Smelly bellies and bleached patios

Last Wednesday, my brother came over for a barbecue. He brought with him a copy of Chat. Is there any better present in the world? So today, I am proud to present to you, The Nonsense From Chat.

First up, a rare occurrence, a story which has been given 10 out of 10 on the shock factor scale.

And I think I know why. This woman, Jonty, has named her children Kai, Bailey, Skye and Hunter. I’m sorry, Kai and Skye? O, and friends of theirs, a couple called Lee-Anna and Liam. Lee…. Anna…. Leanne?… Whatever.

On the random photos page, there’s a lot of good stuff going on. We’ve got a picture of someone reading Chat on holiday, a picture of a baby asleep, a picture of a baby in a sunhat, a picture of a cat and, best of all, a picture of a cake someone got on their birthday, which had been made to look like a copy of Chat magazine! Epic!

Next up, we’ll visit the top tips page which, I’m sure, is your favourite. It’s certainly mine. Our first fabulous tip is to cover an old chair in a pair of jeans. It makes it look better. Apparently.

You decide.

The next tip is, basically, use a small vacuum cleaner to clean the little bits out of the bottom of your handbag. Thank you, D Thornton from Bournemouth. Where would I be without this tip?

The next tip is put bleach all over your patio to kill the weeds. Boy, do I love a bleach covered patio. The smell, the discolouration on your paving stones. What brilliant advice. Thank you, Julia Wakeford from Romford. You have improved my life immeasurably.

Lastly, stick some sea shells on your wall. Check it out.

Good, hey?

To finish off today’s look inside Chat, we’re going to briefly visit the Health pages and one letter in particular. This letter is called ‘Whiffy midriff.’ Already, you know it’s going to be amazing.

It starts with ‘My bellybutton pongs!’ Get straight to it, Ashley, aged 28. Don’t beat around the bush.

‘If I put my finger in and sniff it, there’s a smell like rotting veg!’ Ok, Ashley, 28, what… on…. earth. I’m 28 and I can tell you this for nothing. If I had a smelly bellybutton, Chat would be the last place I’d go for advice. I mean, give Google a try first, maybe? The NHS has a free helpline? Ask friends?

And what is she doing sticking her finger in her bellybutton then smelling it? Unless the bellybutton smell is so strong that she catches a whiff of it while sitting on the sofa then decides to see what’s happening, am I suppose that one day she was just eating her dinner, watching TV with her boyfriend and thought, ‘I’ll quickly smell my bellybutton.’ For no reason. And is that something we all do? Am I the stupid one here, for not jabbing my finger in my bellybutton then inhaling the resulting odours?

She finishes the letter by saying, ‘My boyfriend says he can’t smell it though.’ I bet he’s not your boyfriend anymore, is he, Ashley, 28?

“Smell my finger, darling.”

“What? Why?”

“Just smell it. Go on. Please.”

“Um, ok…. Where has it been?”

“In my bellybutton.”

“And why do I need to smell it?”

“Cause it smells like rotting veg. Don’t you think? Give it a smell. Go on. Tell me what you think.”

“Err… No. It’s fine. There’s… There’s nothing wrong with it at all. I’m just, um, going to nip out. Um. To the shops. Yeh, the shops. If I’m not back in a few days, don’t call me….”

The contents of my handbag

I’ve heard men say that the contents of a woman’s handbag is a mystery to them. Well, let me tell you something. They are a mystery to me too. Even the contents of my own handbag puzzle me. Check it out. In my bag I found….

Two books – Pondlife by Al Alvarez (very good) and What Are You Looking At: An Anthology of Fat Fiction (not yet started)

One dark chocolate covered rice cake

3 unposted letters to friends

A pack of hair bobbles

3 plastic shopping bags

5 pens

My purse

Germolene antiseptic ointment

Headphones and a phone charger

Keys

A strip of throat sweets

Wage slips from last March, last November and this January

A bill from March 2012

A card saying ‘One in a melon’ and a picture of a melon (who knows why this is in there? Not me)

A copy of a magazine called TTG. (I have never read TTG, have no idea what it’s about and am vaguely confused as to why it is there)

2 hand creams

Red nail varnish (I very rarely wear nail varnish)

2 packs of tissues

Vaseline

7 receipts

Face wash (I don’t know why I would be carrying this around with me)

A pair of big thick mittens I haven’t worn in months

A hairbrush

That bracelet I lost a few weeks ago! Brilliant!

The shopping list I wrote when buying stuff for making a Valentine’s meal

A tea bag

A faux Oyster card holder which in fact has a mirror in one side and a little book of discounts for a nearby hairdressers in the other (I’m as puzzled as you are on this one)

A purple swimming cap which says ‘IRONMAN’ across it. (O, the hilarity. As though putting on the cap might convince people I’m in that category of sportsman)

Elizabeth Arden 8 hour skin cream (probably used it once in the past few months)

5 pence

A map of London’s top ten attractions

An unopened pack of nail files

A loyalty card for a shop I barely go in

3 Oyster cards (no, I don’t know why either)

Some flu medicine

I don’t know, everyone! I don’t know! I don’t know why I carry around so many ’emergency’ things, like the gloves in case it suddenly gets freezing. I should know myself well enough to know that I consider myself far too invincible to need gloves. Why so many receipts? And pens? Surely one or two would do? And a teabag?

O well. I guess I’ll put it all back in my bag and go on as though none of this ever happened. I’m too confused at myself.

I am the Litter Lady!

Day 1 of usefulness went well. I had the following two instructions.

Un-litter the land – take a trash bag to the local playground or park and pick up litter.
(The Difference A Day Makes by Karen M. Jones)

Separate your rubbish – keep aside things that need recycling and, once a week, take it to your local recycling bins.
(Going Green by Simon Gear)

The second one requires nothing of me as I am fortunate enough to live in an area where the council provides each individual home with three recycling bins – one for food, one for paper and one for everything else. So I already have that covered. That box is ticked.

The first one I did when I got in from work yesterday afternoon. I got a recycle-able paper bag and walked to my favourite park. Along the way, however, I noticed three things.

The first was that there was rubbish on the ground that I was passing to get to the park. So I started picking that up on my way and filling my bag.

The second was that walking with my head down looking at the ground gives me a bit of a bad back as I tend to look up when I walk. I felt a bit Hunchback Of Notre Dame-esque.

The third was that I had left my Crocs on after work which, Danda says, makes me look ‘like a tramp.’

So there I was, hunched over, in my best tramp get-up, collecting rubbish in a bag. I dread to think what people thought I was doing. Getting padding for my pretend mattress made of old newspapers and plastic bags, probably.

Anyway, despite my Hunchback and bad Crocs, I soldiered on until, at the end of the road into the park, I found a load of recycling bins. I recycled all I could, emptied the unrecyclables into a bin and then recycled the bag.

I then straightened up and treated myself to a long walk around the park.

I no longer had my hunchback or my bag of rubbish but I did still have my Crocs on….

The time I surprised my Dad

Last year, for my Dad’s birthday, I decided I would go to Liverpool to see him but I didn’t tell him. I thought it would be more fun to surprise him. For the train journey, I had some food and study books with me as I had a huge peice of work due a week later. One of them I guarded with my life. It was the Blackstone’s guide to the corporate homicide and corporate manslaughter act. Blackstone’s guides are like the be-all and end-all in the world of academic law. Everything you want to know about a law will be in one of their guides. It was a thin 170 pages and had cost me £48. But there was no way around getting one. So I had it and it was my most prized possession.

When I got to the main station in Liverpool, I clutched my Blackstone’s guide and went to buy a ticket to the stop nearest to my Dad’s house. With my ticket, I then boarded the train, went the six or so stops, then got off. As I headed out of the station, I realised my hands were empty! Where was my Blackstone’s guide?! My very expensive Blackstone’s guide? The one that I wouldn’t be able to get another copy of in time for my essay deadline.

Panicked, I raced to the ticket office and explained that it had either been left on the desk when I bought my ticket in town or on the train. Panic, PANIC! Where was it? The railway man, thankfully, dealt very efficiently with this madwoman having a panic attack in from of him.

He located it in the station in town and I asked them to keep hold of it, I would go back. The next train was in 20 minutes so I quickly ran to the house, didn’t see my dad’s car, so assumed he was at work and threw my bag down before racing back to the station. I put a pack of ham in the fridge that I hadn’t eaten on the journey. I had also made my Dad a hamper of baked goodies so put it on the sofa, in the seat behind the door where he usually sits so he would see it when he got home.

Picking the book up was fine and on the way back, I called the house to check if my Dad was home. He wasn’t so I headed straight for a friends house. I spent the evening there and got home later but my Dad still wasn’t home. Eventually I just wrote him a note and left it in the hallway and went to bed.

And here is my Dad’s version of events:

“I was upstairs on the computer when I heard a sound like the door being opened then closed. I went downstairs to see what the sound was but didn’t see anything. I popped my head into the front room but didn’t see anyone. I went to the fridge to get my sandwiches to take to work and saw a pack of ham in there which hadn’t been there before. Confused, I just got my sandwiches and went out to work, figuring there must be an explanation for it. When I got home late from work, there was a note on the floor saying Laura was home!”

That’s right. He’d been there the whole time. But because he wasn’t expecting me, he just thought he was hearing things when he heard the door open. So the whole first day I was in Liverpool, we spent missing each other, like ships passing the night. Well done, Laura!

Distraction techniques!

When travelling, I often used (what to thought to be) a clever technique for distracting potential burglars. I would be using a big backpack and worried that someone might easily zip it open so I put, all the way around in a line, some *ahem* lady things. You know. So that it would be the first thing someone saw when they opened the bag. Hopefully they would be male and horrified by this sight and rapidly rethink his plan to steal from me.

That was the plan. I’ve never been stolen from while travelling but I’m not sure whether it was my clever distraction technique or luck.

Anyway, this one time, my friend and I were off backpacking around South East Asia for five weeks but we had different flights. He had had a stopover in Sri Lanka, been wined and dined and a beautiful hotel, swum in their beautiful pool and had a little nap. I, however, was changing in Kuwait and had a long eight hours in Kuwait Airport, with lots of massive duty free shops selling Toblerones and alcohol, neither of which I wanted.

For some reason, although I definitely wasn’t keen on staying in Kuwait longer than necessary, the announcement for my connecting flight wasn’t being made in the area I was sitting in. So I realised a bit late and had to make a dash for it. As I was running, I heard the announcements that they were waiting for one more passenger to board. That was me!

Desperately embarrassed, I arrived at the gate, panting and sweating and a stern faced lady said they were just about to close the gate and I had held everything up. I apologised profusely and handed over my backpack for her to search.

She zipped it open at double speed, her face a picture of grumpiness….

And all my *ahem* lady things spilled out all over her little desk.

She looked at me like she hated me.

I did a nervous little laugh and vaguely tried to explain how I did it to deter thieves.

“Well maybe you should have repacked it when you knew you were getting it searched,” she said, very very unamused….

Woops.

Nanny Rhino and the law of tea

Yes, that’s right. I’m fobbing you off with something from my Nanny Rhino, rather than writing a proper blog for you. Again. Apologies. I have been busy (for ‘busy,’ read: lazy).

 

Tea. What a wonderful wonderful beverage. Not much beats a tea. As a non-drinker (of the alcoholic variety, I of course, do drink other things), tea is as wacky as it gets in my world. Well, apart from when I occasionally drink coffee.

 

I do get quite wacky with my tea sometimes. When I first moved to university and happened to have a peppermint tea at someone’s house, a whole new world opened up in front of me. And it was very exciting indeed. I used to have a small travel kettle in my room which just brewed enough for one cup. I also had a rubbishy student job at a coffee place inside a train station. They would open at the crack of dawn to get the early commuters and close late at night to get the drunken husbands desperately trying to sober up with espressos before returning home to their wives.

 

I was often on the early shifts, which meant arriving at 5.30am. Whether cycling or taking the bus, I needed to leave myself about twenty minutes. So my alarm would go off at 4.15am and I would grumpily throw back the duvet and force myself over to the desk to put the kettle on. A mug with a tea bag would be waiting, having been placed there the night before. The kettle would boil, the water would go in and while it brewed, I would gripe about early starts and it surely being against the Human Rights Act and I could possibly sue my employers. Then the tea would finish brewing, I’d ditch the bag and, depending on which tea it was, I’d add milk and have a sip.

 

Things slowly seemed kind of nice then. I could hear the birds singing and see the sun rising. I would put in headphones and listen to I Don’t Know Why by Norah Jones (always the same song, because of the line “I waited till I saw the sun.”) and write. I was doing a joint honours degree and one of my subjects was Creative Writing. The lecturers had advised us to write for twenty minutes every morning. I realised what I always realise at that time of day, when my grumpiness has slid off and down under the floorboards some place and all the nice things about being awake in an empty world while everyone else sleeps become obvious. There’s just me. Me and my cup of tea. My day feels nicer when I start it that way.

 

Yesterday morning, for example, even though I didn’t have time to have tea at home, I managed an earl grey and a scone in between all the breakfast and coffee orders at work. It helped.

 

I have been known to branch out quite spectacularly when making tea. I went for milk-less tea for a long time, which led to forays into the world of fresh mint tea (plucked from my own garden), cardamom concoctions and licorice infusions. When living abroad in Namibia, my friend, Lucy, and I, in our poverty, drank a lot of rooibos tea, to keep our tummies full! It was dirt cheap for a box of fifty and every evening, we would stand at our window in our kitchen and watch the sun set over the water. We were living on the coast, our little house looking out over the Atlantic ocean, and got the most beautiful skies I have ever seen in my life. Colours I didn’t think belonged in a sky – greys, oranges, pinks, reds, blues, purples. Rooibos tea will always mean beautiful African sunsets to me.

 

Careless brewers, who throw the bag in walk away from it, then return later in the day to add milk, should be publicly reprimanded for killing tea. Teabag squeezers also need the same level of punishment.

 

Don’t just leave it there for ten minutes! It shows you don’t care. It comes out like black coffee and is far too bitter. And don’t go the opposite direction and try to brew it too quickly by taking a teaspoon and squeezing your bag against the side of the cup! What’s wrong with you? You’re suffocating it. Let it brew gently. Unless you have so little respect for yourself that you don’t mind drinking tannin, then please do not squeeze.