The snack sized blog

Here’s another shocking revelation from the world of international news for you, hot from the BBC interweb presses.  Hold on to your hats folks.  This one is going to blow your mind:

 

Apparently, New Scientist magazine have published some ground breaking research to show that eating snack sized treats does not in fact make the eater snack sized, and quite often it has the opposite effect of making them woolly mammoth sized.  The scientists at New Scientists are all amazed by this and have had to sit down and have a party sized Mars Bar each just to get over the shock.

 

Now, as we know, I am not a scientist, but from this I can safely deduce that these scientists are indeed new, and they are all men.  How, you say? How, oh wise woman, can you tell such things from such a teeny, weeny paragraph of writing with only a picture of someone happily chomping away on a mini Twix to help you?  Is it your amazing psychic skills?  Do you have an informer in the top level world of Mad Scientists R Us meetings?  Are you in fact one of the key authors of New Scientist who has merely been pretending to be an idiotic, middle aged woman with far too much time on her hands than is good for her?

 

No! None of the above.  I am merely using my Sherlock Holmesian skills of deduction in a rational manner.  Here is my evidence.  Nobody who is being given the job of monitoring people’s intakes of midget sized food is very high up on the power ladder chain hexagon of top scientists. Fact. They’re hardly ringing Stephen Hawking on the bat phone at three in the morning begging him to drop everything and hot wheel it down to the lab with a family sized bag of Mars mini treats and some hungry sweet lovers now are they?  So, they are baby scientists.  Scientists who despite having to live in fear of being pelted with warm caramel by hate filled Willie Wonka’s, are not exactly changing their names and hiding in nuclear bunkers because of their top level security work with the United Nations Special Task force.  Scientists who smell quite nice, and whose girl friends love them for bringing home their work, but who secretly wish there were a few more cages and sulphuric acid with pipettes and chromatographic paper in their lives.

 

They are men, because only men would be in the slightest bit a) interested and b) amazed by such blindingly obvious facts.  Any woman would take this news in her stride, sniff disparagingly whilst hoofing down a large box of Malteasers and get on with her life.  If pressed to make a comment it would probably be: ‘Yeah! So what?’  If asked to write a paper on it they would nip down to the pub for a chat with their mates, type up their findings, including a nice graph with a picture of foxes heads on sticks on it, and use the research money to buy cake and shoes.  This is reality.

 

Only a man could think that a snack sized chocolate treat would be thought of as a real slimming aid, as opposed to an ‘excuse’ for a slimming aid.  They are there, much like the king of illusion, Derren Nesbitt himself, to act as a cunning smoke screen of lies.  They are there so that we can say: ‘Well, they were really very small, so it was fine that I ate the whole bag and then the other one that I got in the cupboard as part of a buy one get one free deal.’  They are there so we can casually throw them into our capacious handbags and graze on them throughout the day, munching dainty morsels instead of inhaling a king sized Snickers.  It’s just unseemly in public.  We eat the king sized Snickers at home in front of that great film that really makes us cry, when we need comfort and love in the shape of four thousand calories of chocolatey joy.

 

Every woman knows that:

 

• Tiny chocolates don’t count.  In fact the effort of unwrapping each nugget of chocolate means that they are in fact like celery and have negative calorific value.
• Eating tiny chocolates whilst standing up makes us lose weight so quickly that if we don’t eat them twenty at a time we may well die before we reach the fridge.
• Tiny chocolates are cute.  Cute things are good.  Babies are cute.  Babies have hardly any calories.  We can’t eat babies because it is frowned upon in our culture.  We are forced to eat chocolate instead, which due to its resemblance to cute babies, doesn’t have many calories in either.
• Eating tiny chocolate whilst using any form of transport at all, or indeed talking on the phone counts as exercise, and thus negates the minimal damage that eating tiny chocolates can do to our waistline.

 

Oh yes! The most important thing to mention is that every woman knows that eating chocolate in whatever form it happens to appear in our lives is what separates us from beasts and men and makes our lives a glowing circus of happiness, and if we are frowned at or criticised in any way whilst in the process of ingesting such happiness we will be forced to destroy anything in our path.

 

That is all New Scientists.  I don’t know why you didn’t come to me sooner.  It would have been a lot cheaper for you.  Plus I do a mean graph of foxes heads on sticks.  Their eyes follow you as you move around the room.

 

 

The Question is…

How to make wool owls.

 

First catch your owl.  I recommend using a butterfly net and some night vision goggles.  Either that or dressing up as a shrew and parading about the shrubbery in the early hours of the morning making shrew noises.  If you go for the shrew option make sure that you still have your butterfly net.  It’s only going to take the owl a few moments to work out that though he and his family of owlets might be able to feast off you for several years if he can just drag you up to his bower, he’ll probably rupture his spleen in the process.  Pounce while he’s still dreaming of feasting on your hefty, shrew remains for eternity.

 

Your owl will probably be furious at having been deceived in what it sees as a spiteful and unnecessary manner.  Don protective gauntlets and then sedate him using a stiff shot of brandy.  I recommend using some sellotape to keep his beak firmly closed and stop him complaining bitterly.  You will then need to draw round his body so that you have a template.  You may want to take your protective gauntlets off for this as it is hard to manipulate a marker pen in any form of mittenage.  You may also want a tot of brandy yourself at this point.

 

Decide on whether you want your owl sitting or in the flight position before drawing round him.  If you are a beginner at weaving owls I suggest that a sitting stance might be slightly easier.  You may want to make several templates to save yourself having to go through the whole shrew charade in later months when you tire of your prototype owl and want to move on to advanced owling.

 

Once you are happy with your design, take the time to study the owl’s colouring, feathers and general anatomical formation before releasing it into the wild.  You might want to put a bag over its head as you take it out of your dwelling, and release it somewhere unusual, so that it will be confused as to where you live and won’t come maliciously hooting down your chimney in a vengeful manner later on.

 

Once you have the right coloured wool and some lovely, shiny beads for its eyes you will be sick to death of the whole thing and I recommend that you take it to your nearest tailoring firm, or your local branch of the WI where someone with a more professional and less feckless approach to such things can make one for you in half the time it will take you to balls it up.  I’d set aside about thirty pounds for a standard adult owl, fifteen for a chick and about seventy five pence for an egg.  Good luck.

 

Accidents that may happen in the garden.

 

• Shooting with a sawn off hoe.
• Drive by wheel barrow incident.
• Being frightened to death by Alan Titchmarsh leaping out of your shrubbery and catching you unawares.
• Death by crazy paving (goes mental and shoots you in the head while you’re trying to build an ornamental bird bath).
• Falling into a giant marrow and drowning.
• Heart attack being pursued by a gang of ninja radishes.

 

Bombay mix cats.

 

It’s very difficult to render a cat down into the constituent parts of Bombay Mix.  It takes years of training.  The list for an apprenticeship currently stands at six months of waiting before you even get an interview.  You must be prepared to cast aside your old life and embrace a life of grinding poverty, social stigma and cat fondling. If you’re still up for it write to: ‘The Persian Spiced Snack Company, P.O. Box 54, Dorking,’ enclosing your C.V. any relevant experience rendering household pets into nibbles, a signed photograph of Marlene Dietrich and a £5 postal order.

 

How to make yogurt cornflake cakes.

 

Get thee behind me Satan! Never darken my doorstep again with your crazy ideas.  You’re just encouraging them and I hate you.

 

Shooting pigeons at Wimbledon song.

 

Sung to the tune of; ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.’

 

I’m forever shooting pigeons

Tiny feathers everywhere

Some in the net, some in their hair,

Some in Tim Henman’s underwear.

I’m forever shooting pigeons.

Pigeon carcasses everywhere…

Tra la, tra, la la….

I forgot the tune at this point, but you get the general idea.

 

Iggle Piggle guest appearances.

 

I hear he’s opening the Glenfield Respite home for Disposssed Aliens next week.  He will also be headlining at the V festival in September with his band, What a Pip! And will be doing the end of the pier show at Bridlington for the upcoming summer season, entitled; ‘Whoops! There goes my blanket!’

 

Grannies delight in rubber.

 

That’s because it’s versatile, it’s easy to clean and it smells like the war.

 

Sausage slippers.

 

Is this one of the grannies who delight in rubber coming up with more pragmatic ideas from their war time repertoire?  There’s probably a book with 101 things to do with other things that you can’t think of things to do with in.  Other things one could do include:

 

1. Make a trenchcoat entirely out of powdered egg and Your Country Needs You! Posters.
2. Dungarees made from recycled chip fat, belly button fluff and roof felt.
3. A standard lamp made from Vera Lynn’s toenail cuttings.
4. A fake ration book made out of a potato and some soot.

 

 

What to do if your hedgehog vomits.

 

• Stand well back and hope you’re wearing some wipe clean rubber and that it hasn’t splashed your sausage slippers.
• Try not feeding it Dubonnet and Dry Ginger Ale just before bed time again.
• Applaud it from putting Ray Mears off from turning it into a tasty, pre dinner snack.
• Jump up and down on it for two hours to teach it a lesson.  If you’re doing it barefoot, be prepared to learn a lesson of your own.  Always don sausage slippers when squashing your naughty hedgehog.

 

How to get kids not to hate you.

 

• Don’t have any.
• Tell them they’re adopted and it’s all their real parents fault.
• Pretend not to understand anything they say.  They’ll soon give up and move from hate to pity.
• Die young in a tragic accident on the way to buy them a fabulous present.
• Refuse to have anything to do with them.  They’ll follow you around idolising you until you cave in.  The minute you cave in they will hate you for being a weak willed idiot.
• Pretend that you’re baby sitting them and tell them that Britney Spears will be coming back for them soon.

 Beelzebub’s house.

 

149 ‘The Gloaming’, off Shady Nook (private road), Minchinhampton.  It’s the one with the brown Ford Fiesta in the drive and the Venetian Blinds.  I believe he is also the proud owner of the entire set of Eternal Bow crockery and a fully working Hostess trolley which he won on the Generation Game in 1978.

 

Can baby eat toast if constipated?

 

Babies can eat anything if constipated.  It’s not the going in that’s the issue, it’s the coming out.  If the baby is having problems eating and you think they’re constipated you may be watching the wrong end of the baby.  Try taking its bonnet off and turning it upside down.  Babies probably won’t want to eat toast if constipated however.  When suffering from abdominal disruptions babies prefer to go for things like plant pots, pebbles, string, bits of lego and Barbie shoes.

 

Woolly mammoths for children.

 

Can’t you just buy them some In Line skates like everyone else?  I bet you live in Battersea and have a dog called Giles don’t you?  Always having to be different.  ‘Oh yes!  Tamsin wanted a Bratz hair salon for Christmas, but we said, ‘Darling! That’s so vulgar.’  We bought her the woolly mammoth because we wanted her to get in touch with her primitive roots, to understand the environmental impact her need for consumer durables is putting on the planet and because that blind lady from Guatemala makes them entirely from recycled yak hair and gives the profits to the street urchins of Streatham.  They’re just fabulous.  Tamsin cried for a week, but she needs to understand suffering, so it’s all good fun really.’

 

Why do people pooh at work?

 

That’s the least of your problems mate.  I raise you with:

 

• Why do people pooh in my bath?
• Why do people pooh on my rug and then everyone ignores it thinking it is a comedy pooh?
• Why do people pooh on my toilet but still manage to smear it up the walls of the bathroom and emerge looking like one of the black and white minstrels and smelling to high heaven?

 When you’ve answered mine, I’ll answer yours.

 

Ladies bike with biscuit.

 

I like the biscuit bit.  I think you need to drop the ladies bike bit.  It’s really not working for you.

 

Tasers and pregnancy.

 

Not a great combination it has to be said.  Firstly, if you’re the pregnant person and you’re being tasered yourself, I doubt that repeatedly crumpling to the ground in an electrically charged manner is going to do you or your offspring much good.  Unless you want someone to taser you into going into labour in M&S, where I hear they give you loads of free stuff if you give birth on one of their escalators.  In which case, it’s a workable plan but you might want to think about doing it in the home furnishings department so you can land on something soft and forgiving.

 

If you’re a pregnant woman who wants to taser other people I’d try and find other ways to release some of your pent up hormonal rage.  I understand totally that it isn’t fair that the mobile star fruit and marmite van doesn’t deliver after ten at night, but is it really fair to resort to violence in these cases?  Remember, you may need him to drive you to the hospital if your waters break at an inconvenient moment.  Try knitting instead.  It’s supposed to be therapeutic and if you get really pissed off, you can always jab someone repeatedly in the eye with the knitting needles.  That hurts quite a lot apparently.

 

When the hell will my dad go to bloody bed?

 

When you get off the computer and let him start searching for porn without you leering over his shoulder so he can have a crafty wank and go to bed in peace I imagine.  You typing random comments into Google so that he’ll think you’re doing your homework, when all you want is for him to go to bed so that you too can search for porn is just going to lead to a Mexican stand off.  A chip off the old porn star block there methinks.

 

Big nit hats.

 

Hats for giant nits who are too ashamed to show their faces to the other, more ideally proportioned nits?  Or big, rasta style hats for nits with stacks of dreads and nowhere to put them?  You need to be clear about these things before I can answer you properly.  Focus.

 

When do mice leave their mum and dad?

 

When their mum and dad get sick of listening to High School Musical CD’s in the mouse mobile and refuse to watch any more episodes of Hannah Montana when they could be watching soothing gardening programmes instead.  And when they get an offer for renting the bedroom from a young vole of independent means who won’t be any trouble because he’s out at work all day and goes back to visit his mum on weekends.

 

The price of a packet of drawing pins.

 

You may think it’s just 57 pence from Parkers’ the reputable, nationwide stationers, but think about the emotional cost, the physical cost, the cost to your happiness and that of your children and your children’s children.  Don’t do it, I beg you.  Walk away from the pins.  Blu Tack is your way forward to a happier life, despite being twice the price and leaving those horrible greasy marks on your walls.  It’s worth it in the long run.

I stick a flag in it

Today has been, upon reflection a good day.  A busy day and a slightly forgetful day, but a good one nonetheless.  This morning I was so busy getting Tallulah out the door with all her accoutrements for the social event of the century, her class were having a teddy bear’s picnic in the park, that I forgot to have breakfast.  I NEVER forget to have breakfast, so I wasn’t expecting it, and was quite surprised when I got home to find my uneaten breakfast still sitting on the table, looking at me in a frankly, sulky fashion.

I also forgot to take Oscar to nursery and was half way home with him, trundling along with a firm physical grip on the buggy and a firm mental grip on not very much of anything at all, when I thought: ‘There’s something different going on.  I wonder what it is?’ I looked down to check I was actually dressed.  I rifled my pockets to make sure I had my door key.  Then I realised I’d still got my boy when he was supposed to be widdling all over someone else’s floor.  I dashed back to nursery with him in a very apologetic manner and scarpered, only to find my breakfast lurking about in a resentful manner.

I had to go into town, and as I had already forgotten two things I decided to make myself a list whilst eating my breakfast.  I made it.  It was a lovely list.  I lost it somewhere between home and the bus stop.  I made another list on the bus into town.  I lost this one in the depths of my extremely capacious handbag and only found it again when I got home.  Luckily for me I had actually got all the things on my list.  Whether I remembered to write everything I needed on it in the first place is a topic which will be keenly debated over the weekend no doubt.

I did achieve all my remembered goals, which is great, but my progress around town was erratic to say the least.  If you had mapped my movements with one of those moving dots that leave a trail it would have looked rather like the progress of a fly round someone’s kitchen when it has already sustained a serious head injury from bumping one too many times into the window.  I spent much of my morning zig zagging from A to F via P and looking at my watch thinking ‘I’m late!’ in a very white rabbit kind of way.

I had agreed to meet Andrea in town for lunch at twelve, and by the time I’d arsed around losing everything and approaching everything in a sideways fashion it was eleven o’clock and I’d only just got into town.  I had some last minute birthday shopping to do for Tallulah the hun.  I had banks to visit, both at opposite ends of the town.  I had contact lens solution to buy.  This was very important as I went in to town to buy some last week and came back with a bottle of perfume and some shoes for Oscar instead.  It’s fair to say that things were getting critical on the contact lens front. 

I had child proof locks to buy (these have been on the list forever, but became more urgent last week when Oscar tried to throw a tin of condensed milk at Tallulah’s head.  We are the only family in Britain who have to keep our condensed milk under lock and key in case of head injury.)  I had a pirate hat to buy so that Oscar would stop trying to scratch all the hats out of his pirate books with his fingernails.  It was exhausting.  I also, and this was the most important thing on my list, had a Dalek birthday cake to buy from M&S.

Andrea had made a very sensible suggestion, which was that I buy my cake last, so that it didn’t get trashed during my other shopping and it didn’t melt while we were eating our lunch al fresco.  I agreed that it was indeed, a very sensible idea.  Yet because I didn’t have my list to hand, and because I had impressed upon my feeble brain that the Dalek cake was THE thing that I had to come home with, I kept finding myself outside M&S when I should have been in Boots or the Early Learning Centre.  It was a nightmare.

By the time I got to the restaurant, I had everything except my cake, but was absolutely knackered and gasping for a drink, a fag (even though I don’t smoke), and a handful of valium as a first course.  We consoled ourselves with tuna nicoise and a whacking piece of cheesecake each which has obliterated at least two days worth of my syn points, but was worth every last syn.  We drank a lot of coffee, we discussed geology, anatomy, Aristotle, why I shouldn’t take up biology with the OU, garden furniture, Hugh Bonneville, where one might buy a mop if one had a mortal aversion to Wilkinsons, and how to poison someone with arsenic.  It was fun.  It was particularly fun because I had no children to wipe and Andrea had no calves to vaccinate.  We sat in the sun, and apart from the odd stain on our t-shirts, we were ladies who lunched.

I emerged happy, wired and full to the eyebrows with food.  As my next stop was M&S and I am notorious for going in there for a ham sandwich and coming out with a roast pig, this was surely a good thing.  I was too full even to browse.  I got to the cake counter.  I scoured the birthday cake shelves, no dalek.  I lay on the floor, weeping gently and drumming my heels.  As I was down there I noticed Doctor Who shaped box corner poking out from behind a cake in the shape of a pink handbag.  I dragged it out.  It was a chocolate Dalek.  I leapt into the air and did a little dance.  Frabjubous day, Calloo, Callay!  I was superstar mother.  My reputation after the hedgehog fiasco was redeemed.  Yay me!

The queues were horrendous.  I got side tracked by watching two midgetty old ladies who were almost identically dressed and who both had hump backs, but who were not related or even friends, going up the escalator after each other.  I was so entranced that I missed a gap in the queue and had to stand in the ten items or less queue for twenty minutes.  I paid the price for my extreme nosiness  It was hideous. 

The woman in front of me decided to strike up a conversation.  I wish she hadn’t bothered.  She had decided that it was so busy because everyone had read that M&S share prices were crashing and people were panic buying meringue nests and vol au vents, presumably for a post apocalyptic dinner party.  She then went on to tell me that it was all the fault of a Labour government and nothing had ever been the same since The Hitler Youth were disbanded in 1946.  Apparently there are more bloody foreigners in England now than good, honest, English white people and that’s why petrol is so expensive and you can’t get free breast augmentations on the NHS.  I paraphrase, but you get the drift. 

I thought about killing her, but I would have had to put my chocolate dalek down to do it, and it was the last one in the shop, and if someone stole it while I was force feeding her organic chicken breasts until she choked, I would have been really annoyed, and I was afraid that she might be a ninja in disguise and I am a coward.  I smiled in that thin lipped way that says: ‘I hate you.  Now fuck off and die.’  and looked to the woman behind me for some light relief.

Unfortunately she was violently left wing but held exactly the same views as right wing lady except that she blamed Margaret Thatcher for the shocking state of the UK today.  I tried to block them out as they reminisced, dewy eyed over Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and how it’s a shame you can’t get it on DVD.  The queue shuffled forward inch by agonising inch as they moaned about how they can no longer sponge free cash from the social services because apparently all the bleedin’ foreigners are having it instead. 

I thought about getting out my blackboard and jotting down a few salient points about our nation’s glorious history of colonisation, building St. Pancras railway station in every country whether it needs one or not, and our penchant for sticking flags of ownership in everything that moved.  I thought about mentioning the fact that we, with our kindly British ways invented the concentration camp and new and ever more ingenious ways of stamping all over everyone else’s turf, culture and beliefs, as well as taking all their wealth and resources and embossing them with the words ‘mine all mine!’ and taking it away from them so we could keep it in a big garden shed with a union jack on it. 

I thought about saying: ‘Isn’t it about time we took responsibility for a little bit of it?’  I looked at their narrow minded, bigoted, faces  The faces of people who were immaculately dressed and clearly financially well off enough to shop in up market supermarkets, and who didn’t have to worry that their homes might be bombed, or their children taken away from them, or that they might be imprisoned for reading the wrong book.  I thought about the fact that the only thing they’re probably worrying about is if M&S run out of vol au vents before they’ve filled the cupboard under the stairs.  I thought: ‘What’s the bloody point?’  I clutched my Dalek to my chest and felt very, very depressed all the way home. 

I cheered up a bit when Tallulah came home from the Teddy Bear’s picnic sporting a fat lip from a run in with the swings at the park (second time this week.  No sympathy).  I cheered up even more when both my girls got glowing school reports AND I remembered to pick their brother up from nursery.  I was very happy when my friend Caron came round for tea with her kids and volunteered to help me out with the Brownies run and getting the kids to bed because Jason was going out.  I was even happy when Oscar whipped his pants off to do a big pooh on the living room rug and nobody noticed because it was so perfectly formed they all thought it was a joke pooh! I was happy because it made me laugh that my friend would think it was normal for me to plant a joke pooh on my living room floor, and because he hadn’t done a pooh in the bath again.  Small mercies.

I was ecstatic because it was the last Brownies until September and my Friday nights belong to me once more.  Hooray.  Stick a bloody flag in that!