Month: February 2010

Currently President of the Chamber of Commerce, in his day job Chaz runs a public relations and marketing firm based in Guildford, promoting clients locally, nationally and internationally. He was brought up in West Sussex and then went to college and lived in London for ten years. He has lived and worked in Guildford for twenty years and is a passionate supporter of the local area.

Chaz is married with three children, aged 14,12 and 5 and says he spends his free time ferrying the kids around from one activity to another, whether that be ballet, drama or football. His hobbies include walking, cooking, drinking Spanish and Italian red wine, and music. He’s just painstakingly digitised his entire vinyl collection of 1000+ LPs and put them on his iPod and can be seen wandering around Guildford and over the Downs with headphones on, normally in a world of his own! He also likes to keep quiet about the fact that he is a West Ham supporter, as that’s where his family originates from, and if you ask him he will say that West Ham won the World Cup for England — so don’t ask him about that ….

When I told my brother-in-law we were entering a charity pancake race he said “What is that? Do you have to make pancakes as quickly as possible?” Presumably he has been watching too much Saturday Kitchen and thinks that pancakes are omelettes.

The pancake race is, of course, one of those splendedly eccentric British traditions unknown to my (American) brother-in-law and the origins are interesting — in 1445 a maid in Oxfordshire was cooking pancakes, she was late for church and she unwittingly ran to church still carrying her frying pan with a pancake in it!

Anyway, back to Guildford and my mate from the local radio station shamed me into entering a team into the Pancake race (which the radio had made sure went ahead as the normal organisers couldn’t do it as it was half-term this week — long story).

So, our intrepid team lined up for the start — officiated by our ever-civic spirited MP Anne Milton and we had an extra member of our team in the Guildford reporter for the Surrey Advertiser (thanks Richard!)

We didn’t get off to a good start — apparently I tossed the pancake too high and too slowly, so we lost the competitive advantage we never had, and the others in the team of Uli, Richard and Andrew couldn’t pull back the deficit and we didn’t quite win the race. This gives fuel to the argument as to where you put the weakest member of a relay team …..

More training required for next year …..

Chaz

(photo of naive “high” pancake tossing courtesy of Surrey Advertiser)