Things You Should Never Do…

• Lola says that you should never, ever eat a tomato.  I don’t actually agree with that, but I do think you should never ever eat the evil edamame bean, lentil and pomegranate salad from Sainsburys.  My best friend Rachel also advises quite strongly against the cous cous salad from Tesco which has sultanas in it.  She felt so badly about it she even sent me a text message from work.  You can’t say fairer than that.

• You should never buy your children cabin beds until you have worked out that they are fully capable of getting up in the night and going to the toilet unaided.  Otherwise you will spend several unhappy months/years teetering around on ladders with comatose children in the middle of the night, swearing and treading on badly put away bits of lego.  You will be even more sorry when you fail to get them up in time and have to spend several minutes of your life wrestling with a fitted sheet covered in wee, six feet in the air in the dark.  Probably if you were in the circus this would be fine (as long as you weren’t a performing midget).  If you are a bog standard housewife it’s not so good.

 

• You should never leave any biro in my immediate vicinity and wander off thinking that it will still be there when you get back.  I moved all my stuff from my fab Ghost handbag into my fab Charlie and Lola rucksack the other day only to find that I had six biros in varying designs, colours etc.  I only recall actually buying one of them.  I am very pleased with the latest one that I have ‘found’ on my desk, which seems to be advertising ‘Simoes Automotive’ in Vancouver.  Not only is it stolen, it is a well travelled pen.  It is good because it is blue (I prefer blue and recently I’ve been stealing a lot of black ones), and because it has one of those comfy grip things, that oddly, makes it comfy to grip.  Simoe, if my car ever broke down in Vancouver I’d bring it to you mate.  And it wouldn’t matter how much you charged me for fixing it, because I’d probably already have stolen enough pens to recoup the loss.

 

 

• You should never ask me what my phone number is in one of those casual chat type moments.  Even though I’ve had the same one for at least six years I will forget it, and come across as a total spanner.  I was in Pumpkin Patch in town this week, buying some clothes for Tilly’s birthday.  I like it there. I shop there quite a bit.  The woman asked me if I wanted one of their catalogues.  I said no because I already had one thanks.  She said: ‘Can I update your details on my computer?’  I said: ‘Sure.’  She said: ‘What’s your postcode?’ I looked at her blankly and had to confess that I couldn’t remember.  She thought I was lying and trying to sneak out of being a good customer.  She looked at me in a funny way.  I panicked.  I burbled.  I acted like a complete spanner, and that wasn’t half as complicated as my phone number.

 

• You should never buy Ainsley Harriot cupasoups Although they can be quite useful if you’re stuck for a tombola prize for a charitable group that you don’t particularly like. They (the soups, not the charitable groups) are evil and taste like ditchwater with chives sprinkled in them.  My mum and dad tried them.  My mum spat it out after the first mouthful.  My dad soldiered on, even though every mouthful made him shudder.  He is very, very strange and oddly stoic.  I don’t get it.

 

• You should never tell your mother that you have cleaned your bedroom and put all your toys and clothes away only for her to find at half past eight at night, when she thinks it’s all over and is looking forward to tea that you haven’t, and that you were in fact lying through your tiny teeth.  You should definitely never try to wiggle out of then tidying up by bursting dramatically into tears, announcing that you are very tired and that your fingers are too worn out and that you need some help. 

 

If you do this you will get more help than you bargained for.  This help involves your mother ranting about the bedroom for an hour, extricating socks from extraordinary places, throwing many things that you thought were precious but she has now refiled as ‘broken crap’ in the bin and you going to bed with no story and no music.  So let that be a lesson to you young lady.

 

• You should never be even vaguely tempted to eat three quarters of a packet of Rice Works excellent sweet chilli nachos, just because your husband ate some earlier and then when you wandered past they smelled really, really nice and you just couldn’t help yourself, and then you ate them all up, every single last one.  I would hazard a guess that if you were the kind of stupid, greedy person to do this, not only will you have to spend the next three hours imitating a grassy knoll so that Gillian McKeith doesn’t shoot you down dead, you will also have indigestion and be ridiculously thirsty.  And who would want that to happen eh?

 

• You should never be fooled by the first chapter on a book which tells you it’s going to explain to you all about Aristotle into thinking you know what the bloody hell he’s going on about.  What you have failed to realise is that this is in fact ‘the introduction’, and is just breaking you in gently, and that by the time you get to chapter seven you will have had no idea what he has been talking about for about the last six chapters and you will want to cry because you feel so very stupid.  I bet you’re the sort of person who would eat three quarters of a packet of Rice Works excellent sweet chilli nachos without thinking it through too, aren’t you?

 

• You should never marry a man.  My granny told me this when I was a child.  I was slightly puzzled because she had married a man and had three children.  I pointed this out and she nodded sagely, rolled a fag and went: ‘Precisely darlin’, and look what happened to me.’  A salient lesson, well explained.  Anyway, she said that all men were aliens which is why it made them impossible to marry and explained why babies looked so funny.  There may well be something in it, although I liked marrying a man so much I’ve done it twice now.  I confess to liking it the second time better than the first. Perhaps he’s from a better class of galaxy.

 

• You should never volunteer.  My mummy told me that once, and I believe that she’s right.  Otherwise you might end up being Brown Owl, and that would never do.