mathematically interesting transformations. I genuinely wanted to die for about twenty minutes - apparently the noises echoing around the cottage were quite horrific - and finally emerged an hour or so later, feeling very fragile, but otherwise a lot better. I was just about back to normal twenty-four hours later.

We had to buy a new washing up bowl - couldn't get the smell out of the old one.
(Photon wasting your time since, Tue 12 Jan 2010, 1:42, Reply)