Bacon rind. What’s not to love?

Except for the fact that it’s basically pigskin.

Nope, sorry. I’m thinking about that as hard as I possibly can, but it’s just not putting me off. And do you remember when it used to come with an inky blue tattoo? Or bristles? And when it used to sometimes have a little hard bony bit in it that could take you by surprise. Blimey – eating bacon was risky in those days. Even so I was undaunted.  

It’s just that bacon rind hits so many points. It’s salty, like peanuts. It’s chewy, like gum. It’s full of saturated fat, like … er … saturated fatty things.

It’s basically fatty, salty gum. Someone should market it. Never mind Juicy Fruit. How about Salty Rind?

Those days are long gone, of course. Now bacon comes hermetically sealed from Tesco (or elsewhere), and you’d hardly even know it had once roamed the plains on four little trotters. (Must quickly explain that I only ever buy free-range meat, so there’s no need to tell me about the miserable existence of the average pig)

Sometimes, it even comes with the rind removed.

Now, I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong.

It’s like only eating peeled fruit, surely. And we all know the vitamins are in the skin, don’t we? It’s as bad as wanting your crusts cut off. And eating crusts gives you curly hair, doesn’t it? (Doesn’t it? Wait til I next see my mother!)

And what do they do, pray, with the rind they steal from us? Apart from feeding it back to the piggies, or possibly to school children in the form of chicken nuggets. They make pork scratchings, that’s what. Pork scratchings – that most noble of British bar snacks. A bristle in every bite!

But the scarcity of NHS dentists will, no doubt, pose a serious threat to the pork scratching industry. Few of us can afford to pop a crown any more, and I’m seeing trouble ahead. There’ll be lay-offs, industrial action, riots, maybe.

I say, leave the rind on the bacon.

Why don’t they ask me?

I have issues. Big ones

There’s only one person left in the whole world that still calls me ‘babe’.

And I have to pay him.

He’s the Big Issue vendor that stands outside the bank. Oh – and he looks a bit like this:

Now, obviously, he’s not a cat. That would be silly. Nor does he have a fly on his nose. He doesn’t need one. But you get the idea. In fact, it’s surprising, in a way, that he doesn’t call me ‘babes’.

Anyway, to me it’s £2 well spent. He gains, I gain. But today, when I pocketed my copy along with my sad pathetic ego boost, I got to thinking about the far off days when I was ‘babe’-d all over the place. I don’t think I appreciated it. In fact, I know I didn’t. I was all high-horseish, and sexist-crappish, and phallocratic-oligarchyish.

Hah. Supply and demand. When the ‘babe’s flowed free, I despised them. Now they’ve dried up, I see their value. I crave the ‘babe’s. So this is why I have 150 copies of The Big Issue on my desk. This is why I stump up every week to the visually challenged homeless man, instead of spreading my largesse more evenly between him, the man with all the badges on his hat and Yugoslavian John. (I know!)   Nothing to do with helping the homeless. It’s all about me.

What am I going to do, though, when even he realises that I’m very much post-babe? (Apart from singing Tina Turner songs at the top of my voice.) I suppose I could transfer my affections and my small change to the Salvation Army man outside the Halifax but, somehow, ‘God bless you’ doesn’t quite do it for me in the same way.

Someone should start up a business, selling anodyne compliments, free from any expectation of ironing, or lifts to the station, or sex, to middle-aged women. They’d clean up. To tell you the truth, this is a far better idea than my knitted uterus one. Dragons’ Den calls again …

Or maybe I should save my Big Issue money up until I’ve got enough for botox … because I’m worth it.

I am, aren’t I?

Go inappropriate yerself!

We writers are very sensitive creatures. Frankly, you only have to look at me to realise that I’m operating on a higher plane than most people. We drift around, thinking exquisite thoughts – more often than not in iambic pentameter – and are physically pained by the use/misuse/abuse of language we encounter in everyday life.  

Thus it is that I am suffering – suffering, I tell you – because of the inappropriate use of the word ‘inappropriate’. I come across it an awful lot, too, because I’m a school governor and have to read reams and reams of utterly boring crap important briefings and policy documents produced by civil servants and apparatchiks whose main aim in life seems to be making it utterly impossible to run a school without falling foul of some new code of practice or filling out forms in quadruplicate – having first completed a risk assessment facilitating the efficient implementation of the government’s excellent and coherent education policies in all our schools.

‘Inappropriate’ looms large in the public sector. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that society as we know it today would fall apart without the word. Cos it’s saying something without saying anything. And I’ll bet you can’t be sued for saying something is inappropriate (I’ll have to check with Moobs on this – although it may be inappropriate to do so).

And since it doesn’t mean anything, ‘inappropriate’ can, paradoxically, mean anything you want it to. So – ‘inappropriate’ – here are some possible interpretations. Feel free to add a few more: stupid, bratty, crap, slutty, boring, smelly, common, foreign, funny, vulgar, intellectual, elitist … the list is, almost by definition, endless.

Now, I may have said something inappropriate in this post – and I just know that picture is – well – inappropriate.

But – you know? I really don’t give a flying inappropriate.

Wrappers Delight

A little entertainment from the early – and more innocent days – of rap, to help you through the last-minute tussle with sticky tape, paper and ribbons. Dig those groovy dance moves!

Have lovely holiday. Hope Santa lives up to eveyone’s great expectations.

See you next year, when we can deconstruct the whole thing.
x

Join the dots …

Right! Are you ready? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Pencils at the ready now …

1. Young people in Britain are, it seems, the worst behaved in Europe.
2. According to Save the Children, the UK has one of the worst rates of child poverty in Europe. It comes 21st out of 27 countries.
3. At least 3.4 million children in the UK are living in poverty.
4. The investment that is reckoned to be necessary to end child poverty in the UK is at least £4 billion.
5. Our beloved Prime Minister (pictured right) has pledged £4 million to provide almost 80 ‘supernannies’ to help parents who have problem children.

Is this making any kind of coherent picture? No, I didn’t think so either.

On a lighter note, I tagged You Da Mom and she’s duly divulged 5 scintillating things most people don’t know about her already! I suspect she’s working faster than light, so her posts actually appear before she’s written them. Say hi to her from me.

It’s all about me(me)!

See what I did there? Bit of a play on words – good, eh? Plus a little French joke too – you’ve got to admit, I’m a bargain.

Right, down to business. I’ve been ruthlessly tagged with a meme by the lovely Dana Loesch over at Mamalogues and must now divulge ‘Five Things People Don’t Know About Me’. I was all of a pother when I got her email, quite unsure of how to proceed. I know, from having strolled through the meandering paths of the blogosphere these last couple of months that I should kind of roll my eyes and sigh resignedly before doing this – but to tell the truth, I’m chuffed to bits to have been asked. And especially by Dana, who’s writing is more than funny enough to make whatever you’re drinking come out through your nose. I’ve sworn off reading her stuff in the morning, while I’m enjoying my first cup of tea of the day. I just don’t have the time to be dashing off to A&E at the moment. You’ve been warned.

Anyway – I’m actually two people most of the time – although not in a way that needs medication (often), but since someone very clever (Mark Twain, perhaps) said that only emperors, Siamese twins and people with tapeworms should refer to themselves as ‘we’, ‘I’ it stays. You’ll have to pick the bones out yourselves. That wasn’t the first thing, by the way. I’m starting … from … now:

1. Both of me are somewhat claustrophobic, but one of me won’t go anywhere by plane, while the other one of me won’t use the Channel Tunnel. This limits the possibilites for author trips abroad – I’m hoping this will be a problem one day.
2. Both of me went to boarding school, but neither of me seems particularly scarred by the experience. (Unless maybe that claustrophobia thing …)
3. One of me can’t abide the sound of toast being buttered and has to run from the room, hands firmly clasped over ears, if anyone scrapes the burnt bits off. The other one of me is very insensitive to other people’s suffering and eats crunchy toast with no qualms at all.
4. Both of me studied Russian for a while and, although neither of me can remember much, I can both do an outrageous ‘Bond villain’ accent – and keep it up for hours and hours.
5. Both of me hates thongs, but neither of me believes magic pants can work. I mean, it’s got to go somewhere, hasn’t it?

Right – you’ve had yer lot. I hope someone, somwhere was interested enough to read to the end of that. Cos now, I’ve got to pick one of you to tag. Oooh! The power! I’d like a volunteer, please, or I might have to keep you all in at break time… Anyone? Anyone at all?

What? No-one?!

I have a theory!

Ahhh – help! What happened there? That’s not quite how I meant it to go, but it’ll do. Check out the video first, then read this bit. (Please)

My theory is this, hem hem, and this is what it is.

I reckon that we’re the most inexperienced generation of parents there has ever been. Very often, the first baby we hold is our own. Since our mothers were more or less able to control their fertility, we often come from neat families with children ranged at two-year intervals over a six year period, rather than a child a year over a 25 year period, as in the bad old days. All this means that we don’t get the practice in – and our view of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting is not grounded in reality, but derived from Gone With The Wind and Hello! magazine. Added to this is the fact that we’re often distant from our families, so have no access to their support and know-how.

Not that we’d probably accept it anyway. We’ve been coached to be good little consumers because we now believe that parenting is an ‘-ology’ rather than anything instinctive, and would sooner rely on research and the dogmas of ‘experts’ who dispense on-size-fits-all solutions to childcare, rather than try methods that aren’t evidence-based, no matter how time-honoured.

Looking around, all our friends are at pretty much the same stage as us, so no opportunity to practise there either. We inhabit a child-free, career ghetto until we decide to move into nappy valley. And then It’s a whole new world – but never mind the nitty gritty – the accessories are GREAT!

Two generations ago, it was a success if all the children had all their limbs and the mother survived to bear down another day. But it’s very different now. Once we make that decision, to start a family, we expect everything to go to plan. After all, that’s what we’re used to. Products of a self-help culture, we assume we can – and should – solve any problems for ourselves by either working a little harder or throwing some money at it. They baby becomes a project – take the vitamins, do the classes, read the books and everything is bound to come good. The first moment you realise, at 3am, that having an MBA isn’t going to help you get your baby to sleep, that’s your wake-up call – literally – to the fact that it might not quite be what you were imagining!

What you make of it from then on depends very much on your temperament, I reckon. But the tidal wave of conflicting advice from experts, all with a product to sell, often ends up fuelling (or even creating) the anxiety it purports to assuage. And anxious parents are vulnerable parents – easy prey for the marketing people, circling us like sharks.

It’s enough to make you turn quite green. And that is why, I reckon, it may be safer to stick to theories about dinosaurs … unless, of course, that dinosaur happens to be purple!

Recognise anyone?

Because I’m too slack … er, I mean busy to do a proper post at the moment, I thought I’d just give you a link to a slightly abridged extract from the book that appeared in the Times magazine about a month ago. It’s basically a series of little caricatures of parenting types. Let me know if anything looks familiar! (And I’m NOT ‘fessing up to which one … or indeed ones I am. Oh well, I might. But you’ll have to go first.)

Click here to check out which kind of mad parent you are

Half-term … full time … and going round in circles

So, it was half-term and we went to London for a few days and we went here, along with just about every other family in the metropolis. And it was absolutely fab, although the queues for tickets were so huge that we just did the little slide and resolved to come back on the next inset day. That was the extent of our exposure to art. Strangely, the kids showed no desire to visit the rest of the gallery apart from the cafe and the shop!

We got talking to one of the gallery staff and she told us that people had been waiting outside since 7.00! And the doors didn’t open until 10.00. That’s some amazing devotion, don’t you think? But of course, it was half-term and parents wanted to give their kids some fun and something a bit special to do. The fact that this particular art installation had been featured on several kids’ TV programmes may have contributed just a little to it being the hottest hot ticket for the half-term break. In terms of entertainment, it has it all: culture, danger and contemporary – who could resist. And there were the parents, giving up hours of their time to queue on a chilly concrete ramp on Bankside so their kids could have a few minutes of whizzing round and round at high speed.

So how do parents who have proper jobs (unlike me) manage during the school holidays? Frankly, it must be a logistical nightmare, served up with double anxiety and a side order of guilt. And yet the recent report from the Equal Opportunities Commission into women and work was treated like it was news. Hold the front page! Working and looking after children is tricky!

No shit, Sherlock!

Hello? Is it just me or has this been a problem for years and years and years? And we’re only hearing about it now. Hmmmm. Am I sensing an agenda?

So here are the facts:

• more than 400,000 women could be tempted back into the workplace, provided employers were willing to offer them more flexible patterns of work.
• coaxing more women into paid work will be critical to defusing the demographic time-bomb and boosting economic growth in ageing economies.
• the pay-off could be £20bn per year in the UK alone.

Well, now that making working life easier for parents (specifically mothers) is of benefit to the economy, I preduct a rash of initiatives that will certainly appear to help. But you know, I reckon that we’ll still be still be going round in circles.

And not just at the Tate.

The Ministry of Happiness

Lord Layard, Emeritus Professor of something terribly brainy at the LSE, is popularly known as ‘the happiness tsar’, because of the sterling advice he’s provided for the government on the vexed question of happiness – or more precisely our apparent lack of it.

Now he’s going to be chairing The Good Childhood Enquiry, a two-year national independent investigation, managed by The Chidren’s Society, into exactly what constitutes a ‘good childhood’ and which ‘aims to renew society’s understanding of childhood for the 21st century, to inform, improve and inspire all our relationships with children’. Apparently this is neccesary because Britain’s 12 million children and teenagers are the unhappiest and unhealthiest in any wealthy European country. So it seems money can’t buy you love – who could have guessed?

Gosh! Is it just me, or is there just a tang of 1984 about all this? Legislating for happiness – even quantifying it – how’s that going to work, I wonder? It’s clearly no laughing matter. And who’s going to head up the Ministry of Happiness – cos it’s only a matter of time til they set one up? Could I nominate Jack Dee?

One thing they are doing in this enquiry is taking evidence from interested parties – parents, professionals and children – into what constitutes a good childhood in today’s society. Hmm. Hope they don’t ask my kids who, last year, said they wished they could go to live in a children’s home because on the TV show ‘Tracy Beaker’, Justine got to have a TV in her room – unlike them, poor, deprived little mites.

I’m sure this all very worthy and necessary. But legislating for happiness? Heck even trying to analyse it seems a tiny bit like pulling the wings off a bumble bee to see how it flies. I wish Lord Layard and his exalted colleagues the best of luck. In the meantime, here is a link that might make you laugh .

Have a happy weekend!