Binge's Adventures in Eindhoven Day 7 (and the quest for a disposable barbecue.)

The Leisure Pool

Final day of the pool swimming today and Area 51 was celebrating Sumo's second gold of the meet in the 200 breaststroke, although with the greatest of respect to his performance the excitement in the pool centred around the appearance of Inge de Bruin in the 40 years 50m freestyle.

The Dutch heroine from Sydney went 26.64 to set a new European record, it was awesome to watch, although not quite fast enough to grab Dara Torres's world record.

On a more mundane level, Area 51 and the Ren 96 crew decided to combine forces to celebrate the end of the pool competition.

A barbecue was suggested and the Funky Trunks pair and Binge were dispatched to a local supermarket to lay in the provisions. The moral of this story is don't buy a fortunes worth of barbecue food without checking that you can buy a disposable barbecue first.

This led to a rather frantic chase around the suburbs of Eindhoven in a bid to locate this rather essential piece of kit! Success in a the Dutch equivalent of "downstairs at John Lewis" known as "Blokker" The evening degenerated from there on in, way too much red wine led to an attempt to eat a "Super Dickman" without using your hands. There are some very ugly photographs!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the delights of Dutch cuisine, a super dickman is a cross between a walnut whip (without the walnut) and one of those chocolate snowballs you used to eat when you were a kid.

The pool swimming ended and Jane Asher and Geoff Stokes were part of the closing ceremony and received the symbolic handing on of a flag as the next European Championships will be held in London. So all of you ex swimmers there's no excuse you've got about 30 months to get yourself back into shape.