Sunday November 25th – The Queen and Garlic Vampires

I am sitting here reeking of garlic from a particularly fierce meal I have just cooked.  I made a frittata, and thought it was a bit bland, so I added some extra oomph, and got a bit carried away.  Luckily Jason had some too, so I won’t have to sleep in the spare room tonight, and if I’m very good I might get a snog, but woe betide anyone who breaks into our house in the wee small hours.  We won’t need a burglar alarm, but we may have to learn basic CPR after they asphyxiate themselves and collapse with the stereo on their heads.  Learning to stanch head wounds with a bath mat might come in handy as well, in that case.

Still, safety from any roaming vampires is an important factor in the preparation of meals in Glenfield.  It has the look of a place where vampires would hang out (we live on the edges of the dodgy bit.  It’s alright if you look out of one window, not if you look out the other), and you just can’t be too careful.  After all, as the owner of my own virtual graveyard I feel a responsibility to offset my evil, vampire-breeding karma by doing something useful and Buffy-like to protect my family.  I’m hardly likely to start doing ass-kicking karate chops, or weighing six stone wet through and talking in a whiny cod Californian accent, so cooking with extra garlic is the way forward.  Sometimes you have to set the bar low to get anything accomplished, otherwise you’d end up cutting your own throat with a spoon before breakfast.

I’m sitting here in a miasma of onion, peering through the fog like Holmes in a London pea souper.  All I need is a deerstalker, a meerschaum pipe and an incompetent side kick who knows how to lance boils, and I feel my literary career could be made.  What? It’s been done before?  Darn it!  Curse that Conan-Doyle chappy.

Even I can’t stand my own breath so I’m eating a sherbet lemon in the hope that this will diffuse the aroma but keep the efficacy of the vampire repellent.  As it is a particularly fizzy sweet I must look quite odd, as I sit here gurning at the computer screen, indiscreetly burping equal mixtures of garlic and lemon.  Charming.  I feel that my invitation to tea with the Queen is receding once more to a distant horizon.  I can however, highly recommend M&S’ fruit sherbets, as the most squinchworthily fizzy sweet I have eaten in many a long year.  They are, and I hesitate to say this, even better than flying saucers, at least modern ones anyway.

The Queen thing was one of my mother’s great threats/admonishments when we were children and doing something particularly repellent: “You’ll never get invited to tea with the Queen if you carry on doing that.” Like all the hordes of well-behaved children out there were constantly getting invited to tea with the Queen, and so we were missing out!  I don’t think so.  Surely she was too busy running the country and patronising the colonies to start the Kidz Korner Kaff at Buck palace?  There was no hope of an invite for us, not in our village anyway.  We were lucky to get tea in our own houses, let alone anyone else’s, we were all so vile and scab ridden.

I asked her (my mum that is, not the Queen) what the Queen ate for tea, thinking it would have to be something utterly brilliant, because clearly we were supposed to be threatened into good behaviour by the thought of missing out on such a tea.  My mum’s answer was: “cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and her own blend tea.”  Hardly likely to incite a frenzy of good manners out of a bored eight year old is it? ‘Now then Rupert, we must behave, or we’ll never get cucumber sandwiches again!’

Now, if the Queen was offering sausage and chips with spaghetti hoops (Life on Mars – ‘I’m ‘Avin ‘Oops!’ awesome), white bread and butter, and arctic roll for pudding, eaten on our knees whilst watching Crackerjack, it would have been way more of an incentive to behave.  In fact, if she’d have thrown in Corona Cherryade as a sweetener, I’d have given up my evil ways in a trice.  There was and never has been, a finer brand of pop, and I still mourn its passing.  Naturally, it wouldn’t taste any good if they made it today because they would be forced to take out all the carcinogens, artificial colourants and residue of Class A drugs which made it so moreish in the first place.

As it was we were like: ‘Sod it! Let’s carry on smashing up the typewriter with a lump hammer and a spanner.  What have we got to lose except a cup full of Darjeeling with bits in it?’ I actually did that by the way, smash a typewriter that is.  Needless to say, there was much trouble afterwards, particularly because I got the spanner caught between ‘Q’ and ‘W’ keys when I hit them too hard with the hammer and bent them together.  I seem to recall running upstairs very, very fast, to avoid being slapped round the back of the legs – and sadly, not making it fast enough.

On a good day, I would make it to my room, only to have a totally crap hiding place which was woefully inefficient in protecting my limbs from a sound drubbing.  I would hide under my bed and hold onto the bed leg furthest from fresh air to give me some purchase.  Some days my crime would not be hideous enough to warrant her having to huff and puff her up the stairs, lay on the floor and wrench me out from under the bed.  Other days I was doomed regardless, and all the extra effort of pulling me out would make her even more mad, and the slaps harder.

My mum was a great one for smacking.  Looking back on it, to be fair, we were hideous children and deserved everything we got!  My dad didn’t used to hit us very often, but when he did he would just go completely off the deep end.  I remember that there were two times in my life when he lost it, big time.

The first time was when I was sick all over the leather upholstery in the back of his brand new Humber motor vehicle, when I was five.  I did tell him I needed to be sick, but he told me I was just making it up!  Like denial of a quite important fact is going to make it any less true:  ‘Oh just be quiet! Of course you’re not bleeding out of your earholes, you stupid child.’ It’s only when a random adult points out: ‘Did you know that your child has fountains of blood cascading out of their ears?’ that they take any notice, and invariably the child then gets punished for not having said anything before, and having forced the parent to be humiliated by having their short-comings as a caring member of the human race pointed out by an old lady with a goatee beard who smells of cat piss.  Consequently I got smacked for throwing up when I had given him plenty of warning to avert disaster.  Most unfair.

The second time was when I refused point blank to go to playschool one morning because a mean boy was bringing his Eagle Eye Action Man in just to frighten me.  These particular type of Action Men terrified me more than all the threats of Queenless teas ever did.  I don’t know why now, as I saw one recently at an antiques fair (!) for some vast sum of money, and it seemed relatively innocuous.  At the time I thought it was the scariest thing on the planet and refused to go near one.  It may have been his wiggly eyed movements.  It may have been the voice box in his chest and the weirdly gravelly way he said: ‘We will meet you on the beach at dawn’, like he was going to kill you with a bucket and spade or something.  I don’t really know, but it was the worst thing I could possibly imagine.  A fate worse than death…

Anyway.  I had rationally explained all this to my parents only the evening before, and told them specially how I would be their best friends forever as long as they didn’t make me go to playschool the next day.  I thought we had reached an understanding, only to have my illusions rudely shattered the next day, when my dad picked up his briefcase and said: ‘Right then.  Get in the car.  I’m taking you to playschool.’

I went bananas.  Betrayed isn’t even close to describing how I felt. I ran round the house.  I hid in the toilet.  I screamed my lungs out.  They managed a pincer movement to get me out the front door and my dad scooped me up and shoved me in the car.  I got out the car and ran.  My dad caught me and having locked one back door, shoved me in and locked the other.  I bunked over the seats and out the front door.  He locked all but three of the doors and dragged me out from under the car where I’d been hiding.  Admittedly it was a rubbish hiding place because I was bellowing like a bull, so was pretty easy to find.

Knowing that once he got me in this time that there would be no escape I fought like a demon.  He picked me up and tried to push me in the door.  I straightened up and went stiff (Aha! The old rigor mortis trick - nifty!) so I was too unwieldy to put in.  He tried to bend me, so I gripped the top and bottom of the car with fingers and toes, all this time screaming like a banshee.

My dad was not impressed.  My dad has never been a small man.  My dad has never been a man keen on physical exercise.  My dad hates being hurried.  My dad loathes mornings with a vehement passion, and even now cannot be induced to do more than grunt until 10.30 a.m. on any given day.  You can imagine what chasing an hysterical three year old for forty minutes on a damp Tuesday morning had done for his temper.

As I was clinging to the car with all the tenacity of a stubborn limpet he finally lost it.  He neatly winded me by karate chopping me in the middle.  This caused me to fold up, whereupon he could easily have bundled me into the car.  At this point he was too mad to care and wasted his advantage by putting me over his knee and smacking me repeatedly on the backside in order to vent his spleen and stop himself exploding on the spot with pent up rage and aggression.  I then sobbed in the car all the way to nursery, totally traumatised, while he cursed and swore (something else he never does), and rued the day he’d decided to get frisky with my mother way back in 1971.

The irony was that the boy didn’t even go to playschool that day, and my valiant effort was all for naught! God, I hated that child with every fibre of my being.  If I could remember his name I’d hunt him down and write him a very stiff letter (traumatised of Glenfield).  The weird thing is that I used to go to playschool in Glenfield, which is where I live now, but was miles from home when I was a child.  The place I take Oscar to Tumbletots every week is the same place the hideous trauma occurred, which probably explains why we have only made it to Tumbletots twice this term.  I am too mentally scarred to go back!

To get back to the issue of her majesty.  Would I really want to go to tea with the Queen?  I watched that film with Helen Mirren, and she seemed a bit buttoned up.  The Queen that is, not Helen Mirren.  Anyone who gets her bosom out with the frequency of Miss Mirren is hardly likely to be accused of being buttoned up now is she?  I’m a great admirer of Helen Mirren, although I am indifferent upon the state of her bosom, and I can honestly say that this is the first film in which I haven’t seen her take her clothes off.  It is also the first film in which I have seen her wear a headscarf.  My advice is to stick to nipples and avoid headgear in future.  I’m sure Barry Norman would second that opinion. (I like Jonathan Ross, but nobody critiques a film like our Bazza).

I don’t really understand what all the fuss was about with that film.  Admittedly Dame Helen’s performance was very good and about as far removed from Prime Suspect as we’re likely to get unfortunately, as a combination of the two stories would have been awesome.  Picture the scene:

‘Ere Philip.  It looks like it may have been murder!’

‘Cor blimey Liz luv, are you sure?’

‘Not ‘alf!  Now stop pissing about and get these samples strapped to one of the corgis and down to the lab, Stat!  I’ll just put me fag out on this Limoges teacup and I’ll hop in the roller and get down to forensics.  Heads will roll for this, you mark my words!’

‘You’re right guv’nor.  We can’t bloody trust those frogs to do it right. Oooh! I do love it when you get all magisterial Liz.  It makes me go all funny.’

‘Shut it, you slag!  Oops! Sorry Phil, I got a bit carried away there.’

Sadly it wasn’t that exciting.  It was a bit like watching a very predictable documentary.  One of those ones they have on the Discovery Channel where they have twenty pence in which to make three pertinent facts stretch into an hour of viewing, and so insist on letting you see that bit again but from a different angle, for forty five minutes.  Because all the people were ‘real’ it was also a bit weird, because they just didn’t look like themselves (because they weren’t!).  They might as well have just used Spitting Image puppets or something.  Now that would have been worth watching.

My other bone of contention was that it didn’t really shed any light on what happened.  You don’t have to be the sharpest pencil in the box to realise that anyone who can stomach being married to Prince Philip for a gazillion years without having embedded a large axe in the back of his head, and who wears hats like that (i.e. ones that look like you’re wearing your brain on the outside – never a good look – see Davros, King of the Daleks for proof), is going to be somewhat repressed, and not given to great shows of emotion.  If it were me I’d have shot my stylist, had Philip assassinated and bought myself a sensible dog by now.

Corgis are just rubbish aren’t they?  They’re not really dogs at all.  They’re swiss rolls with legs and bad breath.  If I was the Queen I’d probably have a pit bull encrusted with diamonds, or maybe an afghan hound called Montmorency.

You want a dog that makes a statement, not a dog you can make on Blue Peter out of a toilet roll and some fuzzy felt.  I don’t know if you remember the kids television programme ‘Willo The Wisp’ (with the particularly fine voice of Kenneth Williams)?  There was a random, thicko dog like creature on it called The Moog.  That’s what a corgi is liked when stripped of its royal dignity that is.

Anyway, back to my day, which can be pretty much summed up in a few lines.  I am, you will be glad to know, feeling much better. It’s probably the prodigious application of garlic that did it.  I’m just pleased that I can now breathe without issuing forth reams of Ghostbusters Slimer style goo, and that only one side of my face is now killing me.  Life would be perfect if it could do some kind of shift type arrangement with the other side of my face, one hour on, one hour off.  That way I don’t feel greedy in asking for some miraculous cure, but a change is as good as a rest, as they say.

I have nearly finished my new Amazon Vine book, called People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks.  It’s very cool and tells the history of a Jewish holy book, known as a Haggadah.  It’s set just after the war in Serbia, where a book conservator is sent to restore the book, and is told in flashbacks, interwoven with the details of her work.  I am obviously on a Jewish vibe here as this is the third book about Judaism I have read in less than a month.  I’m still not buying into the gefilte fish stuff though.  Sorry.

My friend Saj came to visit today.  For those hardened lifers of my blog reading public, you may remember that Saj promised to come and visit me if I mentioned her in my blog.  This was nearly three weeks ago, and she has finally deigned to come and pay us a visit.  She was, in her own inimitable style, over two hours late, but hey, she made it.

Why was she two hours late I hear you cry?  Was it because she came to the aid of an injured pensioner at the side of the road and waited with them until the ambulance arrived?  Was she serving dinners to the homeless of Leicester in order to assuage her guilt over her cushy middle class life?  Was she perhaps, busy studing ancient Aramaic texts and discovering philosophical truths that will change the course of world history forever?

No.  She discovered that they now have a personal shopper in Monsoon and spent three hours testing her patience buying a dress to go to a party!  Am I bitter?  Am I jealous?  Do I wish that it was in fact I who was spending three whole hours of my life getting personal shopping type attention in Monsoon, and not reading another bloody Magic Key book with Tallulah and cooking fish fingers and smiley sodding faces?  Of course I am….