Ted meets a "Boris" bike

The London tubes (underground) have been on strike for 3 days this week.  So what to do for transport  … like the other 2 million a day tube users who shouldn't be above ground, or on the road, let alone on a bicycle, I decided to use one of the London cycles (nick named Boris bikes) that are for hire all over the city.

How hard could it be .. I put my foot on the pedal to climb on-board and immediately and without any grace at all slipped off the pedal and face planted onto the very robust handlebars.  I came up with badly split and rapidly swelling lips and spitting out bits of one of my front teeth.

I had injured myself at zero miles an hour without even getting on a bike!!  I slunk off home thinking that the Doll will give me sympathy and patch me up. I got in the door and she looked at me and said “what happened to you, Homer Simpson lips?” A long silence followed … and then the Doll said “Hey Homer loves pizza so why don’t I take you out for pizza later.  It’s soft and you can put it in through one side of your face .. probably.”  How could I refuse such a romantic offer? So off we went to Franco Manca, my favourite pizza joint.

Actually Franco has several rustic little pizza joints in London.  He first started in Brixton market years ago where he imported a huge “Beast” of a pizza oven, that took about a year to tame.  They are capable of reaching temperatures of 500 degrees Celsius.  So it’s blast furnace pizza and man is it good .. and cheap.

There’s a specials board, as well as a few every changing other things to add to your chosen pizza topping.  This time there was sheep prosciutto and I asked the waiter what it was like.  He said “it’s the same as prosciutto made from porks, only it’s made from sheeps”.  Naturally I had to try some. Like everything at Franco Manca it didn’t make a big noise about itself, just went about being delicious and making you mentally plan when you’ll be back next … without Homer.