TLC

Today was my worst ever birthday and my worst day in France yet.

I woke up late, missed my bus, got on the next one to discover my monthly travel card had expired and arrived late for lessons.

Our morning class was art which was particularly uninspired as we were simply doing elaborate capital letters.

I took my lunch break by the balls and went off to visit a shop I've had in mind for some time only to find it was shut. Arrived back in the labo to find we had nothing new to make and were revising just brioche and puff pastry. Boring.

Something went wrong with my brioche dough (I think I must have mis-tared the balance) and it ended up extremely runny so I had to start all over again and my puff pastry went wrong for the first time EVER. This was due to the excessive heat in the labo since the other group were working on nougatine. There were 8 industrial gasses on full blast and 8 600 Watt heating lamps filling the room. This reeked havoc with my butter - everyone else had already done their feuilletage by this point because they hadn't had to restart their pastry...

By the time it came to shape my second batch of brioche dough the room was like a furnace and made things very hard... and I was so far behind there was not enough time to properly prove the dough (don't care about that split infinitive) so once baked it had to go straight into the bin.

Was so bloody angry. What a waste of a day.

I had decided I would go and see a film I've been eying up for some time to cheer me up, a French film called Welcome about an Iraqi immigrant who wants to swim the channel to England. My family couldn't come with me (no films on school nights) so it looked like a lonely trip. But I was quite resolved, and the cinema is not really about company anyway.

So I was just preparing an extremely swift getaway from scrubbing the labo (hiding round the corner listening to some lovely birthday messages from my parents) when Marion came dashing over saying, Don't leave, the prof has put some petits-fours in the oven, we're going to celebrate your birthday.

The petits-fours were lovely and were accompanied by a mildly suspect champagne which was very touching (the done thing at school for celebrations) but by the time it was over I'd missed the first 20mins of my film. So there was no point in going.

So I decided to try a new bus route home which is on a much more direct line. I got to the bus stop to find I had missed the last service (it was only 20.30 for goodness sake) so had to walk 15mins across town to my usual one. En route, I dropped a whole pack of cards which scattered everywhere.

Need some TLC.

I'm going to bed.