Of Boxes & Boxers

Papier-mâché – such fun!  I was helping in school yesterday.  The girls got stuck in but some of the boys found it gross and didn’t like the mulch under their fingernails.  I’m that way about pastry, which is why I never make it. 

Two of the boys didn’t get past the building a mountain out of egg boxes stage, and asked for my help.  I found myself doing a Hub and completely taking over.  My mountain had a waterfall and caves and the fact that it was green and lumpy and the waterfall was made of a Smarties box means that you have no imagination at all.

Let me explain what I mean by ‘doing a Hub’: if you can ever not be bothered to finish a project, any project, just ask the Hub for his help; sit back; relax; watch a movie; bake a pie (using frozen pastry, naturally); raise a family.  He cannot help himself when he sees that you are not putting enough effort in; not dotting the ‘i’s, crossing the ‘t’s, outlining the crayon with a black marker pen; not using a fork to prettify the pie.  It’s how he got so sick in the first place.  Delegate?  Pah!  He spits on your ‘delegate’ (just got all Rowan Atkinson-French in Not The Nine O’Clock News there).  Why should he delegate when he can do it all himself?  He is not a perfectionist – good grief, no!  He denies the accusation strenuously, insisting that he just trys to be a perfectionist.  I bet 90% of all CFS/ME sufferers have the same complaint.

The children had to bring boxes into school to make their models.  I’m guessing that some didn’t bother to ask their parents’ permission: one had obviously retrieved his mother’s Canesten Duo box from the bin;  another was going to be in trouble when his mother discovered he had taken tonight’s ready meal from the freezer.  The worst part was that he left the food inside and took it into school three days before the project started.  There were a lot of complaints about the peculiar smell, especially once the heating was turned up.

Children don’t always embarrass their parents; sometimes it’s the other way around.  Tory Boy has joined http://www.formspring.me/.  Anyone can ask you any question and you can answer them.  He has had lots of political questions (Q: If after the election we have a hung parliament, how would you like to see the situation resolved? A: Too dull for this blog) and some personal (Me: Are you eating properly?  TB: Stop nagging), but this one made me laugh:

Q: Boxers or briefs (or other)?

A: Boxers. Always. Also, other? What the hell? No, just no.

I liked his answer so much I Liked it on Facebook.  Five minutes later I received an outraged phone call from my son asking me to Unlike it immediately and to refrain from liking his underwear on a public forum.  And in private, come to think of it.  It was just wrong on so many levels he would have to deny I was his parent if we were ever together in public.  That made me laugh even more: as if I’d ever admit that a politician was related to me, let alone be seen with him in public…how embarrassing.

Doesn’t Bode Well For The Future…

I have signed up to Twitter. There has been a lot of publicity this week about British MPs signing up and I thought well, if they can use it, so can I, as technept as I am. It doesn’t bode well, however, that a lot of the publicity has been about Twitter identities being hijacked. Nor does it bode well for me that I told my family I had signed up to ‘Tweeter’. They thought I had become a birdwatcher. Or is that ‘twitcher’? Tweeters are usually paired up with woofers in a Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch, aren’t they? This online stuff is complicated.

My Twitter name is laughwife because I couldn’t fit the whole of ‘thelaughinghousewife’ in. I am a little concerned that my new name makes me sound like a crazy fishwife. My first tweet probably didn’t help: Is there anyone in America who owns an electric kettle? I haven’t had any replies yet so if you are reading this; live in the States; have important information pertaining to kitchen appliances; and nothing better to do, please tell me.

This question is still bugging me. I think the answer is ‘no’ because a look at blogs discussing similar topics turned up a raft of Americans now living abroad who rave about the wonders of their newly-discovered electric kettles. There are even posts dedicated to instructions on how to use them properly. I wouldn’t have thought you could say much beyond, ‘Fill with water. Switch on. Wait,’ but you’d be surprised at the detail these kettle converts go into. I’m not going to mock because I remember my Mother’s wonder at her first automatic washing machine after years of slaving over a twin tub; and my own astonishment, when we first went out to South Africa, at the miracle that is the sandwich toaster.

Do you think John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh felt the same way about the potato? Bet they never foresaw the invention of the chip pan or the deep fat fryer. I wonder if they have those in America? Probably not: tea and chips are very English habits; though, of course, we didn’t invent either of them – Belgium invented chips, according to my Asterix the Gaul books.

Here’s an interesting fact about kettles that I came across when I was researching the potato:

1891
Electric Kettle Crompton and Company developed the electric kettle in England. The earliest examples of electric kettles all had the element in a separate chamber underneath similar to traditional vessels which boiled water and had the fire underneath the pot.

From: http://www.open2.net/historyandthearts/history/food_timeline_html.html

It has just occurred to me that my non-Brit readers might not know the term ‘fishwife’. It is a derogatory term for a woman, meaning one who swears loud and long in public. It originally referred only to women who sold fish but was made notorious by the women of Billingsgate fish market in the Nineteenth Century. Now, of course, it seems like every female in Britain, from two to ninety-two, swears like a fishwife and gives the first fishwives a bad name.

I’m starting to feel hungry for some reason; I am suddenly in the mood for fish and chips and a mug of tea. Must be the hard work of writing trivia that only I could possibly be interested in.  It makes me feel a bit of a twit, which doesn’t bode well for the future of this blog….

PS Did you know (from the same source; or ibid, for my Latin friends) that ‘by the early 1900s there [were] more than 30,000 chippies in Britain’?  Me neither.