A return to Chat

This is long overdue and I apologise to those of you who have been waiting patiently for it. It’s time to review this week’s Chat magazine.

It’s difficult to know where to start really. The cover has got some real gems. Check it out.

‘Fag-butt torture’?! Brilliant. There’s just something really catchy about that. The main problem with this title, though, is not its catchy tag line but the fact that, when you read the story, there’s not a fag butt in sight! They obviously edited that bit out but forgot to tell whoever was getting the front cover ready. There is literally no mention of fag butts in the story. None. And yet the front cover promised me some fag butts! Disappointing. I very rarely read a story unless it contains some fag butts.

Ah. Now this is a good one. When looking for my favourite magazine on the shelf, I spotted this funny, oddly proportioned face and something about cement and knew I’d found Chat. O, the perils of using a dodgy unqualified plastic surgeon.

I love how the inference here is that she arrived in Florida, in the airport or whatever, and she got off the plane, passport in hand, to have a lovely beach holiday. But when she got to passport control they recoiled in horror at her weight, disgusted by the thought of her on their beaches, flaunting her overweight body for all to see and psychologically damaging children for life.

“Too fat for Florida”. That’s what I thought I was going to read. Those Floridians can be harsh, I thought to myself. Poor woman, being told she can’t come in because of her weight.

And then I read the story, which really should have been titled, “I Couldn’t Fasten My Seatbelt On A Ride In Florida And A Man Had To Help Me.” Yeh. That was all. Of course that was all. She just couldn’t fasten her seatbelt on a ride.

At first I didn’t know whether the two things were connected – “Turn your hero into Lego” and “Win a life size statue of your child.” It turns out they are, implying that one’s hero is their child. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that as such, but your average six year old is unlikely to have achieved the things an adult of fifty probably has. I mean they’re barely getting to grips with their times tables. They’re still punching their friends in the playground to settle disputes. And giggling at the word ‘boobs’. Personally, my hero, a man called Clive Stafford Smith, has got a lot more going for him than any child I know.

And yet, I am invited by Chat to turn my hero (my child) into a life sized Lego statue. I mean, really? Really?

Surely by the time you’ve built it, it’s no longer life sized because children grow quickly? And why, why on earth would I want a Lego statue of my child. I already have my actual child. I don’t need a Lego body double.

Check out the Lego family! Now imagine it just chilling in your front room. After the initial novelty of having a Lego family watching TV with you, I imagine it’d be a right pain. And a bit scary if you went downstairs for a glass of water in the night.

Wow, guys. That was just the front cover! I’m going to stop there and let you digest everything that’s been discussed today. Tomorrow we’ll delve inside the magazine to find what treats await us there!

D is for….

DOG!

(This is a picture of my friend’s dog, not mine, as you will see.)

I’ve never really been a dog person. You know, they’re just there, being dogs. And I’m just here, being me. And our paths very rarely cross.

One of my first doggy memories is of a little girl racing across the back field at a million miles an hour, closely followed by a barking dog. Behind our back garden was the large back field that she was running across and she was heading in our direction. We opened the gate into our garden and she ran in and we shut the gate so the dog couldn’t follow her. In my mind there are quite a few people there, all watching this little girl being chased across the field by the dog. Now that I’m writing it, it seems like a slightly wierd thing to have happened. I’m not sure of this is an actual memory or a creation of my overactive childhood imagination.

My next experience of dogs was when we, as a family, decided to get a dog. My brother was excited and I did whatever he did so suddenly, without really thinking about whether I really liked dogs, there was one there, in our house, yap-yap-yapping. I was about seven and too nervous to speak up but I was pretty scared of it. It was little and excited and loud. I was horrified at its jumpy-loudness.

My brother played with it and threw it things and what fun he had. I stayed in the hallway and listened to them in the front room. Eventually I decided to go and see the new dog. I went into the front room and it jumped for me. I ran away from it and it chased me. I ran around in a circle panicking and shouting for someone to open the door, which they did, and I made my escape.

I did not approach the dog again that evening. The next day, when I came home from school, it had been returned to the shop.

And that, my good friends, is the sum total of my experiences with dogs.

Well, I lie. We had a dog when I lived in Africa but that was more like looking after a child in a dog’s body. She came and went as she pleased and very often wet herself while sleeping.

Falling off my bike whilst moving at high speed

The first time I fell when moving fast, I was cycling along the side of the road through Brompton, on my way into London. I was in the cycle lane and there was a bit of a traffic jam. The cars were stationary but the cycle lane was clear so I was cycling quite fast. I was approaching a section of the road that had a Keep Clear sign, for cars to turn into a car park on my left. As I approached that section, I looked but nothing was turning so I kept cycling. All of a sudden, a big jeep thing swung quickly into the Keep Clear section and across my path into the car park. A millisecond before it would have hit me, I pulled on my brakes and skidded around so I was side on to the car. By the time it had disappeared into the car park, I had fallen sideways off the bike and skidded along the tarmac road, leaving the majority of my leg skin there. As this fall was post-cleats, the sudden pull of my body off the bike had been too fast for the shoes. I stood up, in my socks, and noticed that my cleats were still attached to the pedals on my bike! People rushed over, offering support and cursing the jeep driver. I stalked after him into the car park, in my socks, pushing my bike. I caught up with him and poked my head in the driver’s side.

“Are you going to say sorry?” I demanded.

“What’s wrong? Are you ok?” The man seemed worried.

“You just pulled in front of me and I had to brake really hard and I came off my bike.”

“O god, sorry! I didn’t see you.”

“EXACTLY!” I said, self righteously.

“But I, I didn’t see you.”

“Thats not ok. That doesn’t excuse you,” I ranted. “Why weren’t you bloody looking!?”

After a long rant, I mounted my bicycle, awkwardly because of the shoes on pedals and because I now realised that the seat had been shunted out of place, and flounced off, as best I could given the situation at hand.

The next time I fell off my bike whilst moving at speed was a similar situation. The cars were still at a set of traffic lights but the cycle lane was clear so I was cycling quite fast. A lazy mother was dropping her child off at school and instead of driving her into the school car park, she had obviously told her to jump out at the lights. The little girl, not looking of course, opened her car door just as I passed and almost knocked me out. I was thrown clean off my bike and onto the pavement. The edge of the door had ripped the skin between my little finger and ring finger apart and was bleeding all over. My arm felt broken and my leg had taken a bit of a pull in the wrong direction.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” I yelled at the little girl. In hindsight, this may not have been the best thing to say to a little girl.

Shell shocked, I struggled to my feet as the Mum came around from the drivers side and asked me if there was anything she could do.

“I think you’ve done enough!” I snapped, as I got on my bike and gingerly cycled away.

I had a bruise on my arm from shoulder to elbow which was deep purple and yellow and lasted for weeks. It wasn’t broken but I couldn’t really use it for the next two days.

Bloody kids.

Lazy Laura and the big hospital strop

Almost two years ago, as mentioned in C is for…, I had a bit of an emergency. Like a life-threatening, I-thought-it-was-some-mild-food-poisoning, extremely-rare colon thing.

It was a Wednesday, any old Wednesday, no forewarning, nothing out of the ordinary. I ate my dinner, felt a little ill, it got worse and worse til, by Friday, I hadn’t slept in two days and was becoming a little delirious. By 3am on Saturday morning, it dawned on me that it wasn’t going to be ok and I got scared and went to hospital.

It was supposed to be my first day back at law school after the Christmas break. I had all my books ready. I was hoping they could just give me a little painkiller and send me on my way and I could still make classes at 10am.

Then things went crazy. I didn’t have any time to prepare myself for it. I honestly thought I was going home in a few hours. Then all of a sudden, there were things being jabbed into me with liquid painkillers, there were x-rays being taken, I was in a ward full of people waiting for operations and, wait a minute, I was waiting for an operation! And they were talking to me about my colon and I couldn’t hear them properly through the haze of fear that was throbbing in my ears.

Anyway, I woke up from the operation later that day and proceeded to spend the next three days in bed, sulking over why I had become ill, “why me?” etc. Doctors and nurses would come round and be nice and friendly but I had turned into Little Miss Grumpy. I was having a tantrum at ‘Life’ and that’s how it was going to be!

I spent all day asleep, too terrified to eat anything so sleeping through meals or refusing them, then spent all night awake, with my headphones in, watching Supernanny or Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen on my little TV, gently weeping to myself like an idiot.

I was allowed visitors but mostly just watched while they talked. I think I had convinced myself that I was quite legitimately ‘depressed’ and that was that.

Then Danda came to visit.

“Try and get her up and about,” they had said to Danda. “She lies in bed all the time, she needs to be a bit more active if she’s going to recover.”

So Danda came to my bedside and shook me awake. I was sleeping, as usual.

“Come on, Laura. Let’s go for a little walk.”

I looked at him with my No Face.

“Come on. It’s been four days since the operation. You need to pick yourself up a bit. Don’t you want to get well so you can leave the hospital?”

I did my best quivery-lip, I’m-so-sad-and-ill face, which he ignored. What?! My sad face wasn’t working?! Panic set in. I’m busy sitting around feeling sorry for myself here! You’re interrupting me! Don’t you get it?

“Come on. Put your little slippers on. Let’s go for a little walkies,” as though talking to a child.

That was it. I had had it.

‘Danda, can I tell you a secret?”

He nodded and leaned close so I could whisper in his ear.

“I don’t WANT to go a walkies!” And I stuck my bottom lip out.

And suddenly he was laughing uproariously. He had to sit down and clutch his stomach. I heard what I had said and realised what a baby I was being and put on my little hospital-issue slippers and went for a walk down the corridor, which tired me out for the rest of the day.

But that, that little strop, that was the beginning of the recovery period.

These days, if I don’t want to go a walkies, I at least come up with a more decent excuse, like “It’s a bit cold,” or “I’m far too busy making this cup of tea” or “Family Guy is on.”

GIVE ME THAT TRUFFLE!

On Tuesday, my manager and I spent the morning at the Speciality Fine Food Fair. It was fabulous. There were tons and tons and tons of stands where producers had little tasters of their product and you could chat to them about the possibility of stocking their product in your shop.

It was in Kensington Olympia, which is massive. It took us about four hours to walk all the way around it and see every stand. There were these fabulous chocolate sculptures at one end…

… And beautifully crafted Italian pasta at the other…

…and Brie in the shape of the Eiffel Tower…

We went up and down the rows, up and down, up and down, nibbling on anything which was held out to us. The order that we nibbled was something like this:

Pannetone
Pasta
Chocolate
Truffle honey
Crackers
Ice cream

More ice cream
Salmon
Cheese biscuit
Parma ham
Bread dipped into truffle oil
Chocolate
Biltong
Granola
Brie
Chocolate
Cracker with chutney
Walnut and apricot bread
Strawberry yoghurt sweets
Freshly made pumpkin ravioli

Italian pastry with ricotta cream
Ice cream
Parma ham
Black truffle butter
White truffle butter
White truffle butter
Black truffle butter
White truffle butter…..

After this point, my memory becomes blurry because this truffle butter was A. MAY. ZING.

Let me explain my position on truffles, prior to this day: “Truffles are ok but if anything, they’re not that tasty. They don’t taste of much.” I had had truffles a few times in restaurants, where they were just shaved onto things that didn’t really do anything to showcase its fantasticness. “What’s all the fuss about?” was my general opinion of truffles.

And then I went to the Fine Food Fair. And everything changed. There were SO many truffle stands so I tasted eveything that it is possible to do with a truffle. And I have to say, I am definitely on the Truffle Bandwagon. This truffle butter…. I can’t even explain. It was phenomenal. I was spreading it onto the plainest cracker in the world. A Jacobs water cracker thing. Boring. But with this black truffle butter spread on it, it was the food of the gods! I bet that Jacobs cracker couldn’t believe its luck when it got to sit on the truffle stand.

After a point (when I’d been munching crackers and truffle butter for a tad too long and the people on the stand were looking over at me warily), we had to walk away…. And suddenly I knew that if I had any children and the truffle butter producers asked for one in exchange for a stick of the truffle butter, I would make the swap without a second’s thought.

“Push that child in front of the bus,” say the truffle men.
“Yes, truffle men,” I say, salivating at the truffle butter in their hands. I push the child in front of the bus and hold my hands out for my prize.

“Give us your house,” the truffle men say. “Go and live under a bridge somewhere.”
“Yes, truffle men,” I say, handing over the keys and taking the stick of butter. That night, I am found in the exact same spot, hugging my truffle butter while it slowly melts and smiling to myself as I lick my fingers.

“We want all your money,” the truffle men say.
“Yes, truffle men,” and I hand over my bank cards and pin numbers.

I’ve thought about going online to look up the company and do a bulk order of truffle butter, to see me through the next few months but I’m worried about opening that Pandora’s Box. I already have quite an obsessive nature. It could get silly. I’d be putting it with everything. Cereal, cups of tea, ice cream, fruit. I daydream about eating crackers full of it but am worried about the reality.

What should I do? I’m having a truffle dilemma here! I so want the truffles, but it could be a dangerous road to start down….

Wedding goats and dog training

Ok. It’s time to revisit everyone’s favourite magazine again. That’s right. Chat. The best magazine in the world. I shall now prove this by sharing some of the amazing titbits I found inside this week’s offering.

Firstly, I had to buy it when I saw it because in the top left hand corner were the words ‘You’ve goat to be kidding me.’ I just knew it was going to be amazing. Sure enough, when you flip to the back page, there’s a picture of a lady in a wedding dress with some goats on leads and the words ‘Me and the kids.’ The goat puns don’t stop there though. There’s a picture of the bride with her bridesmaids and goats, with the caption ‘Say (goat’s) cheese everyone!’

The story is about a woman who works at an animal rescue centre and loves the goats. The way she talks about them in the article is hilarious. She says to her fiance one day, ‘I met a wonderful goat at the centre today.’

She met a goat? She met it? Really? As though she was at her local, having a pint, and she saw someone also alone, so sidled over and gave it her best chat-up line. Then came home and said she’d met a wonderful goat.

Anyway, fiance proposes, they’re planning the wedding. By this point she’s ‘met’ another really great goat called Geoff. She says to fiance she wants the goats involved in the wedding – ‘I want Geoff to be ringbearer and Fuschia to be maid of honour – no butts!’ She then tells us about getting big gold satin bows for the goats and little thingys for their hooves and finishes off by saying, ‘Yes, it’s an odd love story, mine and Martin’s. But you know what? I bleatin’ love it that way!’ Fabulous.

Ok, another great story is a little short one at the end. The basic outline goes like this – my daughter is 14, I like her hair long so she’s never ever had it cut, she decided the other day to get it all cut off, look, here it is her cut-off hair. Fascinating stuff.

One of the letters written in to the problem page is pretty good. It’s about something really serious. A real problem that is unable to be resolved through any other channels. Good job Chat is here to help people who have real emergencies…. ‘I’ve got two cats. My partner has a dog. We’ve just moved in together but his dog hates one of my cats. He snarls and chases her whenever he sees her. How do we resolve this?’

And the advice? Tell the dog ‘No!’ when he starts chasing the cat.

Phew! Thanks, Chat! They’re so helpful. If it weren’t for them, how would Frances, 40, have ever worked out what to do when the dog is chasing the cat around. I imagine her sitting on the sofa, blankly staring at the dog chasing the cat around the front room and thinking, in despair, ‘I’m sure there’s something I should be doing here to prevent this from happening. I just can’t think what it is. I know, I’ll write to Chat.’ She buys Chat the following week, eagerly flips to the letters page and there it is, the answer to all her problems! At last! She can hear the dog growling and chasing the cat in the back garden and she runs out there, Chat in hand, a light switch has gone on in her world. She sees the dog and the cat and yells ‘NO! NO!’ The dog looks up, surprised. What is this word he’s never heard before? Something tells him he’s being shouted at. He slopes off to hide somewhere and the cat potters away, free from the constant torture, happy at last. Frances’ world is transformed. Chat has saved her. Thank god for Chat.

Another letter is the ‘Facebook photo of the week’ which is just of a little boy in swimming trunks. He’s just standing there in his trunks, smiling. Nothing to merit being photo of the week. His name, we are told, is Noah-Freddie. Poor child.

Ok, one last bit of amazingness for you. A top tip. Are you ready? This could really help you at home actually, transform your life even. Ok. Here goes.

Use a peice of dry bread to clean your lampshades.