Monday 30th June – The joys of technology

This morning I am being innovative on the technology front once more.  Usually I type my blog posts from my lovely study, which I love.  My pc is as old as the hills and has to be wound up with an elastic band and a pencil, but as we have already established that I am a technophobe who fears change, this doesn’t bother me unduly.  Since giving up entirely on the world of paid work I have forgotten my previous ability to make cunning powerpoint presentations about the fascinating world of rights and permissions and the spread of liver cancer in the western hemisphere.  I no longer need to do sums wrongly in Excel to baffle the police force, or indeed write letters in Excel, which one very bizarre company that I worked for insisted that I do to ’save time’ ! Nor do I have to drive everyone in the office bonkers by becoming spastically number blind and entering three hundred people’s phone numbers back to front in any number of customised databases you care to mention. 

I am free, free from the demands of complex administration and newfangled, labour saving devices which in the entire ten years plus of my working life have never yet heralded in the arrival of the paperless office despite what that man with the funny glasses and the pen protector said once in that meeting where he persuaded you to give him several thousands of your hard earned pounds which you would recoup in stationery savings alone.  The same thing he said in that meeting every year since when you’ve found that not only have your stationery bills tripled, but that your shiny new gadgets are now so out of date that unless you replace them as soon as you’ve had them installed even the man who comes to water the flowers laughs at you because the computer at his son’s school is better, quicker and has more buttons.

Most people are like me when it comes to technology, but are just better at hiding their ignorance.  The only time this rears its ugly head is in people’s persistence, despite reassurances from IT departments up and down the land about back ups and USB sticks etc, in making a paper copy just in case, and hiding it away in a secret room for emergency purposes.  Quite often they don’t file it properly as a gesture of defiance and a brave two fingers to their paranoia, but they still keep it as a kind of scratchy, environmentally unsound comfort blanket for when the machines rise up against us, just like in Terminator, and they really, really need to know what Janine said about numbers for coffee in the board room last Tuesday.

I cannot possibly keep up.  I don’t even know what widgets are for goodness’ sake.  I don’t even try to keep up.  I have been thinking recently about laptops however, not because they’re cool and funky and you shouldn’t leave home without one, but because I will be able to track the children round the house as they decimate it room by room, and this might mean I have less clearing up to do.  It would also mean I have less far to run when they’re sitting on each other’s heads forcing lego down their gullets and pulling the wings off flies.  Surely this can only be a good thing, particularly in my unfit state.  I fear exercise more than I fear technology.

I have been mulling it over for some time, and made the decision this weekend due to the fact that the children like being outside, even if they have to wear twelve layers of fur to enjoy our British summer, and in the office I can’t reach them quick enough if they’re garrotting each other with the skipping ropes.  Now we have new, comfortable garden furniture I also had visions of myself sitting happily under a parasol, typing away, sipping freshly squeezed orange juice and lobbing tennis balls at the children’s heads until they behaved themselves.  An idyllic picture I’m sure you will agree.

Unfortunately our laptop is even more decrepit than my pc.  Jason has a spanky laptop for work, but as he actually needs to work I can’t wrest it from his grasp.  Then there’s our laptop, which is made from granite, doesn’t like being carried around, and refuses to work off its own battery because mains electricity tastes so much nicer.  It is so old it has a picture of Winston Churchill engraved on the front and works by feeding it old penny pieces using a crank handle.

So much for my visions of lounging around on the decking.  I am currently crouched in the kitchen near to a suitable power outlet, sandwiched between a wall of clean laundry that needs sorting out and the tumble drier. It took five minutes to power up when I plugged it in, and if I cough, the screen goes all funny.  Even I, as the person who doesn’t really give a crap about such things, am disappointed in it.  I don’t need it to be a Mac Powerbook or an Ipodular device.  I don’t need it to match my shoes and fit into a hand woven Burberry computer carrier.   I do think it would be nice if it were slightly more mobile, less heavy and less prone to tantrums than my middle child however. 

Jason says that this is a test.  Apparently he doesn’t want to invest in a new laptop if I’m just going to get enthusiastic about it for a week and then never look at it again, much like Tilly’s trumpet lessons and his exercise bike (which I might add, had nothing to do with me.  I was unenthusiastic about both things right from the start).  I have to prove my loyalty by slogging away, chipping the text out with a tiny technological chisel, going deaf from the whir of the tumble drier and blind because the screen is a bit funny.  If I then survive going crazy with frustration because this thing needs more coaxing to get started in the morning than Tallulah, I might be allowed to have a real one, which actually allows me to move around the house like it says in the adverts.  That is, if we’ve got enough money down the back of the sofa.  I can’t wait.

Sunday 29th June – eating cats and dogs

I realise I may have been slightly terse in my last blog and perhaps blowing things out of proportion due to having been stuck in a car with a small, whinging child for large portions of the day.  I thought about the fact that actually some other nice things had happened and I thought I ought to mention them so that one day I can look back on this stuff and think; ‘ah well, it wasn’t all salt mines and flagellation.  Sometimes there were shoes…’

 

So good things that happened yesterday:

 

While we were on one of our many toilet stops in Ikea, Tilly asked me: ‘Mama? What would you do if I had six fingers?’ I replied; ‘Chop the extra one off and eat it.’ At which she laughed and said; ‘No, really?’ at which I thought for a bit and replied: ‘Book you in for harp lessons where an extra finger would probably be an added bonus.’  She seemed pleased with this answer.  Apparently she had been musing for some days over the fact that someone in the Guinness Book of Records has six fingers.  I asked what did they hold the record for?  She said it was for having six fingers, which was more fingers than anyone else in the whole world. I don’t think this is true, as six is only one more than normal, and seems unfortunate, but not necessarily record breaking. I cannot be bothered to read the Guinness Book of Records to find out more though, so I will be forced to take her word for it.  I’ve always found the Guinness Book of Records a wild disappointment.  You think it’s going to be cool and full of Norris McWhirter type moments, but it just isn’t at all.  It’s dull, dull, dull, unless you happen to come across a picture of a woman with six fingers, in which case, compared to thinking about the Vikings, which is what Tilly is doing at school at the moment, I expect it takes on a whole new shine.

 

You are probably wondering why I have classified this conversation as a good thing, rather than an odd thing.  I will elaborate.  You would expect nothing less.  There are many things that cheered me.  One is that Tilly thinks like this.  She is truly a chip off the old block, vague and woolly though she undoubtedly is.  I felt comforted that she spends her time thinking about what might happen if she grew an extra finger, and whether she’d win a world record.  It’s the sort of thing that I think about all the time, and it’s nice to feel that I’ve passed this remarkable talent for filling my head with strange things on to future generations.

 

The other good thing about it is that she just laughed when I said I would chop her finger off and eat it.  This is the kind of thing I say.  I say this kind of thing to other children and they either cry, run away or ask their mummy why I am mental.  My children take these kinds of comments in their stride and just get on with life.  I heard Tallulah talking to someone the other day and she said, apropos of something they had asked her; ‘No. I can’t do that, or mama will beat me to death with my own shoes.’ In a very calm voice and just got on with whatever she was doing before.  With that kind of nerve they can get through any social situation and I feel that I have trained them well.

 

The other, and probably most important thing was that it was a much more interesting conversation than the; ‘Are we there yet? Why aren’t I emperor of the entire galaxy?’ conversation that I’d been having for about five hours with Tallulah up to that point in the day.  Discussing freakish extra body parts was a welcome breath of fresh air.

 

Then there was the conversation with my mum earlier.  She has been taking a keen interest in my blog recently and apart from noticing that I mis spelled the word too, or two, or to, I can’t remember which, she also commented that she thought that I wrote a lot like that man off the telly, Derren Nesbitt.  Apparently this was a good thing.  I spent ages trying to think of who the hell she was talking about and how she knew that I wrote like him if she’d seen him on the telly. 

 

It transpires that it was in fact Derren ‘Brown’ and she had started reading his book when she used our bathroom facilities the other week when she babysat for me.  So, not much of a jump from Brown to Nesbitt then.  It made me laugh a lot. It particularly made me laugh a lot because when we had finally ascertained who it was, she was very dismissive of the fact that she’d got the names wrong, apparently a simple mistake that could happen to anyone.  I asked her if she’d worked out where the hell she got the Nesbitt from but it’s all a blank.  I wonder if it was a cunning bit of booktacular hypnotism by Derren himself, and that anyone who reads the first chapter of his book whilst perched atop a lavatory automatically starts thinking of the word Nesbitt when confronted by the image of Derren.  I might write to him, care of Mr. Nesbitt.

 

You’ll be pleased to know that all our new garden furniture is up and looking fabulous.  Jason and Tilly worked on it ceaselessly while I showered and Tallulah sulked.  Just before I went up for my shower, Tilly came bounding in to see me enthusiastically shouting, ‘Mama! Look! Look! I’m going to wear my shorts just like daddy (daddy is a confirmed shorts wearer.  He likes to relax chez nous.  Apparently shorts are very relaxing) and that means I can build things just like daddy!’ and ran off to wield a screwdriver in a manly fashion.  I see where I have been going wrong with my DIY attempts all these years.  My failure to wear shorts has obviously led to my complete inability to know one end of a plug from the other.  It may also explain my fear of changing lightbulbs.

 

They had a wonderful time and laid on the decking, staring at small Japanese diagrams and discussing whether they’d plumbed in the parasol the right way.  It was a father daughter bonding session extraordinaire and they did enjoy themselves mightily.

 

We christened the new furniture by eating our dinner in a howling gale underneath a flapping parasol.  We had a Chinese takeaway.  As the chef of the house it was my job to ring in the order, and while I was perusing the menu to see when they were open I noticed the following legend emblazoned on the front of the menu: ‘Orders supplied with hygienic container.’  Nice!  I think they need to rethink their marketing.  I mean, I applaud fully the fact that they’re going for the positive angle and not writing things like: ‘Relax, we don’t really cook dogs and cats.’ But still, when the best that you can think to say about your takeaway is that the containers are hygienic, it’s a bit of a poor show.  I’m hardly likely to be impressed by the fact that my chicken in black bean sauce didn’t come in a second hand wellerton boot now am I?

 

Where does that Chinese takeaway urban myth come from anyway, the whole eating cats and dogs thing?  It doesn’t do the rounds so much any more, but when I was a kid people would come to school almost every week with some tale of a restaurant closing down because health and safety inspectors found that they were mincing up the Crufts back catalogue. I could understand it if you were to suddenly find out that everything was made out of Iceland chicken nuggets, because they’re cheap and in plentiful supply, but cats and dogs are difficult to catch and slaughter. 

 

There’d probably be quite a lot of evidence lying around too, what with having to dispose of collars, leads etc.  Plus, we’ve got two Chinese takeaways in Glenfield alone and it’s not a big village.  Can you imagine rival teams of chefs haring up and down at the dead of night trying to outdo each other by luring more cats to their doom than their rivals? The streets would be awash with frantic teams of chefs and their vans full of yapping, meowing prey laying booby traps for each other and running books on best of breed.  Someone would be bound to notice, and after a few weeks, when the RSPCA was empty all the restaurants would either have to close down or start buying Iceland chicken nuggets.  Although it would be interesting to see how many takeaways are near catteries and kennels…

 

Then there’s the effort of disguising the dog and cat meat to look like everything else on the menu.  I’ve never tried sculpting ginger tom into sweet and sour king prawn, but I can’t imagine it’s easy, and you can’t tell me that cat and dog both taste like chicken, because I just don’t believe it.  I reckon cat tastes a lot more like goat myself.  I’m only going on the smell of cat wee, but I can’t believe that anything that excretes something that eye watering can taste good.

Saturday June 28th – Are we there yet?

I have decided to give myself the day off from frantic, multiple blogging, because I seem to be full of hayfever and I’ve just spent the day in Birmingham with three small children taking Tallulah to Build A Bear workshop as her birthday treat.  Thus one, short, slightly grumpy blog will have to do.

Bits of today were really nice.  It was lovely to watch the girls filling their baskets with stuff in the shop (Tilly had saved some of her birthday money), and getting excited about the same kind of things I would have gotten excited about when I was a kid, if they had had such things as entire shops full of clothing and shoes just for bears in the nineteen seventies instead of lots of bri-nylon and power cuts.

It was lovely to have lunch at Wagamamas’ and eat coconut and prawn curry and watch Oscar making pirate weaponry out of his chopsticks and pull funny faces whilst stealing sips of my green tea.  It was also very nice to go and drift around Selfridges’ shoe department whilst Jason and the kids played with the beaded curtain in the champagne bar.  I narrowed my potential purchases down to a Mulberry bag for day to day use, a Paul Smith overnight bag for weekends away, a pair of Marc Jacobs boots and a pair of peep toe, chocolate brown Jimmy Choos with a four inch heel just for the hell of it.  It came to over £1500.  I settled for a deep sigh and a promise from Jason for when we are millionaires.

What wasn’t so nice was the fact that Tallulah incessantly asked when we were going to be there on the way there in the car.  Then when we were there she changed to when we were going to visit Build A Bear Workshop, even though it was the second place we went into.  Then when we were there, how come she could only have fifty pounds worth of stuff for her birthday and how come you couldn’t buy the shop for fifty pounds.  Then at lunchtime it was a constant negotiation about if she ate some cucumber would she have to eat all her rice, and how come she had to drink the hand pressed orange and apple juice she asked for, because once she had it she decided that she didn’t like it.

She also wanted to know why she couldn’t buy everything else in Birmingham, how come everyone else had to have a turn at doing, going somewhere they wanted, why I made her go to the toilet every time we passed a loo and how come she wasn’t exactly, especially, very more important than everyone else on the planet.  Bow down now peasant.  We were only there for two hours, and then we left because it was just getting too stressful to try and explain everything, and then explain it again, and then explain it again, and then get bored of explaining and saying ’shut up’, which apparently she finds very hurtful, despite the fact that you’ve explained three times why a pair of bear sized slippers cannot be purchased for £4.76 when they are £6.00 and you are now bleeding out of your eye sockets with stress.

I read that terrible story about the woman who kept her three year old daughter in a room with no furniture, shit all over the floors and bare wires poking out of the walls yesterday.  The girl died from heart failure brought about by chronic malnutrition.  It was absolutely heart rending.  It is sickening to think that that kind of suffering is routine for more children than I care to imagine.  I spend quite a lot of time feeling very sorry for my children that they have such a grumpy mother, but when I think that the worst thing my child had to moan about today was the fact that she could only get two pairs of teddy shoes instead of three with her birthday money, it does put things into perspective rather.

Just to relax we went to Ikea in the afternoon.  To most people this may seem counterintuitive in a bid for peace and familial harmony but it works for us.  We actually like going to Ikea.  Tallulah said: ‘Mama, it’s so nice in Ikea, why don’t we do all our shopping here?’ I pointed out that enjoy visiting it though I do, I have a very low tolerance threshold for Swedish meatballs and that after a week the shine would probably begin to wear off.  It is a fact that Jason and I have never argued in Ikea.  In fact sometimes when we are having a bad day we go to Ikea to chill out and calm down.  I know it’s not normal.  I think our genes are back to front.  Anyway, we went to buy some garden furniture for our new decking, but didn’t like any of it and came out with a new fruit bowl, some bedding with manic green hippos on for Oscar, two potties for the commencement of potty training (god help us) and three bars of chocolate which we ate in B&Q where we did buy some garden furniture.

We bought a six person table, a parasol, two directors chairs and two three seater benches for £260, which I thought was a steal, and Jason nearly had a heart attack over.  When I pointed out that the only other garden furniture I’ve seen all year that I really liked was in that little garden boutique in Stoneygate and that the table, made from reconstituted railway sleepers and solid enough to live under was £1500 before you even got to the chairs, he cheered up immensely.  When you think about that and the fact that I didn’t spend that other £1500 in Selfridges I reckon that my immense self sacrifice today alone has saved him nearly three grand.  I am such a philanthropist…

Despite initial misgivings we managed to cram all this furniture, still in its boxes in the back of a VW Touran with all the other stuff, and without leaving the three children in a car park.  They did have to sit folded double over a bunch of giant boxes all the way home though.  And despite Jason’s efforts to make it all into a big, shiny adventure the grumbling coming from Tallulah was so loud and persistent that you’d think we’d made her sit in a box full of spikes whilst pouring acid in her eyes, which was nice for the entire hour it took to get home.

Which is why she and Oscar are now having an enforced nap.  It would be a shame to kill her before Doctor Who.  Jason and Tilly are doing construction work on the verandah and I’m hiding up here with a cup of tea, praying they’re not going to make me hold up the big end or something.  I might go and have a shower now, because that means that even if they do want me to hold something I can’t because I will be all wet.  What a shame.  I might stuff my ears with soap as well, just to make sure that if Tallulah wakes up I won’t be able to hear her moaning her way up the stairs.

Questionarooney Questionaree

You know the drill.  You ask.  I answer.  Here it is. Voila:

 

Where did my wife get chiggers?

 

Maybe she saved all the coupons from the cereal packets and sent off for some with a £2.00 postal order and a stamped, self addressed envelope.  Or maybe she really went to the rainforest when she said she was just popping down to the Co-op to spot some aliens.  I feel that you clearly have some trust issues here in your marriage if you would rather ask a random stranger over the interweb than say: ‘Now look Muriel.  Once and for all.  Just tell me where you got the chiggers?’  Perhaps you could reassure her that no matter how much they cost you won’t make her take them back, and all will be well.

 

Things to make from elephant pooh.

 

• A scale model of the famed astrologer, Russell Grant.
• A shed load of money and an artistic reputation viz. Chris Ofili.
• A horrible smell.
• An old people’s home.
• Some roller skates.

 

Is Tallulah a serial killer name?

 

In our house it is.  Well, a baby, fledgeling serial killer to be’s name anyway.

I have looked up the top five serial killer names for children compiled by Mothercare and sponsored by Smarties.  The top five serial killer names for boys are:

 

1. Geoffrey
2. Idris
3. Montgomery
4. Shadrach
5. Joshua

 

The top five for girls are:

 

1. Jacinta
2. Yseult
3. Yvette Fielding
4. Isadora
5. Timothy

 

Giles Coren in his pants.

 

I like your thinking.  I do wonder however if this is the first line of a song:

 

(To the musical stylings of Camptown Races as played on Oboe and Recorder.  Allegro.)

 

Giles Coren in his pants, doo dah, doo dah

Giles Coren wearing pants doo dah di doo dah day.

He wears them up and down,

He wears them round and round,

Giles Coren loves his pants, doo dah di doo dah day.

 

That’s it.  I knew I’d heard it somewhere before.

 

Is lettuce safe for cats?

 

Absolument non!  It is deadly.  It lurks about in the cold frames pretending to be cat nip and humming a siren song, luring unwary cats to their doom.  Once it has them within its reach, it extends its tentacles and tentaculizes the cats into its gaping maw, whereupon it rolls them over and over until they are dead, at which point it will eat them.  One standard Siamese will last your average Little Gem a week.  The best breed to choose if you decide to breed lettuce and cats, is a Burmese long hair.  The tentacles get less purchase on the longer hair.

 

What nail varnish goes with gold shoes?

 

The sort that can be used to paint your gold shoes a different colour and thus render them fit to wear out in public.  Dark brown leather effect is good, either that or black patent.

 

Paranoid aliens in Glenfield libraries.

 

No wonder they’re paranoid.  First they’re in the Co-op minding their own business, sucking up Sunny Delight with their forefingers.  Then renewed public interest forced them over the road to the library, and now you’re after them there.  Leave them alone.  They’re not doing anyone any harm, and I’d pay them to pod snatch the grumpy woman who always looks horrified if you actually try to remove a book from the premises.

 

Free photo of a child with frizzy hair.

 

Do you get a ring binder to put it in?  Why would you want a free photo of a child with frizzy hair?  Are you compiling a montage of frizzy headed children for a public health film about the dangers of rubbing balloons on children’s heads?  My child has frizzy hair.  You can only have a photo if you agree to take the child as well.  You can have them both for free if you like.

 

Can you get plague from chiggers?

 

It’s quite complex, but basically, if a Medieval ship full of French rags laden with plague rats, sails into a port in Belize, a rat escapes and it’s plague blood filled flea bit a peasant, who was then in the unfortunate position to be invaded by chiggers, and one of those chiggers wriggles out of their plague ridden, festering torso and climbs into you via the tiny hatch in your big toe, then yes.

 

Andrea is a fraggle.

 

Well I went to spend the evening in a big top with her recently and she definitely wasn’t a fraggle then.  Is this a recent thing?  Perhaps she’s just done her hair differently.  I wouldn’t mention it if I were you.  Or has she got the part of Red in Fraggles the Musical and is doing some method acting by running along with both arms outstretched and swaying them from side to side whilst wobbling her head alarmingly?  Apparently Sean Penn did that when he took the part of Kermit in The Muppets, A life in fun fur.  He crouched on a lily pad for five weeks, living off of flies and inflating his cheeks.  It’s what led to his recent temporary separation with his wife.

 

Queen of the bears name.

 

• Grrrrrr
• Arrrrghhhh
• Rrraaaaahhhh
• Ursula
• Edith

 

Can I name my baby Celine without people laughing?

 

Ha ha ha ha hhhaaaa haaa hhh ahhha hhaaa ha.

 

No.

 

One word for imaginary world.

 

Cirencester

 

Where to go for a dirty weekend in Venice.

 

• Swindon?
• The back of the Co-op in Glenfield, where all the big bins are?
• No, wait.  Is this a trick question?
• Ha! I’ve got it.  How about Venice?

 

Celine Dion spotted in Glenfield Co-op.

 

No wonder the Aliens have moved out.  It’s probably not helped their paranoia.  They’re probably in the library now, crouched round the Large Print section, twiddling their tiny suckers and waiting for Celine to come and find them.  Bless.

 

George Clooney will have kids.

 

You sound very sure about that.  They have laws about artificially inseminating Hollywood stars with a turkey baster you know.  Are we talking baby goats here?  I know he’s got a pet pig. I don’t honestly know whether pigs and goats get on so well, particularly pampered celebrity pigs who are used to having their own sty with en suite bowling alleys and wallowing holes.  You might want to rethink that.  I approve of your forceful stance, but I think honestly you’re wasting your time.  You want to try someone more flexible like Whoopi Goldberg.  I bet she’d love a baby goat.

 

Weird kiwi fruit with nipple like things.

 

According to that person who wrote in last week, they are probably not fruit at all, they’re probably just your auntie’s breasts and you’re just blotting it out in a heroic act of denial.  Young people these days spend far too much time thinking about their auntie’s breasts in my opinion.  No wonder less people are taking A level biology.

 

Superheroes in Tudor times.

 

1. The Mighty Codpiece (protector of all manly values.  Able to render himself invisible during very cold snaps and under extreme stress)
2. Wonderbethan – Lots of twirling in panniers in very narrow streets soon settled her hash.
3. Fish man – Fish was very popular in Tudor times, due to Elizabeth having to keep the navy so busy.  Fish had to be eaten by law three times per week (fact).  The other four days a week you were actively encouraged to pretend to be the very popular comic strip hero ‘Fish man’ who went around in a stinky apron and clogs, righting wrongs by slapping people around both cheeks with a pair of halibuts on strings.  He had a crap name, but that was because he was made up in a hurry by the Elizabethan Fish Marketing Board in order to avoid having their heads chopped off when they hadn’t shown week on week growth in fish sales for the fourth month running.

 

It was all the rage in Tudor times to be a superhero and claim extraordinary powers.  It’s why everyone wore capes and tights.  They all foolishly believed that they had the power of flight and would regularly hurl themselves out of mullioned windows, only to smash themselves to bits on the shit infested cobbles below.  In a list compiled by the Health and Safety people in Queen Elizabeth’s court, the three most common causes of death amongst the nobility in the Sixteenth century were:

 

1. Being burned as a witch
2. Falling out of a window pretending that you could fly
3. Impersonating the Queen

 

Why is time important when observing children?

 

So that you can appreciate fully just how many other things you could be doing in the time it takes you to watch your child crouched on the floor hitting a tin of condensed milk with a spoon full of new potatoes shouting the word ‘Pants!’ with every appearance of joy and a life well spent.  Otherwise it’s not half so tragic and nobody would ever write plays like; ‘Waiting for Godot’, which Samuel Beckett wrote after just such an event.  We suffer for art.  It’s what we do.

 

Tuna is so fat like a bat.

 

I agree that tuna can be a bit portly, but fat bats? Perhaps you’re feeding them the wrong things.  Perhaps they should lay off the Mars Bars for a while and try fruit.  Bats, being needful of aerodynamism are better thin.  Fat bats don’t so much fly as plummet.  Although if you’re going for poetry I agree that; ‘Tuna you are so thin, like a bat’, doesn’t sound half so good.  Now you’ve got the bat bit right, the Tuna bit is all wrong, because as we have already discussed, Tuna can indeed be fat.  Perhaps you should go for documentary stylings and merely say: ‘Tuna you are so fat, not like a bat which is naturally thin, due to its need to fly and not plummet.’ You can have that for free if you like.  I made it.

 

Do nits pooh in my hair?

 

I hate to break this to you, but unless you’ve got specially trained nits who wear Pampers Pull Ups, or ones who have a pet dog to jump on as a lavatory, then yes, you do have nit pooh in your hair.  Be thankful that nit pooh does not crawl around on your head but merely stays where it’s put, in a small pooh shaped lump on your head.  The nits on the other hand are frisking about, making babies on your ear lobes and sucking blood straight from your brain.  Pooh is the last thing I’d be worrying about if I were you.

How to make Ray Mears Out of Napkins

This query: ‘How to make Ray Mears out of napkins’, is one of the things someone has searched for on Google this week, and found my blog in the process.  Usually I would answer/debate this in my weekly round up of questions which is due to be published at some point today, when I can be bothered to compile it.  I started it some while back, but this was the first query I found and it has stopped me dead in my tracks.  It is an awesome, awesome thing to want to know.  I am so impressed of you I could weep.

I have sat staring at this line of text for some time, thinking about why a person would want to make a model of Ray Mears out of a napkin.  Perhaps they are going to feature on that Channel Four show: ‘Come Dine With Me’ and are doing a wilderness style paeon to King Ray complete with tables made out of roughly hewn logs situated in a bivouac, complete with tiny Ray Mears lookie likey napkins.  Perhaps it’s Heston Blumenthal on his ever expanding quest for perfection, hosting a celebrity dinner in which the first course will be essence of wood louse in a spray can, which one mists lightly over a napkinalike Ray whilst eating twig fondue with wild mushroom coulis.

Whatever it is, for the extreme joy you have given me over the last half an hour of my life I dedicate this blog entry to you, whoever you may be.  Long may you spend fashioning napkins into images of UK based, BBC celebrities.

Here is Ray Mears:

Here is a napkin:

Trying to merge one with the other to create a Ray Mears lookie likey napkinalike is a problematic venture which is going to take time, dedication and fortitude on your part.  Here are the steps to take in achieving your dream:

First choose which type of napkin you will be using.  You may decide on a) the vulgar, yet infinitely more versatile paper napkin or b) the stylish, classy and more environmentally friendly cloth napkin.  This decision is crucial and should not be taken lightly.  The outcome will affect the whole of the rest of your project.  My advice would be to weigh up whether you want a disposable Ray or a long, lasting, hard wearing Ray that will keep you satisfied for years to come. 

If you are a throwaway kind of person I would opt for the paper version.  This has the added attractions of being easier to achieve, lighter for the purposes of carrying the napkinalike round with you, and cheaper. This cost consideration will come in particularly handy if Ray suddenly decides to change his image and you need to produce a more up to date model of Ray wearing an ultra fashionable jump suit and moon boots ensemble instead of his usual woodsman’s gear.  If you are a person who believes in a solid bit of lasting workmanship, that will also soak up messy stains without tearing, I would go for cloth.

Once you are happy with your decision you will then need, in the best traditions of the man himself, to manufacture the napkin of your choice using nature as your guide.  If you are going for paper you will need to either plant your own natural woodland area, using plants indigenous to your local habitat and then wait for a few hundred years for a bumper harvest of sustainable wood, or you could indulge in some coppicing in an already existing wood.  I would suggest that this option is preferable, especially if your dinner party is some time in the next couple of hundred years and you haven’t got time to wait.

Once you have chosen a suitable tree for your purposes (I would estimate that one medium sized horse chestnut tree will provide you with enough material for about forty napkins.  This, using standard four napkins per Ray scale of measurement will give you enough for ten Rays, six for your guests, two prototypes and two left over in case of emergencies), you need to fell it.  There will undoubtedly be footage of Ray on YouTube doing just such a task, which you can utilise as a guide.  Remember to take your laptop into the woods with you and make sure you have enough battery left for the whole clip.

Trim off any extraneous branches and leaves, rehome all dispossessed wildlife and then drag your tree home with you.  I then suggest sawing it into manageable pieces, because the trunks can be quite long, and if you leave it sticking out of the door you’re either going to have to pay off the postman when he trips over it on the way up the path, or you will be burgled by a common peasant with no sense of decency and the need for a new DVD player to sell down the pub.

Once you have your manageable chunks you need to render them down to make paper pulp.  Doing this at home your best bet will be a very fine microplane or mouli grater.  You may want to take it in turns with a friend as it is quite a labour intensive job and excessive grating can lead to wear and tear on the fingers.  On no account must you mix blood with your pulp.  This is very unprofessional and may well attract sharks.

Add such ingredients as you consider necessary to your pulp in order to make it more paper like.  At this point I suggest shredding some paper into it as a Delia style short cut.  If you’re too tired to shred it yourself after all that intensive grating you could hire a hamster to do it for you from the local pet emporium, thus keeping it ‘real’ and as nature intended.

You will now need a binding agent to stick your pulp together.  Porridge is very good, and the right sort of colour for paper based products.  If after the liberal application of porridge you still feel the need to make it more adhesive, add the juice of two eggs, stir and strain through a sock.

The resulting mixture must be laid on napkin shaped moulds (Swiss Roll tins are quite good. Two napkins per one Swiss Roll tin is standard) and beaten with a rolling pin firmly and vigorously until the mixture is flat and thin enough to resemble a napkin.

If you live in sunny climes, pop the resultant mixture on the window sill to bake in the warmth of the sun for three days.  If you live in the UK, stick it in the back of the airing cupboard for a week, taking it out once daily for a quick prod and a prayer.  After this you may remove them gently from the moulds.

Voila! Napkins, ready for action.

If you are using the cotton napkins I suggest the same steps but replacing the word ‘tree’ with cotton plants or plantations.  My other top tip in this scenario would be to avoid any form of slavery during harvesting and processing, as this is now frowned upon.  I also recommend replacing porridge with icing sugar as your main pulping/glue agent.  The end result will be perfect napkins.

Once you have assembled your napkins you will need four per Ray.  One for the head, one for the torso and one each for the arms and legs.

Take the ‘head’ napkin and scrunch it into a ball.  Douse generously in varnish to stop it unravelling and to give it that ’sweaty, I’ve just hacked my way through the jungle’ look.  Currants for eyes are good.  I would use a bit of upturned glace cherry as a mouth, and orange wool for hair.  Remember, not too neatly styled. He’s a man of the woods, after all.  If you want complete verisimilitude, steal a hot weather combat style hat from your son’s Action Man collection and glue it onto the varnished head.

If you are nervous about using fruit based products to make your basic Ray you can always cheat.  Print out some tiny photographs of Ray’s head, cut round them with a pair of very sharp nail scissors (mind your fingers here please.  You may want to get a child to help you) and stick the faces onto the varnished napkin ball using glue, or Calpol if you haven’t got any glue handy.

Take your torso napkin and fold it in two lengthways to make a body. At the top end, thread through the arm napkin so that it crosses the body.  Remember to make the arms of equal length.  You don’t want him to look ’special’.

Staple the bottom ends of the torso napkin together and thread through the leg napkin, again remembering equal lengths.  Ray does not walk with a limp, and we are aiming for the recognition factor here.

Attach the head to the completed body using home made string, calpol or a light application of porridge.  You will now need to dress the body in the survival outfit of your choice.  I recommend again the delights of raiding your son’s Action Man wardrobe. If you have daughters, please don’t think you can get away with Barbie.  It won’t work.  Ray looks stupid in off the shoulder ruffles with a matching clutch.  He just does.  Spend the extra money and go to Toys R Us, or knit your own survival outfit using remnants of wool that you were saving in case they ever did another blankets for the Third World drive at the local church.  You won’t regret it.

Hands and feet last.  I recommend pipe cleaners for fingers and varnished prunes for feet.  They look a lot like Army boots and can be really effective, particularly by the light of some dinner party candles, or even survival flares, if you’re going all out for the look.

You can either sit them by each plate, or use a chopstick down the back of each napkinalike, embedded in some plasticine or a bread roll to give them a naturalistic standing pose.  The choice is yours and will depend on how you decide to stage the rest of your dinner.  If you want to send in pictures of your event, I will be more than happy to publish them as a guide for other interested parties.

Finally, use a picture of Ray for reference at all times.  Remember.  You want something that looks like this:

Not this:

Good Luck

Fin

Do enjoy your Ray napkinalikes.  Next week, we render Celine Dion entirely from pig fat and offal.

Friday June 27th – Bong! It’s The News…

To carry on this theme of experimenting and being daringly topical, what with me reading the news and learning to hyperlink all in one week (no wonder chocolate was required), here are the headlines in the Katy Times for today:

Genuine Information About Celine Dion – Shock!

Now as regular readers will know, I frequently celebrate the title of; ‘woman who has written the most spurious and inaccurate drivel about the French Canadian pop minxtrel Celine Dion in the history of ever, ever’.  It is one of my finest skills.  Nevertheless, I now have to break this long run by bringing you some actual, real, as reported by the BBC, news about Her Celiness of Dion.  Luckily it is quite amusing, and is very like what I would probably make up anyway, so it’s not too much of a wrench.

Celine Dion has apparently been voted as having done the worst cover version in the history of cover versions ever.  The song which won her this title was her balladeering rendition of ACDC’s ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.  Fair play to the woman.  It only goes to confirm my view that she is as mad as ninepence, but whatever rocks her millionaire diva’s world I suppose.

I have to confess to being more than a little intrigued.  So, purely for the purposes of professional news journalism, I hopped on over to YouTube to have a little look.  The footage I found was a duet between Celine and that American rock chick warbler Anastacia, ’singing’ live in Las Vegas.  It was a sight to behold.  Celine, clad in white spandex with an Aerosmith stylin’ scarf and glam bus driver shades, rocking it with Anastacia resembling someone who’d had a fight with a badger in which the outcome was uncertain.  Many of her articles of attire seemed to be shredded and somewhat furry and it may just have been the grainy footage, but it seemed as if the badger were still actively clinging to her head. 

There were no shorts in evidence, no sweaty men with Geordie accents and flat caps stomping about the stage.  They were all dead with mortification that one of the finest rock anthems of our time has been turned into prancing, middle of the road musical stylings I expect.  Either that or they were laughing it up on a desert island somewhere counting the money from selling their souls to the French Canadian devil.  It was all very sanitized and quite frightening.  The singing, which I suppose is what we’re all about here, was very much what one would expect.  A sort of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ with more rock guitars and verbal high fives.  I turned the sound down after the first minute, so don’t really feel qualified to comment on the rest.

I don’t know whether I agree that it was the worst cover version ever, because in the; ‘If you liked that, you’ll love this menu’ on Youtube which appeared as I stared in horrified fascination at gyrating white spandex there was a link to a version of the same song by that goddess of contemporary middle of the road country music, Shania Twain.  I clicked on this, only to find her pouting in a black leather jumpsuit (Oh My God! They are everywhere) and doing her ‘rockin’ all night long’ to the sound of steel guitars and some down home blue grass roots.  Again the sound went off after sixty seconds, but I did watch the entire rest of the footage in awe as she flicked her hair around in a sultry manner wearing the black leather jumpsuit from hell.  I examined it minutely and found that it had two ‘new’ features with which to torment me; slightly puffy sleeves and  kick flare trousering.  God help us.  We are doomed.

Moving swiftly on to the next news item as I weep gently into my super stylin,’ ever fashionable moon boots:

British People Are A Nation of Whingers – Shock! Shock! Shockety Shock!

Where do they get this news from? Where?  From the: ‘It’s not really news is it dammit? But I just can’t help myself’ file?  Still, as I don’t really do ‘hard’ news either, at least it gives me something to talk about.  I shouldn’t really complain, but apparently as a Briton, I just can’t help myself, so what the hell! It’s bein’ so cheerful that keeps me going.

Yes, this is the news that Tom Harris, a no name (well, obviously he has a name, or he wouldn’t be known as Tom Harris, but you get my drift. It isn’t a great name.  It isn’t a name in lights.  It’s not Englebert Humperdinck) MP who clearly doesn’t think that looking after his constituents needs is as important as getting in the Magazine section of the BBC News Website, has asked the topical and deeply relevant question: ‘Why is everyone so bloody miserable?’ in parliament this week. 

I expect this was because he stupidly thought that being an MP was all about shagging nubile secretaries and ordering wallpaper at fifty guineas per square ounce and passing it off as stationery in his expenses form, and then he had to do a free clinic for a week in Hounslow as penance.  After having to chat to nine hundred pensioners about how they live on cat food and bobble hats and how it’s never been the same since Lloyd George and what’s he going to do about it, he’s now ready to slit his wrists with a pen knife and wants everyone to know about the pressures of modern life.  The irony is that he’s whinging about us all whinging.  Physician heal thyself, that’s what I say to you Mr. Tom Harris M.P.

According to the Beeb, we Brits complain just because we like complaining, and we don’t actually expect anything to change, presumably because if everything were fine we wouldn’t have anything left to moan about, and there’s nothing we love more than a good moan.  The Yanks on the other hand moan because they believe that by moaning they can get more things changed and that progress will be made.  I expect they moaned their way to the moon.  Nasa is probably chock full of expert whiners who bitch their way through several successful space missions a year.  We on the other hand have a man called Guy in a shed with a spanner, sitting over a Venn diagram with a fag and a cup of tea.  He has given up moaning and is now moving on to resigned and apathetic.  You see, we all make progress in our own special way.  The Americans are new to the world of moaning.  We’ve got a seven hundred year head start on them in the moaning front.  If you fast forward to seven hundred years hence, Nasa too will be a man in a shed with a frothy latte and a good line in apathy.  All comes to he who waits, as long as what he’s waiting for is cat food and bobble hats.

Nextly:

Shooting Pigeons at Wimbledon – Aaahh!

Apparently the animal rights pressure group PETA have written to Wimbledon complaining about the fact that they have enlisted the help of some pest control people to rid them of their pigeon population in time for Wimbledon proper.  They say that it is not very nice to shoot pigeons at all and it might hurt.

Now I’m torn here, because the cynical part of me thinks: ‘Hah! Surely there are more important things in the world to worry about than the fate of a few mouldy pigeons? Pigeons who make rabbits look like pandas when it comes to breeding and multiplying everywhere… And surely PETA would be better off spending their hard earned stamp money writing to people who incarcerate chickens in tin sheds so that Tesco customers can have an obese, mouldy, syphilitic, diseased Sunday roasts every week.’

Then there’s the humanitarian/animalarian part of me that thinks: ‘Poor bloody pigeons. It’s not their fault they’re brilliant at having babies and poohing on people.  I can think of several humans who do the same thing round our way who I’d be much happier to put out of their misery with a shotgun than a few pigeons.  And, why should the pigeons get shot just because a few tennis ’stars’, and I use that word in the loosest possible way, complain because they got pooh on their heads.  Wear a hat, get a life and stop complaining.  Anyone would think you were bloody British, which you can’t be if you’re Tennis Stars.  You’re going home in a fortnight, and surely the torrential rain will wash it off anyway.’

Then I read the next bit of the article, which made me laugh quite a lot and think: ‘Hah! Serves them right.’  Apparently pest control people actively encourage potential clients to have their pigeons shot, not because it’s the most humane or easiest thing to do in terms of culling, but because shooting the adult pigeons gives new life and vigour to the pigeons on the next rung down in the pecking order, so to speak, thus giving them hope and more ladies to shag, and produces a bumper crop of uber pigeons about six weeks later, thus meaning more money for the pest people, and more sex and food for the remaining pigeons.  Hoorah!

All’s well that ends well then… and it’s goodnight from me

Arkay’s Meme

My blogging friend Arkay challenged me to a meme he got sent today. It is a simple meme, but the idiot who replaced my brain with a begonia in the night has made it very difficult.  I thought.  That’s so simple, I will use his challenge to teach myself some new technology.  After all, how can a girl possibly get to grips with widgets if she can’t even create a simple hyperlink in her blog? Start small girl, start small. 

This is why it has taken me three quarters of an hour to link the word Arkay to what is hopefully going to turn out to be his blog when you press it.

This three quarters of an hour has included me having to have a lie down, a lump of chocolate and log in to an idiot’s guide on YouTube for the hard of thinking.  Sigh…. There is no hope for my widgets.

Anyway, the meme challenge is to create a biography of yourself in six words (I know! I know! Impossible for me…) and accompany it with some kind of explanatory graphics:

Here goes:

I am tired and very hungry

 

You then have to send it to five other people.  Now I am not good at this bit either, so I’m throwing an open house.  All of you who wish to do it are welcome.  Send me a comment with your blog address and I’ll make sure it gets printed at the bottom so everyone can see them.

Dreaming in a Tent

Last night I went to see a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a circus tent in the grounds of Warwick University, with Andrea.  As you know, we are fearless theatre-goers (unless it involves musicals, in which case you will find us quaking under Row D, sobbing into our programmes) and last week endured the delights of a student production of Macbeth complete with strobe lighting and witches in bandages. 

Thanks to this we were more than apprehensive about our night at the circus of Shakespeare.  I in particular was apprehensived out due to my throbbing headache, lack of sleep and a hideous day spent with three small squawking children which, by the time Andrea got to my house last night, had turned me into a bitch goddess of epic proportions.  I almost cancelled, but then when Tallulah came running to me in tears for this sixth time in one afternoon, this time because she had trampolened on her own nose, I felt that it was best to be absent from my dwelling to save me murdering everyone with a shovel.

By the time we got to Warwick my headache tablets had kicked in, my temper had subsided and the wind, which had been howling a gale all day had also died down.  All these things made me feel much more chipper and less likely to mope about on my perch, pullling my feathers out and doing my own squawking.  We had also ingested large quantities of the Co-op’s very excellent fair trade, stem ginger loaf cake, which helped enormously.  I recommend it in times of crisis if you don’t like Rescue Remedy.  It’s a sure fire winner baby.  Andrea who had spent the last forty eight hours cutting herself to ribbons learning the ancient art of glass cutting and manoeuvring a tonne of top soil around the county in the dead of night, and clearly had problems of her own, agreed with me on the cake.  Smiley face and gold star for you.

So. The tentacular delights of Shakespeare?  Actually, v. v. good as Bridget Jones would say.  Not in the slightest bit traditional, but very entertaining and with moments of deep joy.  The company is called Footsbarn Theatre, and it’s their own tent.  Have tent, will travel.  I quite like the idea of having my own circus tent.  Apparently the ginger bloke from Harry Potter has spent all his filmic earnings on his own personal ice cream van, which also sounds like a good idea.  I must put big top and ice cream van down on my list of things to buy when I’m ridiculously rich.

Andrea and I discussed fake blood on the way home last night.  She was commenting on the fact that in this production they used silk scarves, and was it a Japanese thing (there were oriental elements to the play)? I said  I thought it was more to do with the nature of having to get fake blood stains out of a big top and the prohibitive cost of dry cleaning.  You can tell I spend all day looking after children.

The company is based in France.  They spend all winter practicing in the Auvergne and then dust the tent off to zoom around the world putting on productions in five languages and seeing how many props they can squash into a portaloo in between gigs.  The language barrier was apparent in spades last night.  As mentioned, they had gone a bit oriental and had some Japanese cast members, who when they weren’t mangling Erizabeefan into Engrish, were doing brilliantly in Japanese.  Titania was Japanese.  She was a dab hand at ribbon waving on a stick (told you it wasn’t traditional), but her speeches were somewhat earifically challenging.  I actually thought that at one point I was listening with such concentration that my ears were bending round to reach her.  Such is the power of drama to affect us.  Let that be a lesson to you.

Puck was a Japanese masked warrior who looked like a Lion Dog and kept making little Bruce Lee style yaps and clicks in between engirdling the earth in forty minutes.  His voice was somewhat trying, probably due to the large mask as well as his own personal linguistic wrestling matches with the bard.  He was a dab hand at waving flowers into lover’s eyes though. I’ll give him that.

There were lots of masks, which were very cool.  Hardcore masks, not cutesy masks.  I mean they didn’t look like bank robbers or the members of Slipknot or anything, but they weren’t pretty pretty.  The fairies all looked like something Arthur Rackham would have cooked up after a particularly heavy night on the fromage and port, and were quite twisted and cool, particularly the midget one that had a big bouncy dress, a la Upsy Daisy in In the Night Garden, the nightmare version.  It was more Goblin Market than Cicely Mary Barker on a commemorative plate.

Before I go any further, for those of you who are not up on the world of Mr. S, here is another potted version, Katy stylie.  Theseus is the Duke of Athens.  He’s going to marry his lady love, Hippolyta (both of whom in this version looked like Herne The Hunter in Robin Hood, the one with Michael Praed in it, not the new, crap one).  On the same day, a nobleman called Aegeus is hoping to marry his only daughter, Hermia to a man called Demetrius.  Demetrius loves Hermia.  Hermia loathes Demetrius.  Hermia loves Lysander.  Aegeus thinks Lysander is a feckless waster and says that unless she marries Demetrius she will either be killed or have to become a nun.  Harsh, but fair these fictional Athenian nobles.

In the meantime, Helena, who is Hermia’s friend is in love with Demetrius.  Demetrius used to be in love with Helena until he met Hermia.  He gives Helena the brush off because he thinks with his knob and is an unpleasant little man.  She is not best pleased and turns into his number one stalker, thinking foolishly that this will make her appear more attractive to him and win him back, while in fact it makes her look like a bit of a mentaller and he runs a mile, screaming.  While she is stalking Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander agree to meet in the woods at night time and run away from Athens where they can get married in peace.  Hermia tells Helena and Helena, thinking that she can win favour with Demetrius, tells him everything.  They go to the woods too.  Demetrius wants to kidnap Hermia and Helena wants to stalk Demetrius while he’s doing it.

While they’re all wandering around the woods, Titania and Oberon the king and queen of the fairies are also in the woods having a big fight over an Indian boy that they both want to keep as a pet (like a chinchilla, but less sandy).  Oberon is cross because Titania won’t give him up.  He orders Puck, his naughty fairy servant to squish some flower juice into her eyes while she is sleeping, which will make her fall in love with the first thing she sees when she wakes up. That’ll learn her.

In the meantime a bunch of peasants (the simples) are practising a play in honour of the Duke’s upcoming wedding.  They all have hilarious names like Bottom and are very stupid.  They do lots of clowning around and punning on sex and put on a bizarre play about the thwarted lovers Pyramus and Thisbe who get eaten by lions.  They decide to go and practice in the woods at midnight (as all good theatre companies do).

This means everyone is running around the woods in a hilarious ‘Oops! There go my bloomers!’ kind of way, and Puck creates mayhem by squirting this love potion in all the wrong people’s eyes.  Eventually Titania falls in love with the peasant Bottom, who is now, for unexplained reasons dressed as an ass and Lysander and Demetrius are now both in love with Helena.  Vicars fall out of cupboards, bosoms explode, fire is eaten and much braying is enjoyed by everyone.

Oberon eventually sweeps down and sorts everyone out and makes all the right people fall in and out of love. It ends with everyone getting married happily, the peasants play going on and Thisbe’s comedy breasts exploding spectacularly.

So, imagine all this in a big top, with only six cast members, two bassoon players wearing glasses and Elizabethan English being mangled in French, English and Japanese.  Include, if you will, false teeth, lots of spit, ribbon twirling, a man who looked unnervingly like Richard thingy from The Crystal Maze and comedy breasts, and you will pretty much be there with us.  The simples were fantastic and did huge amounts of ad libbing and mucking around with the audience.  I particularly liked the way they pronounced sword as s- wooord and am now going to make it my own for any s wooord fight in which I happen to be embroiled.

The audience did their part and talked, chattered, whooped and generally joined in for all they were worth.  There were a lot of kids in the audience, one of whom had an uncanny knack for shouting out in the quiet bits.  Things like: ‘It’s a donkey!’ when Bottom first appeared as an ass, and ‘Ow!’ when Thisbe’s boobs exploded etc, etc.  It was like panto, only better.  If only we could have shot the teenagers behind us who insisted on chatting to each other throughout the entire performance it would have been a complete success.  I did think about taking them on but I was full of ginger cake and only just over my headache, so decided to let sleeping teenagers chatter.

 

Why The Army Should Enlist Babies

I have decided to try and blog at least once a day on something that is topical, topical to everyone rather than topical in my particular version of reality.  I feel that it is good practice for when and if I ever get round to writing a novel, and if I ever get invited on Have I got News for You? It’s important to be prepared for these things.  I have also made this decision because I’ve just spent the last forty minutes on my hands and knees scrubbing welded strawberries off the kitchen floor and needed an excuse to come and have a sit down before I tackle the hall.

Today on my daily trawl of the Beeb’s newsimation site I came across two stories that licked my ears with delight in much the same way as an over affectionate Spaniel.  The first was a banner headline which read: ‘Adults Scared to Go Near Kids’, and the second was the shocking news, and you may want to sit down for this one, that army ration packs are not very good.  In fact, it is safe to say that the food in the army is shocking.  Quelle Horreur?

So, Adults are afraid of going near children?  Why? Why is this news?  Anyone with children, related to children, who has seen children on the television could have told you that.  Kids are bloody terrifying.  Babies don’t come with a manual, they flop about all over the place, they have weird pulsating holes in their skulls and can projectile vomit up to five yards whilst still wailing like banshees and simultaneously crapping into their own hairlines.  What’s not to be scared of?  You’d be mad not to be scared of going near one of those.  Even a child’s own parents are scared of them at this stage of life.

Then you get the bit where they start moving around.  This is also terrifying.  Like cats they have a knack of getting underfoot, winding round your ankles at the top of stairwells, in doorways and such like.  They also like to launch off of things like chairs, steps, shoulders etc.  They are small but deadly and impervious to instruction due to the fact that they do not speak any kind of recognisable language.  Yes there is baby sign language but you spend twelve months sweating cobs trying to teach them the word ‘milk’, only for them to turn round and say: ‘Sod off and get me some apple juice pronto.’

Once they start to talk it’s a minefield of having to spend entire months of your life explaining things like the theory of relativity, what happens after death, the inner workings of the Wankel Rotary engine, why Jeremy Clarkson has such big hands and what exactly a bush tucker trial is.  Your brain is effectively being turned out by one of those aliens on Doctor Who who can suck information out of you at will, leaving you a dried husk in the corner of the room while they caper about maniacally, cackling with glee. 

You think you might have done a reasonable job until you hear them explaining to one of their friends at nursery that Jeremy Clarkson has curly hair because when he dies he extrudes tiny bits of engines called superstrings which are like cheese strings and that you can eat in a bush tucker trial which have much the same effect as eating crusts.  This is when you realise that they have taken everything you’ve ever told them and stapled it together inside out and back to front.  This is now the framework for their entire future understanding of the universe and it will all be your fault if they turn out to be Fred West or Dolly Parton.

Children are frightening.  All small things are frightening, even when they’re cute.  You only have to look at a picture of a weasel going in for the kill to know that.  Other small things which are frightening are:

1. Midgets in horror films.
2. Killer slugs.
3. Cornichons.
4. Michael J. Fox.

I rest my case.

The other hot news topic of the day is this business of the army’s ration pack food being disgusting.  Now again, why is this news exactly? When has army food ever been nice?  Do people who sign up for the army really believe the glossy brochures promising exotic destinations and delicious cuisine?  Are they all digging latrines in some third world shit hole and weeping because there isn’t an infinity pool and you can’t get a decent packet of Quavers for love nor money?  No. I doubt it.  I expect they’re too busy worrying about staving off dysentry and getting their heads exploded by angry natives with anti tank weaponry.  Now if you couldn’t get a decent cup of tea I expect that would be a different thing entirely and there would be anarchy in the armed forces before you could say spam.

Is Giles Coren rushing over to Aldershot’s mess hall every lunch time, jostling to get to the front of the queue so he can write a glowing paeon of praise to bully beef, smash and baked beans? No. No he’s not.  He’s running away from Aldershot, ringing his assistant and shouting; ‘ book me the taster menu at The Savoy and make it snappy!’ that’s what he’s doing.  The army is not meant to be a place of fine dining and fish knives.  It’s meant to be a place where crazy people who like guns get to go and shoot each other, leaving the rest of us apathetic idlers in peace with some bourbon creams and the latest copy of the Radio Times.

The only reason this is news is because Prince Harry, who is used to drinking champagne neat from the bottle and sucking quails eggs out of the warm bosom of his personal valet mentioned that rations taste like shit and he didn’t like them very much when he went to Afghanistan.  Then Gordon Ramsay jumped on the bandwagon on the F Word and now it’s all over the papers like a rash.  The fact that millions of ordinary canon fodder have been complaining about rations since 1914 is just not newsworthy enough.  Let’s face it, scrofulous trench footed peasants are just not as photogenic as ginger princes and millionaire chefs.

I reckon I have the answer to both of these particular problems.  They should do what Jonathan Swift suggested in his essay: ‘A Modest Proposal’, which dealt with the issues of the Irish Potato Famine.  They should take all those terrifying babies, put them in army sponsored baby farms and then make them into tasty, nutritious rations for the troops.  No more babies to grow into children who frighten grown ups, and if we enlist Heston Blumenthal to come up with some innovative new recipes that will keep in ration packs, something I’m sure he and his digital thermometer would love to do, no more disappointed troops eating baked beans morning noon and night.  A genius plan.

Thursday 26th June – I Lack Widgets in the Springtime

Blogging is a strange and solitary past time, slightly more sociable than masturbation or making scale models of the Eiffel Tower out of used match sticks, but not much.  It is a lot less sticky than either of these other hobbies, something for which I am profoundly grateful.  I hate being sticky, which given the fact that along with blogging, my other hobby is squeezing out children, you will be surprised by.  Life is full of cruel ironies.

I sit up here in my dusty eyrie, pontificating about the world in general and my life in particular and then broadcasting to the nation like a one woman pirate radio station; ‘ARRRR!’ Mind my wooden leg on your way out…

The more I blog, the more I want to blog, the more I find things to blog about.  You would think I’d have run out of things to say by now.  I had envisioned this being the case when I first started blogging.  That one day I would sit in front of my computer screen and then be found, hands poised over the keyboard, immobile, five hours later, my brain empty except for the odd bit of dusty tumbleweed.  Instead I blog more, and more, and more.  Soon there will be no room left on the internet because I will have filled it all up with stuff and things, and broken it.  I wonder which help line you call when you have broken the internet?

I think it’s probably good that I write mainly for me and the rest for the ghosts of children future as we are a very forgiving audience due to the fact that I love me quite a lot, and the ghosts of the children future are still simmering on a low heat, but every now and again I do write with an ‘audience’ in mind.  As with all writers, you can never be sure that the audience in your mind is the one that’s reading your blogs, usually it isn’t.  Hence the odd message from someone saying: ‘Can’t you shut the fuck up?’ to which the answer is a resounding ‘No!’  Leave me alone and go and watch the television instead.  Why Don’t You? will be on in a minute.

I love using WordPress because it lets me know details of how people find me and why.  It reassures me that I’m not the only weirdo in the world.  Anyone who can search Google for: ‘My aunty’s nipples are black,’ has way more issues than me.  I wonder now why he/she stumbled across my blog as although I have aunties, I have never commented about the state of their nipples, and luckily for them and me, I never will.  A veil should be drawn swiftly over all aunties and their nipples.  Aunties are good for directing you to steal silver cow creamers and helping you out when your parents are on the fritz.  Their bodily functions are a private bourne to which no traveller should be admitted.

I also spend quite a lot of time wondering what makes people choose my site over all the others that must come up when they type in ‘How to get a cat stuck up a chimney?’  I surely can’t be listed first in the search engines?  There have got to be other people more qualified in the world of feline persuasion and chimney sweeping than me.  This must be true because my expertise is randomly made up in my brain, fueled by sugar and coffee and I can’t imagine that’s how one gets through veterinary school, although Trude Mostue might beg to differ. 

It’s certainly not the factual and accurate nature of my musings that draws them here.  I do get quite a lot of hits now and I wonder how many of them access the site and think; ‘Huh!?’ and then navigate away with all speed and how many of them start by thinking; ‘Huh!?’ and then gradually get sucked into my bizarre little world?  Then there are the ones that find me and think; ‘Hooray! A woman who has invented a chimney sweep’s pole made entirely of catnip and silver bells.  She’s a bona fide genius.  I must read more!’  They’re probably the ones that trouble me most if I’m honest…

WordPress also lets you know which sites are linking to you.  Sometimes this is very sweet, as you will find out that someone who likes your writing has recommended your musings in their blog.  This is a big ego moment, and when this happens I generally don my crown and ermine cloak and stride about the study shouting; ‘Me! Me! Me! It’s all about me!’ and hitting peasants with my sceptre until the excitement has worn off.  Generally this takes several hours as I am easily pleased and like to make a drama out of every little thing.

Other times you find that some very strange sites have randomly linked to you because they have picked up key words or phrases that you have tagged and have read no further, which is why my recent blogs on the horrors of childrens’ sports day have been picked up by a site which is called something like ’sportulike – first for sports’ and has linked to my blog.  This has had me rolling around on the floor with mirth, as I imagine jogging bepanted sports nuts thinking, ‘Aaah! Excellent, someone endorsing fitness for the under fives’ only to access my blog and find me praising my son to the skies for refusing to go in a race and eating a lollipop with some ants instead.

Then there’s the whole spam filtering thingy that WordPress kindly does for you.  I think it’s admirable that someone goes to the trouble to set up little search engine robots that comb the web for things to link to, but do they really think that I am going to be in the least bit fooled by someone sending me a badly spelled message linked to a blog I wrote six months ago which says: ‘This is a very interesting blog.  I encourage you to keep blogging. Well done you.’  Given the nature of my blogs it is always deeply suspicious to have this kind of blanket encouragement.  How can a woman who sells financial advice in Milwaukee find a blog about combing nits out of the hair of small children in Glenfield interesting, and how come, if she’s so interested isn’t she aware that I am the queen of keeping blogging and that there are three hundred other blogs she could be reading all by me?  Close, but no cigar.

As a blogger I am mostly happy.  I have a nice layout and a lovely picture of some trees.  I have a healthy blog roll and some frankly fantastic tags.  I have nice blogging friends who I chat to, and nice blogs I can read when I’m fed up of reading about me or slimming pills or Wayne ’potato face’ Rooney.  I thought, until this morning that the blog was my oyster, and then I found out that I have no widgets.  I was looking at my stats pages and it said: ‘You are using the cutline theme with 0 widgets.’  Further down the page it again mentions my lack of widgets.  I didn’t know I was supposed to have widgets.  I am now worried that I am missing out.  The only problem is, I don’t know what I’m missing out on.

I have no idea what internet widgets are.  I wouldn’t know a widget if I ran one over in the street.  Up until today I thought that widgets were those things in the bottom of cans of Guinness that made it go all frothy when you open the ring pull.  But how can I have one of those on my blog? I don’t want my readers covered in beery froth every time they access my blog pages. 

They sound important though, widgets.  They also sound fun, and rather scientific.  I expect they are technical, which is why I have not made, found, had one before.  I fear technology and prefer to get by with jam and string and twigs where at all possible, which is why my answering machine is so rubbish.  Jam is terrible for conducting sound, and jam headphones will never catch on.  Anyway,  I have decided that I probably need one, or maybe two.  Possibly a healthy sprinkling of widgets throughout my blog will help me become Giles Coren’s assistant at The Times.  Maybe it’s my lack of frothy widgets that has been putting him off all this time and he just didn’t know how to break it to me.  I don’t want to be left behind in the world of widgets, so I must investigate and purchase a pound of best widgets before the day is out.  Assorted widgets probably, just in case I don’t like the plain ones.