Katyboo1’s Weblog

By the way dear reader, before we start, I must mention that there have been comments on the length of my blogging once again.  I will say this once more with feeling.  Nobody is asking you to read it.  I write a blog so that I don’t go mental, if you want to follow me on my meandering path through life it is entirely your decision.  My kids will be using it as evidence in my trial in later life and I want to give them something meaty.  If you go mental in the process I will deny all knowledge.  On your own head be it.

You will note that I kept that last paragraph deliberately short, so that for those of you who are losing the will to read, even you will be able to make it through half a dozen lines without having a lie down and a stiff brandy.  I will point out however, that if you were Victorians, and you were forced to decide between one more trip to Church, a sing song around the pianola for three hours or reading my diary, you might just be grateful of something weighty to see you through into the wee small hours.  So think on!  This could be the stuff post nuclear holocaust societies are built on! (Yes, it really is that dismal.  I’m hoping to disappear into a pile of smoking ash come the day). 

Jason has man flu today.  It is a tragedy and a half.  Bless him!  I have to be fair to him and say that he isn’t as bad as some when he gets ill.  He still functions and does things, useful things rather than moaning and feebly stirring Lemsip.  He doesn’t take to his bed with a family sized box of Kleenex Balsam, nor does he lie around coughing in the manner of a Victorian consumptive, so I suppose we can live with that.

I note that he hasn’t asked me to make my home made sore throat remedy this time around though (vis: ‘first boil your brillo pad’).  It is just lemon juice with honey and boiling water, which is actually pretty efficacious.  Apparently last time I was pretty heavy handed with the lemon juice and his trachea still hasn’t fully recovered.  He feels it may have hampered his nascent career as an opera singer.  I for one, am truly grateful.

An old friend once told me that if you have a cold, a good remedy is to boil up a can’s worth of coca-cola with a lump of grated ginger and drink it down.  She got it from her Chinese herbalist (I didn’t ask).  I forged yet another path into the dangerous realm of the folk remedy.  I tried it, bravely and without resorting to having a peg on my nose, which is how I usually approach Chinese herbal concoctions.  I have to say that it made my nose run a lot.  It made me burp quite a bit, and I tasted ginger in everything for three days afterwards.  I still had a stinking cold, but the indigestion did take my mind off things.  Remember folks.  I go there first so you don’t have to.

My best friend Rachel, has a lovely husband called Chris.  Chris is very adventurous when it comes to such things.  He eats organic vegetables (he once adopted a cabbage for a year.  He had a photograph and everything), he recycles, he composts, he knows the size of his carbon footprint, and he is very keen on Gillian McKeith and juicing.  Rachel tolerates these quirks because she loves him and he doesn’t frown at her when she breaks open a family sized bag of malteasers and a mug of Yorkshire tea.  She hates Gillian with a passion.  Probably about as much as I dislike our Delia.

Once, when Chris had a cold, he read in his juicing book that there was a particularly effective anti-cold juice, which promised almost immediate relief from the rigours of such evil infection.  It was leek, onion and ginger juice, all raw.  Now at this point I would have thought about it very carefully, and then gone down to the chemist for a bumper sized box of Beecham’s Powders.  But Chris was not put off by this pungent mixture.  He gathered his ingredients, he gathered his juicer.  He went into the conservatory (when Rachel found out the ingredients in his foul brew, she banished him from the kitchen on the grounds that he would stink.  Harsh but fair.)  He juiced.

Apparently he couldn’t speak for half an hour afterwards and Rachel did wonder about whether to administer (if that is the right word?) the Heimlich Manoeuvre, as he had gone a very funny shade of mauve.  He swears it did him the world of good, once he got the power of speech back.  I believe he has never tried it again however, as Rachel couldn’t live with the smell, and he was not only sent to the conservatory, but also got good use out of the back bedroom for several days until his reeking body odour had died down a bit.

My father is a great one for being on death’s door, hanging onto the very door knocker by his bare fingernails, even if he’s only got a blister.  He and Tallulah have a lot in common that way.  He really does like to squeeze all of life’s rich juices out of an illness if it comes his way.  Luckily for him he suffers from a rich array of fascinating maladies that only a Doctor could love.  He has a tendency to have potassium deficiency, which it turns out is something to do with having his kidney on sideways or something.  This deficiency manifests itself by his inability to do up his shirt properly, and you know he needs a boost when he’s wandering round like one of the Bee Gees circa Saturday Night Fever.

Apparently, eating bananas is good for raising low potassium levels.  Oscar will never suffer from bare chest-itis, as he is the world record holder for eating bananas.  I only hope that a surfeit of bananas isn’t too terrible (he is actually limited to two a day, much to his utter disgust).  My father, in his own unique fashion, cannot be cured this way, as he is actually allergic to bananas.  Apparently they bung him up as solidly as cement into a drainpipe and he then explodes from the pressure.  As he is currently fully be-shirted, and not exploding I must conclude he has found other rich sources of potassium which are more suited to his delicate constitution (perhaps licking egg shells?).

He is also, and I am fascinated by this, allergic to walnuts.  Apparently, if he eats the vile walnut he immediately gets as high as a kite and starts hallucinating floridly for hours until the walnut juice has worked its way out of his system.  Now, I have never been privy to this sight for which I am eternally sorry.  I’m sure it would have been absolutely splendid.  I do wonder if my mother sold tickets and has a nest egg somewhere put away for a rainy day, specifically from the proceeds of; ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’.  When I ask my dad for details of said hallucinations he slaps his hand against his forehead, stares mistily into the middle distance and refuses to utter a word (for a man who talks more than me, this is a great thing.  Good tip if you ever meet him).  I can only surmise it must have been particularly hair raising and more than a bit mental.

I had a friend at primary school who was one of ten kids.  They lived in the village down the road from us in a huge rectory with a swimming pool.  They had a lot of land and even had the good fortune to own both a swimming pool (of which I was incredibly envious) and a few acres of woodland.  He was off school for a couple of days one week, and when he came back I asked him what was the matter.  He told me that he and his brothers and sisters had gone out to the woods to pick mushrooms for their Sunday morning fry up.

Sadly they did not have Antonio Carluccio on hand to help them identify the mushrooms and they picked and ate what they thought were delicious, health giving mushrooms, only to find about twenty minutes into the meal that this was not the case at all, and they had all tucked in to a hearty plate of magic mushrooms.  Ten children and a mother and father all galloping about for hours off their tits on magic mushrooms.  It must have been a living nightmare.  He said it was quite fun, but he had a nasty headache afterwards!  I think about that quite often as I feed my family round the table.  I thank my lucky stars that all of them (with the natural exception of me and Oscar) hate mushrooms, and this is one amongst the vast array of things to worry about, that I will never have to have sleepless nights over.

I have to go and baste my chicken.  We’re having a roast with pan roasted vegetables so that I don’t have to dirty any more pots.  It also means I can make chicken soup for the invalid tomorrow if necessary.  This will give me good wife points and potentially ensure another year without impending divorce looming.  I’m on lazy dinner duty because it was cleaning day today.  This means everyone has to creep around on their eyebrows pretending not to make a mess until tomorrow when the sheen will have worn off and we’ll all be back to our usual lackadaisical selves, sipping soup out of our wellington boots and scratching our arses with forks.

I’ve got to get them all in bed for a reasonable time tonight as I am working through my textbook exercises on Burma, limbering up for my next essay, and want to get some done before I’m too tired to watch another episode of Teachers on DVD.  Jason got it for Christmas.  We’d never seen it before, but it’s very funny and much better than the absolute drivel they’re offering under the guise of televised Christmas entertainment this year.  Even the Bond films are bloody Roger Moore.  It’s an outrage.  I’ve a good mind to write a stiff letter (Daniel Craig fan of Glenfield)…