I ran home from Twickenham last night. With a backpack on, too. By my rough calculations, I was running at 11.8 minutes per mile. Which is slightly faster than an unmotivated 96 year old woman with a zimmer. But only just. (A motivated 96 year old woman would probably have left me eating dust.)

Today, to reward myself for such exertions, I went out for lunch to a Vietnamese cafe. I had a wholesome and virtuous salad that was so stuffed with flecks of raw chilli that by the end my dining companion swore that I looked like Lesley Ash.

And now to the interesting bit: I washed the napalm salad down with a cup of the cafe's much-vaunted "Weasel Coffee". The blackboard (complete with illustration of, bizarrely, a stoat - and we all know the difference* don't we, people?) claimed that the coffee beans were fed to, and then regurgitated by, Vietnamese weasels. I find this all rather implausible. How do they persuade the weasels to regurgitate the beans? And if they are so unpalatable, how do they persuade the weasels to eat them in the first place?? Perhaps it is all a euphamism, and the beans actually exit the weasels via another, even less savoury, route???

Anyway. The coffee (which was rather expensive as coffee goes) was very nice - smooth, strong and not at all bitter. But I couldn't really detect anything particularly weaselly about it. I've a sneaking suspicion they've made it all up to see how many foolish people (i.e. me) they can sucker in. I can't see anyone bothering to get it more than once, given it is twice the price of regular espresso and just tastes like a normal, if very pleasant, coffee.

*amazingly, this mistake on the part of the cafe gave me my first ever opportunity to use my favourite joke in context. But since you all know it, I'll spare you. And nobody laughed. They didn't even honour it with a groan.