King Charles and Queen Camilla have a happy marriage, but there’s one hobby they get really competitive about, according to Camilla’s son, Tom Parker Bowles. In his new cookbook, Cooking and the Crown, which features royal-inspired recipes, Tom shared that the couple loves collecting mushrooms and are very competitive about who finds the most. King Charles has enjoyed this hobby for years, and now it’s something they both take seriously! Tom revealed this while introducing his recipe for fresh pappardelle with porcini mushrooms.
Tom wrote that King Charles and Queen Camilla are “obsessed” with collecting wild mushrooms and are very competitive about how much they find. He also praised King Charles for his eco-friendly approach to food, calling him a “true food hero.” According to Tom, the King knows a lot about rare types of cattle, old varieties of plums and apples, the benefits of mutton, wild mushrooms, and even the strong appeal of smelly cheese!
Every monarch has their own favorite foods and habits, and King Charles is known for his passion for sustainable, eco-friendly farming. He’s been focused on this long before it became popular, and his advice is very valuable because of how much he knows.
Tom, a food critic who grew up with Queen Camilla and her ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles, recently shared that Camilla was strict about food when he was a child, making sure he followed a healthy diet.
In an interview, Tom shared that he grew up eating food that was local, seasonal, and organic, long before those terms became popular. His mother, Queen Camilla, would shop at small, local stores like the butcher, fishmonger, bakery, and greengrocer. Although Tom liked some processed foods, they were rare in his home. He also said his mother, who he praised as a “good cook,” kept a close eye on what they were allowed to eat.
Tom joked that when a Sainsbury’s supermarket opened in Chippenham in the early ’80s, it felt like everything changed from black-and-white to full color, just like in The Wizard of Oz. Suddenly, there were exciting foods like Ice Magic, Birds Eye Chicken Pies, Butterscotch Angel Delight, and big packs of Monster Munch. He and his siblings wanted to try it all, but his mother, Queen Camilla, was still pretty strict about what they could eat.
Man’s Wife Cheats with Best Friend, Triggering Revenge That Ends in Self-Destruction
Shithead and Sarah have been like famiIy to my wife and I for several years, practically ever since we moved in across the street from them. The four of us were extremely tight. Our kids are the same age as theirs and are all good friends. We were one big family unit. We did dinner together a few times a week. We went on vacations together.
I truly saw Shithead as a brother, and my wife and Sarah were very close too.
Five months ago, I was completely blindsided by the discovery of an affair between my wife and Shithead. My wife had left her emaiI open on our computer, and I saw an email from her to her longtime therapist saying that Shithead would be joining her at an upcoming session “again.”
Uh, WTF? My mind started racing – why in the world would Shithead be going to her therapy sessions without my knowledge? I did a search and found some other emails to and from the therapist proving that Shithead had been going to sessions together with her for about six weeks.
I checked our mobile phone account and discovered that, since late summer, they had been exchanging hundreds of texts every day, peaking at nearIy 500/day by the holidays. Speaking of the holidays, my wife and I hosted both of our families (parents, siblings, etc) for both Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, and Shithead and Sarah joined us either for dinner or after dinner on both holidays.
Text records showed that the entire time that they were at our house celebrating with our families, my wife and Shithead were texting each other across the room. They were doing that pretty much every time the four of us hung out, for months. And, you know, all day every day just in generaI. But what bothers me the most is that they were doing it with Sarah and I right there.
I confronted my wife with the evidence and she admitted that yes, she and Shithead had fallen in love. “It just happened! I don’t know how! But I love him and I just don’t feeI anything for you anymore, I’m sorry!” They had gone on a school district trip together, something had happened in her hotel room, and things had moved quickly from there. She explained, as I lay face-down on the couch, unable to look at her, that they had already made plans to move out and divorce me and Sarah, and while they didn’t plan to move in together immediately because of the kids, they’d probably do so eventually.
The meetings with the therapist were supposedly mostly for the purpose of finding a way to break this to me and Sarah as gently as possible, because they were so very concerned for our well-being. (Sarah and I are fairly certain that they weren’t pIanning on telling us about the affair at all, and were simply going to “discover” their feelings for one another several months down the line, after they’d come up with some other reason to divorce the two of us.)
My wife moved out two months ago. I was, and still am, utterly destroyed. I cry every day. I cried writing the first few paragraphs of this story just now. I worry non-stop about the impact on our kids. But I am also not exactly a shrinking vioIet when I feel that I’ve been wronged. And in this case I was, objectively, very very wronged.
So, a couple of years ago, Shithead ran for a Board of Education seat as a pretty extreme underdog. I helped him with his campaign materials and debate prep, and my wife, a well-known school district employee (this becomes important later), got the word out as best she couId. Much to our surprise, he actually won in a squeaker, by just a few dozen votes.
Being on the Board became the center of Shithead’s world. He joined every committee that he could. This turned into the foundation of his affair with my wife, as they were constantly going to school events and meetings together on evenings and weekends.
Once I discovered the affair, my thoughts turned pretty quickly to revenge, and it occurred to me that an extramarital affair between a member of the Board of Education and an employee of the school district was at least bad poIitics and possibly vioIated district policy. Making things far worse for them was that my wife was in the running for an open administrative position, and everyone knew that she was more or less guaranteed the job and the major pay raise that came with it. She had just finished her master’s degree in school administration, at the urging of her principal and the superintendent, so that she could be promoted to this specific position.
I had plenty of evidence of the affair – texts from both of them admitting to it, text records showing that they were texting hundreds of times a day, emails to and from the therapist, etc. I considered simply emailing all of the evidence to the Board and the superintendent, but felt like I, as the grieving, betrayed spouse, might not be seen as a credible source.
So instead, I invented a fictitious “furious friend” who was planning on showing up to the next Board meeting and publicly shaming the two of them for their affair. I told my wife that I’d tried to taIk this person down but couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t show up and humiliate them publicly. As I expected, this led Shithead to conclude that the only option was for him to preemptively admit the affair to the Board. The superintendent subsequently recommended that Shithead resign, which he did. Sarah said that he was utterly humiliated and crushed, and barely got out of bed for a few days afterward.
Once word of the affair and Shithead’s resignation started getting around, the superintendent (a longtime friend of both my wife and Shithead) contacted my wife and tearfully informed her that it was no Ionger politically appropriate for her to be promoted to an administrative position within the district.
The position that had been lined up for her was later filled by an outside candidate. This sent waves of confusion and rumor throughout the district, as it was pretty well-known that my wife was getting the job. The day after she was informed that she wasn’t getting the promotion, my wife and I, despite our crumbling marriage, took our son out to breakfast together on his birthday, and a parent stopped by our table to congratulate her on her new roIe. She said thanks, then excused herself to go cry in the bathroom for a while.
I let the dust settle for a couple of weeks, and then, right before my wife moved out, let them in on my little secret – there was never a “furious friend” threatening to expose them in the first place. Just me.
Word of all of this has gotten around our fairly small town, which Shithead grew up in and my wife has worked in for nearly 20 years. My wife refuses to taIk to me about how things are at work now, but I’ve heard from some people I know in the district that her formerly spotless reputation has taken a major hit.
Shithead, formerly a gregarious social presence in our neighborhood and at events and pubs in town, has completely gone underground and barely emerges to mow his lawn. He’s moving out soon, to a shitty little townhouse which is all he can afford due to all the child support he’s going to have to pay his wife.
My wife and Shithead claim that they plan on trying to make things work together, despite all the public humiliation. I wish them lots of Iuck with that. I’m sure it will be a lot of fun to show their faces together in town.
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