I see dead things....

Latest round of photographic evidence of my deeply dull and futile life:

• a few photos of the Easter weekend at my Mum & Dad's place - mainly just eating and drinking and burning stuff.
• photos of a walk I did from Bradford-on-Avon to Bathampton a month or so ago. We'd arranged a poker night over at my friend and cheese racing colleague Andy's place in Bathampton, it was a nice sunny day, so I thought I'd make an afternoon of it. Got the train to Bradford-on-Avon (8 quid single - bargain) and then walked up the Kennet & Avon canal towpath to Bathampton, passing all manner of interesting canal architecture on the way, including the Avoncliff and Dundas aqueducts. Texas hold 'em, since you ask. I'd never played before, but it went OK. We were only playing for small stakes, and I only lost about a fiver, which wasn't too bad.
• some photos of last weekend in Reading - Hazel and I went over to meet up with Doug & Anna and go to the Reading Real Ale festival. We managed to achieve all of our stated objectives, except, erm, going to the Reading Real Ale festival. We just went to the pub instead, which, in a very real sense, comes to the same thing, if you think about it. Apologies for the interminable series of me & Hazel pulling faces at the end; Doug went a bit snap-crazy in the pub.
• some photos of Hannah & Mark's wedding in Bournemouth last weekend. In addition to getting an invite in our own right, Hazel was on wedding photographer duty for this one, so needless to say some far superior photos were taken, but these are mine, for what they're worth.

On a completely unconnected note, may I recommend the completely fascinating Weird Meat blog - partly for the wonderfully diverse range of bizarre dead stuff (and some that's not actually quite dead yet), and partly for the hilariously brainless ranting comments from the fluffy bunny brigade: OMFG WTF u ate a dog! u suck dude, etc. etc. As a pathetically unadventurous comparison I've eaten a few interesting dead things, mainly while I was in Africa, but also in France where they'll eat pretty much anything:

• deep-fried caterpillars, which may or may not have been mopani worms, it was hard to tell. Not quite as disgusting as you might imagine, sort of nutty - at the same time I'm not going to be elbowing anyone in the face to get to another plate of them.
• kudu - a large gazellesque creature
• warthog - bit like wild boar, which is, in turn, a bit like pork
• crocodile - nice. Flaky like fish, but more meaty. I'm going to cash in the "tastes like chicken" get-out-of-jail-free card at this point.
• zebra - bit like horse
• horse - bit like beef. I had it barbecued, and it was sort of steak-y.
• foie gras - not the pâté, the real thing. Morally highly dubious, no doubt, but goodness me it's delicious. I had it in riverstation down by the docks here in Bristol a few years ago.
• calves sweetbreads - I have no idea whether the ones I had were thymus glands or pancreas, but they were OK. Possibly just because they were sauced up with a load of Puy lentils and washed down with a gallon of wine in a dingy Parisian restaurant.

So there you go. I'm not counting the obvious things like rabbit, pigeon, goat, etc. - surely everyone eats those? I'll let you know how tomorrow night's dog soufflé goes.