While my family was sunbathing on the beach, I decided to cook a stack of poached eggs. I cracked the eggs into a tin bath of boiling water following a technique learnt from my Canadian friend WR. The cooking, however, turned out to be the easy part. Extracting them from the water with a slatted spoon proved extremely tricky. It was also hard to concentrate on the task with WR in close range droning on and on about the deficiencies of his wife and three children.