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.