Recent boats I have missed

Why on earth bother to take out large ads telling me that John Lithgow (John Lithgow! Himself!) will be doing Malvolio at Stratford when they know damn well that the run lasts one more week and all the tickets have gone anyway? Just what is that supposed to prove? Is it some sort of bottom line thing? Measuring their success by my disappointment? And I was, you know. Gutted.

And the Terracotta blimmin' Army. Turn your back for a minute and all the tickets have gone. Pfft. Just like that. Well, apart from the two on eBay, and I can't go that day. (Why only the two on eBay? I'd have thought there'd be a roaring trade in them. No tickets at all for Twelfth Night. Just what good is eBay anyway? Can never find anything I want.)

Hmph.

You do the math

Significant Other and I have decided that, actually, it's quite rude to take wine when invited to a dinner party. It implies that one's host is either too poor to afford a bottle, or will provide rubbish wine, or, indeed, is too stupid to notice that you have brought a bottle of undrinkable because CHEAP vino di merda.

But you have to take something, neh? A little box of six handmade chocolates, a teeny posy of seasonal flowers, maybe organically cultivated, fairly traded pecan nuts wrapped in handblocked mango-leaf paper. You know the sort of thing. Which is all wonderful, but how do you carry it? How do you present it to your host? Especially when that box of handmade chocolates is actually quite teeny when compared with a bottle.

Well, you put it in a brown paper bag, don't you? Not just any old bag mind you, but something a little more classy, bit more up-market, know wha' I mean? Something with handles.

Google, bless it, came up with a number of possibilities. Comparison being the order of the day, and remembering that package and postage count, calculator at the ready, I found some good quality, well-constructed nice looking bags at seven pee a pop. Seven! What a great deal, eh? In went the order, Paypal did its thang, and here I am, awaiting delivery of 500 small brown paper bags, with handles, due tomorrow.

Hang on a mo' though. 500? Five? Hundred? OK. Just how many DPs do we get invited to anyway? Seriously. At a generous estimate, I'd say five a year. Including reciprocation, (where a brown paper bag with handles wouldn't count) that makes 10 social occasions a year - sounds about right. Which means we would use the final bag in 83 years and four months time.

Holy crap! I Just thought - how big is the package going to be?

My Mother-in-Law

or:

A Problem Shared is a Problem Doubled.

After much thinking, I've decided to use the words she herself used. You don't know the players, and the incident concerned is not, sadly, isolated. The woman under discussion, let's call her Jane, whom I have met a few times, is small and pretty and engaging and funny and generally charming. She has a feckless husband, three problem children and is prone to quite serious accidents. She is a friend of MiL's DD (Dear Daughter).

The scene: our dinner table, over cheese and biscuits.

MiL: DD told me that years ago Jane was assaulted and buggered with a bottle. No wait - it may have been the other end, but there . . .



My jaw still drops when I replay that conversation in my head. How could she do that?

Isn't it a wonderful thing to have friends? People with whom you feel safe enough to expose your frailties, who will love you anyway, and with whom the sharing of a problem is indeed a burden lifted. It is also a wonderful thing to have a mother with whom you can discuss pretty much anything, without fear of betrayal. No wait . . .

See? Right there. That's the problem with saying anything to anyone. They pass it on to someone they trust, who passes it on to someone else, who doesn't know you well, if at all, and suddenly The Thing that rules the dark corners of your life is the subject of after-dinner conversation among your slight acquaintance.

Hey, did you hear that Isabel had eight miscarriages? Eight! No, but I heard Joe was impotent. Hasn't been able to get it up in two years. Oh, and Steve still wets the bed! And he's twenty-nine! And Barbara can't stand her own daughter, who let's face it is a bit of a slut. Oh, and Jane got buggered by a bottle. Wow, that's really bad luck. Coffee, anyone?

Old Potatoes

See what happens when you leave stuff you should be cherishing and looking after and keeping up to date, or at least cutting up, boiling and eating, neglected for too long? It grows long white funny bits, and no-one wants to know any more. (Makes a pretty picture though, neh?)

On the subject of vegetables, the other day I found myself in tears while I was chopping the onions for supper. They were my own very first home-grown onions (an abundant crop - thank goodness I make terrific red onion marmalade) and it occurred to me that I hadn't cried over an onion in absolutely ages. Now, the thing about the huge supermarkets is that they are, to a significant degree, consumer lead. Did enough of us really get up on our hind legs, and whine that we didn't wike onions that made us cwy? Weally? And did the supermarket behemoths, in all their might and majesty, command an eradication of sulfenic acid? I mean, don't get me wrong, the tears I cried were oh-oh-that-burns-argh-ouch-bloody-hell-fucking-onions tears, right enough, but until that moment I had forgotten that that is what onions are supposed to do. Fucking supermarkets.

Golly, so much to say - the latest appallingness of my MiL, The Adventures of Mango in Wonderland, iTunes - Just How Far Behind The Times Am I?, FaceBook - Is It Just Me, Or Is It Really Rubbish?, the cultural indigestion caused by seeing HP5 and Downfall in the same week - where do I start?

Wow

I loved this. And this.