You’re having a laugh (I hope)

Good morning all. It’s Wednesday so my guest blogger, Rambler5319, is going to take over for some humour to start your day with.

 

After the last two weeks on Genetics & Education I thought I might have a more light-hearted post this week.

Many thanks to Sam Ignarski and his E-zine Bow Wave for permission to reprint these gems taken from his website.

(For any of you with an interest in the Shipping, Insurance & Container fields, this is one website you should visit: http://www.wavyline.com/current.php)

Here we go then. Enjoy!

Walking can add minutes to your life. This enables you at 85 years old to spend an additional 5 months in a nursing home at £2500 per month.

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. Now she’s 97 years old and we don’t know where the heck she is.

I joined a health club last year, spent about £400. Haven’t lost a pound. Apparently you have to go there.

I have to exercise early in the morning before my brain figures out what I’m doing.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

I have flabby thighs, but fortunately my stomach covers them.

The advantage of exercising every day is that you die healthier.

If you are going to try cross-country skiing, start with a small country.

And last but not least: I don’t exercise because it makes the ice jump right out of my glass.
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THE FINAL WORD ON NUTRITION (IN ENGLISH)

After an exhaustive review of the research literature, here’s the final word on nutrition and health:

 

1. Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

 2. Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

 3. Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

 4. Italians and French drink excessive amounts of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

 5. Germans drink beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

 CONCLUSION:

 Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

—————————————————————–

Four old retired guys are walking down a street in Yuma, Arizona. They turn a corner and see a sign that says,

“Old Timers Bar – ALL drinks 10 cents.”
They look at each other and then go in, thinking, This is too good to be true.

The old bartender says in a voice that carries across the room, “Come on in and let me pour one for you! What’ll it be, gentlemen?”

There’s a fully stocked bar, so each of the men orders a martini. In no time the bartender serves up four iced martinis – shaken, not stirred and says, “That’ll be 10 cents each, please.”

The four guys stare at the bartender for a moment, then at each other. They can’t believe their good luck. They pay the 40 cents, finish their martinis and order another round.

Again, four excellent martinis are produced, with the bartender again saying, “That’s 40 cents, please.” They pay the 40 cents, but their curiosity gets the better of them. They’ve each had two martinis and haven’t even spent a dollar yet.

Finally one of them says, “How can you afford to serve martinis as good as these for a dime apiece?”

“I’m a retired tailor from Phoenix ,” the bartender says, “and I always wanted to own a bar. Last year I hit the Lottery jackpot for $125 million and decided to open this place. Every drink costs a dime. Wine, liquor, beer – it’s all the same.”

“Wow! That’s some story!” one of the men says.

As the four of them sip at their martinis, they can’t help noticing seven other people at the end of the bar who don’t have any drinks in front of them and haven’t ordered anything the whole time they’ve been there.

Nodding at the seven at the end of the bar, one of the men asks the bartender, “What’s with them?”

The bartender says, “They’re retired people from Scotland, They’re waiting for Happy Hour when drinks are half-price.”

 

Needs Funds

Merci Paul Dixon

A young man was having some money problems, and needed £200 to get his car fixed and roadworthy again. But had run out of people to borrow from.

So, he calls his parents via the operator, and reverses the charge and says to his father. “I need to borrow two hundred pounds,” he says.

At the other end, his father says, “Sorry, I can’t hear you, son, I think there may be a bad line.”

The boy shouts, “Two hundred. I need two hundred pounds!”

“Sorry, I still can’t hear you clearly,” says his father.

The operator cuts in, “Sorry to butt in, But I can hear him perfectly clearly.”

The father says, “Good. YOU send him the money!”

 

Quips and Quotes

Sales clerk to customer:
“These stretch pants come with a warranty of one year or 500,000 calories… whichever comes first.”

Woman huddled under blanket on deserted, wind-swept beach to husband: “Tell me again how much money we’re saving with this off-season deal.”

Man is the only animal that goes to sleep when he’s not sleepy and gets up when he is.
–Dave Gneiser

A good answer is what you think of later.
–Sam Ewing

The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application.
–Ken Kraft

No one appreciates the value of constructive criticism more thoroughly than the one who’s giving it.
–Hal Chadwick

My wife and I have structured conversations:
firstly, she gives me her opinion, then she gives me my opinion.

I’m weird, but around here it’s barely noticeable.

The mother of three notoriously unruly youngsters was asked whether or not she’d have children if she had it to do over again. “Sure,” she replied, “but not the same ones.”

Everyone should have a spouse, because there are a number of things that go wrong that one can’t blame on the government.

I accept good advice gracefully —
as long as it doesn’t interfere with what I intended to do in the first place.

I wrote this poem about 15 years ago in Ireland. In those days, that country was so strict you used to have to smuggle condoms through the airport in bags of heroin.
–Punk poet John Cooper Clarke

Never hit a man with glasses.
Hit him with a baseball bat.

Thesaurus: ancient reptile with excellent vocabulary.

There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action. –Goethe

I like pigs.
Dogs look UP to us.
Cats look DOWN on us.
Pigs treat us as EQUALS.
–Winston Churchill

Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m schizophrenic, and so am I.
–Frank Crow

If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you have one?

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at maths.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

If things get better with age, I’m approaching magnificent!

You’re so open-minded, your brains fell out

You might as well take all of me — the parts you want aren’t removable.

I have an open mind — it’s just closed for repairs.

At least dogs do what you tell them to do. Cats take a message and get back to you.

I’ve gotta be me — everyone else was already taken.

Do not meddle in the place of dragons … you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.

We occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry on as if nothing happened.

 

The Chat book

Something amazing happened. A book arrived through the door the other day. A book of Chat! I didn’t even know they had a book!

Doesn’t it look amazing?! I opened it, super excited, and found the contents page, which hinted at the brilliance to follow – The Hands That Caress, Our Furry Friends Have Some Spooky Senses, Autistic Love, Did Rape Save My Life, Bloater, Fatgirl Slim, Our Ghost Turns The Coke Flat…. And that’s just a brief overview!

So in I went, in to world of Chat and hilarity and found this, in paragraph 3 of the first story.

Have you found the bit I mean? About the nipples? And there we are. We’re straight into the nonsense. It gets steadily more mental as you get further into it.

For example, one story was called I Feel Like Chicken Tonight. I’d like you to guess first what this was about. I thought it was a foodie story, maybe someone gets food poisoning. Maybe they thought it was chicken but it was disease-ridden mountain goat or something.

Want me to tell you what it actually is? Brace yourselves.

It starts with a couple. The guy is a cross dresser but she doesn’t approve, he’s trying to get help, etc. They get married.

As soon as you read stuff like this, you suddenly remember Chat’s main audience. The “I’ll-just-get-married-in-my-tracksuit” type of person. You know.

This story is also fabulous because ‘Clive’ is also referred to as ‘Ian’ 30% of the time. Good editing and proofreading skills, Chat. Hats off to you. Here’s a fine example of it.

So yeh, that’s also what the story’s about. Not really chicken at all. More cross dressing and bestiality. Is it bestiality if the chicken’s frozen?

Anyway, that was a direction I hadn’t seen Chat go in before. I was on a bus so bursting out laughing at the above part of the story was quite awkward.

Another story I read, called Bloater, was about a fat guy who met a girl, had a family, got skinny, loved it, then got fat again, his wife left and now he’s trying to diet. Interesting.

There’s SO much to get stuck into with this book. I will undoubtedly be reporting back again.

Tinned spaghetti and chubby Dachshunds

Today, I’m just going to do a quick round up of this week’s Chat magazine. Yesterday contained the best stuff. Today’s is really the stuff I feel I can’t let you go on without knowing.

This stuff is important for your life.

First up, the dog that was so fat it looked like a big pillow. Look.

The caption next to the second photo says, wittily, “Does my bum look big in this?” And yes, big fat dog. The answer is yes. Your bum does look big in that.

The vet lady who took it in and vowed to then it’s life around describes how she put him on a diet and eventually he lost some weight and then, like a human, he had to have an operation to cut off his hangy skin after losing all the weight.

Ridiculous.

Next, the couple who wears the same clothes and have some for 35 years. I’m pretty sure most people know about them as they’ve been in lots of magazines and newspapers but this picture is something new that I’ve not seen before. Them in matching jarmies. Check it out!

Looking good….

And last but not least, I couldn’t have put away this week’s Chat without telling you all about the latest value for money in the world of food. Each week, Chat do a column which reviews one item of food from all different shops or brands and grades them out of 10. Well, this week, there’s one which I know you’ll all be itching to hear the results for….

Yup. Tinned spaghetti. Can we get a shout out for TINNED SPAGHETTI, my friends?! Woooooop! Who loves tinned spaghetti? Waaaaaah! ME! Me!

And in case you’re wondering, Tesco won this one. Their 28p tinned spaghetti was described as a ‘teatime treat.’ If I served up tinned spaghetti in my house and told everyone it was a ‘treat’, I think I’d have a mutiny on my hands.

A teatime treat?! Spare me this madness.

An imaginary conversation with the star of this week’s Chat

Imagine the scene. You’re at a pub, let’s say, with some friends. It’s one of those things where you’re all sitting around, you’re comfortably tipsy, people start name-dropping, you know the type of thing I mean. One person mentions their brush past a local politician ten years ago and soon everyone’s at it.

“Well, yes, of course Brad Pitt’s always around town now because he’s bought that house down the road.”

“O really? You know, I get the same thing when I serve Ian McKellan a coffee every morning. Yes. Didn’t I mention? Yes, he gets a cappuccino, no chocolate.”

“I totally saw Gary Barlow the other day on the train. I said hi to him. He seemed really lovely.”

“Well, my cousin’s mum’s nan is Cilla Black so we’re always seeing celebs. Yeh, totally.”

And then…. The claim to beat all claims…. One of your gang pipes up with, “I was in Chat the other week.”

Wowzers. Everyone is floored. What better claim to fame is there than that?!

“Amazing! What were you in it for?” you ask.

“O, I was the fat bloke on the front cover with a massive hangy fat section where my skin was all loose and stretchy.”

“O. Ok. And what did you talk about in the story?”

“All about how I had low self confidence so I started to eat more and then I had no-one and nothing and thought ‘what’s the point’ and hated myself and couldn’t even look at myself in a mirror. My sister was in the story too, talking about how her boobs are just flaps of skin that she rolls up and puts inside her bra to try and make it look like proper boobs.”

“Great. Uh. So what did you do about it? When you hated yourself and couldn’t stand the sight of yourself and felt really self conscious?”

“O, I went straight to Chat, of course. I told them all about it and they printed a really super massive picture of me with no clothes on and told my story.”

“Did that help?”

“I dunno. But that’s not the point is it? The point is that Chat is always the place to go with all your woes. And also, now I’m famous. That’s my life’s work, right there. I am an achiever. I have done things and achieved things. I am The Chat Man.”

“Good one…. *aside to other friend* your Cilla Black story was better.”

And now imagine that that man is you. Imagine that’s the single interesting thing you have done in your life. Depressing.

I confited a rabbit!

This is exciting. It is very exciting. Why? I hear you ask. Well, because I can pretend I am on Masterchef, of course! They are always making a confit of something. A confit of duck, a confit of vegetables, etc etc.

So, using my fabulous new cookbook I got for Christmas, I bought a rabbit, something I have never done before and followed Michel Roux’s recipe for rabbit confit. It was fascinating. Well, actually, it was opposite of fascinating. I just stood and watched a pan do nothing. You have to keep the temperature at 70 degrees the whole time, which is quite low. It bubbles a little at first, then it just sits there, doing nothing.

So far as I can see, it is a more chic, French way of deep fat frying, minus the batter and bubbling. It is cooked really slowly and then preserved in the fat/oil and will last a few weeks in the fridge.

The rabbit was amazing when I used it to make a cassoulet the next day. Really soft and moist.

Last night I also made tomato confit and garlic confit and used them in my lamb and Mediterranean vegetable dish, from the same cookbook.

I am like the confiting queen now! I will just say one thing though, I’m buying more oil every time I go to the shop and it could work out to be an expensive hobby, this confiting thing.

P.S. Danda would like me to tell you the confit joke he and I came up with…. How do you make a duck confit? Lay it down on the sofa and put a pillow under its head.

On mushrooms

Yesterday, I found an old skirt which had little pictures of mushrooms all over it and so I wrote about mushrooms for my Nanny Rhino. I am going to share my mushroom chat with you as I wrote ten thousand words yesterday catching up on the days I missed with Nanny Rhino so I am all written out for a day or so.

 

There are so many things to do and places to go with mushrooms that it’s hard to know where to start. I’d love to start in Rome, where any restaurant worth it’s salt would be proudly displaying a wooden crate of porcini mushrooms on one of its tables outside. Since this visit and my mass consumption of the fantastic porcini mushrooms, I am struggling with eating them here as they are all of the dried variety, which was fine and nice and lovely, until I saw the fresh ones in Italy. Now I feel differently about dried porcini. I feel a bit sad for them as they are trapped there on the shelf, in a little jar, moisture-less. Without any fresh porcini of my own, I am simply not eating porcini mushrooms. It is a sad state of affairs. Dried porcini are great for risottos though, as you can use the soaking liquids to hydrate your rice. It’s still not quite the same though, is it?

 

My next favourite mushroom is probably an oyster mushroom as I love their shape and texture. I love how wild and uncouth they look, all misshapen and not at all uniform like their little cousins, the button mushrooms. The problem with this could be that people may mistake your oyster mushrooms in your stir fry for a slab of fat off the meat (as happened to me when making a duck stir-fry), so it’s your decision whether you want to run the risk of being thought of as a ‘fat-cooker’.

 

Shiittake are my next favourite, for similar reasons to the oyster mushroom. It is kind of irregular and a dark mysterious colour. They have a great flavour that I love cooking with beef in a stir-fry.

 

Enoki mushrooms, so long and thin and tiny are great for throwing into dishes last minute, for an extra bit of flavour. Their size means they don’t need much cooking before they soften and taste lovely. I love putting them onto a pizza last minute before quickly oven baking it as it adds another element to something with relatively few ingredients.

 

Next we have the portobello and the chestnut mushrooms, larger, meatier and better for roasting than their smaller counterparts. They can also hold their own quite well in a pie or vegetarian lasagne with spinach and ricotta.

 

Lastly we have the humble button mushroom, great for general use, fabulous fried in a breakfast, but with less of the qualities that draw me so well to the other mushrooms.

 

Actually, I have a less-than-fantastic memory connected to a portobello mushroom. I was seeing a guy for a few months and we could both see that things were in steady decline. In the height of our excitement while things were great, though, we had booked tickets to go to a literature festival somewhere in the countryside. The ticket had been quite expensive and I had booked the day off work so I was reluctant to give it up. Also the gentleman in question didn’t seem that keen on letting the relationship go, although I knew he knew it was over.

 

He was all up for driving there and giving me a lift and acting like things were fine so I took the lift, slept all the way there and planned other similar tactics of avoidance once there. I thought I’d just potter off and get lost in the crowds. He wasn’t so easy to shake though. It took him hours to finally say he fancied seeing something he didn’t think I’d like and wandering off in the other direction.

 

I found the furthest away corner and went for a long walk among the trees, where none of the fun was happening. I saw a group of people open water swimming and got chatting and generally just soaked up the lovely day. I eventually got back into the foray of people and book stalls and performances and fun and watched an old work colleague doing performance poetry. Here, I had solace. Should the gentleman wander along and want to sit down, I could say I was busily engaged in supporting my friend and paying attention to his performance and apologies but I wasn’t able to have a chat right now. The gentleman did not appear though and the next performer was hilarious so I stayed there. At one of the food stands nearby, I ordered an amazing portobello mushroom burger with halloumi cheese and red pepper. I sat down with my burger, deep in thoughts about life and this tasty mushroom burger. It was such a great moment, there, sitting on the ground, with people milling about, books in hands, intelligent discussion being had all around me, a performer on a little stage not far away and these beautiful purple flowers lining a little garden wall to my left.

 

That’s when the gentleman came along, greeted me in surprise and sat down next to me, ruining my moment. My excuses for silence were none, apart from the tasty mushroom burger in my hands, which required all of my attention. We were stuck together again then, for the rest of the afternoon, until it all became too painfully obvious and, in a quiet late afternoon moment, sitting on the grass, he fell asleep and I sneaked away, got my bag and headed for the nearest main road to find a train station and scarper off back home, away from this awful awkwardness that I should never have embarked upon in the first place.

Nanny Rhino and the three bird roast

My excuse fobbing you off with my Nanny Rhino entry today instead of writing a proper blog entry?

I woke up late.

Feeble.

So anyway, today it’s about duck. Enjoy.

 

Duck has been a recent revelation to me. My interactions with it have been few but all extremely enjoyable. I first ate duck at a small restaurant near a yoga class I used to take every week. It was Bikram yoga which, for those of you who don’t know, is like yoga on acid. It’s in a heated room and is like a fight to the death, a struggle between good and evil, between you and the heat, to win and make it to the 90 minute mark without having passed out or vomited. If you make it to this 90 minute mark, you feel invincible. Shaky on your legs, but invincible. And really damn hungry! I would wobble out of the class, change and leave, wide-eyed, looking for the nearest place I could get food. I would have taken anything on offer but thankfully, the nearest thing was actually a really great little restaurant. I’d order about four things off the menu, blinded by my intense hunger, not even sure what I’d ordered.

 

Quite often, a total surprise to me, a duck stir fry would arrive and I would consume it in one inhalation. It was so amazing. Inspired by this, I would occasionally buy a duck and hoisin sauce wrap so my mind had started to pair the two together.

 

Then last Christmas, a neighbour had recommended I buy a turkey crown for Christmas Day lunch as a full turkey is really too big for two. So off I went to Waitrose, on Christmas Eve, to buy my turkey crown. Surprise of the century when I got there – no turkey crowns! Well, who would have believed that on Christmas Eve, the shop would have sold out of turkey. Clearly, my forward-planning skills have much improvement to make.

 

I looked sadly at the shelves, which were mostly bare, and spotted two candidates for Christmas lunch. One was a stuffed duck crown with a pork and orange stuffing. The other was a three bird roast; a pheasant, stuffed into a partridge, stuffed into a duck. Noticing all the wide-eyed panic around me, I grabbed both, held on tight and called my other half.

 

“I’ve got stuffed duck crown or a three bird roast! Which do you want? There’s not much time! I might not make it out with anything!”

 

“The, uh, the three bird roast! The three bird roast!” he yelled. “Good luck!”

 

Throwing the crown back on the shelf, I made a mad dash for the tills, holding my three bird roast protectively. A few people made eyes at it, longingly, but I pulled my jacket around it and kept my head down until my money was handed over and I was out of the shop, on the home straight.

 

That duck was one of the best meals I have ever eaten. I made a simple carrot and turnip mash on the side and we used the roasting juices to make gravy and we just ate and ate and ate. I couldn’t believe how amazing it was.

 

The following recipe is another thing I made to impress my brother and his wife when they came over for dinner. It’s a guesswork version of the first duck I ate, post-yoga.

 

Duck stir-fry

Olive oil

8 mini duck breast fillets (or two large, with the fat removed)

A few spring onions

A handful of oyster mushrooms

1 orange/red pepper

Hoisin sauce (plum sauce will also be fine)

1 white onion

1 garlic clove

Thick egg noodles

Sesame seeds

Put some hot water in a pan to boil.

Put a splash of olive oil into a wok and add the garlic clove and the onion, finely chopped. When everything has warmed up, add your pepper, sliced into long batons and mix everything around a bit. Add your duck fillets in, depending on the size, you can slice them smaller, if they look a bit too large.

While the duck is cooking, put your egg noodles into your pan of water, which should be boiling by now and give them a few minutes to cook. When cooked to al dente, drain the noodles and let them sit for a second.

Add the chopped oyster mushrooms to your pan with the duck and check your duck to see if it is cooked through. If it is, give the mushrooms a minutes or two to soften. Add your hoisin sauce in and stir immediately so everything gets coated. Then add your noodles in and mix again, so the sauce is evenly coating everything. Lastly, add in the spring onions, finely sliced, toss everything around a bit and serve, finishing with some sesame seeds, sprinkled on top.

I must just add a little aside to this Nanny Rhino post because my brother, having eaten the whole thing and the main and the dessert, asked, as we were sitting chatting, what was in the duck starter. As I listed the ingredients, he went “O! Mushrooms! I thought that was just bits of fat off the duck and I didn’t want to say anything.”

 

So I apparently come across as the type of woman who would serve up a stir-fry which had slabs of fat in it. I don’t know whether to be a little depressed over that.

The bucket of fat

The other day I was in work. It was quite busy. Not rushed-off-your-feet busy. Just I-need-a-cup-of-tea-now busy. We got the food delivery in and, as usual, we started to unpack some stuff into the display fridge, put some stuff away, etc.

There was a huge bucket and when we opened it to look inside, we saw the slightly cloudy water that the poached chicken has been cooked in. Great, put that in the kitchen and I’ll unpack the chicken into tubs, when I get a chance.

Cakes went on stands, cheese went in fridges and salads went in bowls. It was all looking fab and under control. I went to the kitchen and that’s when we got loads of orders. There I was, heating, pouring, chopping, plating, and the bucket of chicken stood on the side, in my way, while I struggled to find time to deal with it. On and on it went, every time my hands went to the bucket to unpack the chicken, an order came in.

It was big and in my way but I didn’t want to move it out of the way, for fear I’d forget to deal with it.

Finally, I got the lid off. Then about four orders came in. I dealt with them and sent them out and then there I was again, alone with the bucket of chicken, finally. I was going to do this! Nothing could stop me.

Now, I don’t know how many of you are frequent poachers of chicken but it’s a fabulous way to cook it. It’s a lot more moist than roasting or frying. But as the chicken takes on the moisture from the water, so it releases some of its fat. So what you end up with is a pan of beautifully cooked chicken, floating in a sea of slightly discoloured water with fatty blobby bits on the surface. Should this water then cool down a little, the fatty blobby bits merge together to form misshapen white islands bobbing about on the top of the water. It’s not pretty, as you can imagine.

So this bucket of chicken had the inevitable floating blobby fat islands on its surface and the water itself was quite cloudy, so that I couldn’t even see the chicken in the bottom. It was a huge bucket, which was wierd because they never usually sent this much chicken. They usually sent a far smaller bucket.

Anyway, I got out two tubs to transfer the chicken into. I wrote the date on them, so we’d know when it came in.

I rolled up my sleeve… And plunged my hand into the fatty watery pit, to seek out the chicken from the depths below.

I swished my hand around. And around. I felt right to the bottom, around the edges. I swirled around in the fat-water. Around and around. And I didn’t happen upon a single peice of chicken. Not one. Puzzled, I kept swishing my hand around.

And then it dawned on me. They’d obviously made a mistake at the other deli, where they cook the food. They’d sent us this instead of chicken. They’d got mixed up, kept the chicken and sent us the bucket of water they cooked it in, clearly meant for throwing away.

So now, here I am, elbow deep in a bucket of fat, for no reason. A chickenless bucket of fat. With my sleeve up around my arm. The floating fat islands gently colliding with my forearm as I plunge around desperately, looking for poached chicken. Poached chicken which is not in this bucket. This massive bucket of fat.

It was not my finest hour.

Parcels, portals and toilet flush buttons

I know, I know. It’s been a while since I reported back on the latest Chat magazine. Well, here it is. You know I never let you go too long without doing one.

First up, there’s the photos page. Well, actually, before that there’s a real life story which has a shock factor of 10! That’s right! A ten. Very rarely will you get tens. Usually they do a 9.8 or something like that. Not usually a ten. So you know that’s big stuff.

Now to the photos page. There’s a photo of two pregnant women in the same top, the caption basically says, here’s us in the same top. Great. Another photo is a lady reading Fifty Shades of Grey. And again, that’s pretty much it. What a fascinating photo, thanks for sharing.

The tips page is quite good today. The best one is probably the one which says that if you have a fancy perfume bottle lid, don’t throw it away when you’ve finished the perfume, attach it to the toilet flush button….! This doesn’t make sense on so many levels. Let me show you.

So on the before pic, you can see that it’s one of those push-in type things. There’s nothing sticking out from it. So what did she ‘attach’ the perfume lid to. And also, all she’s really done, I think, is cover up the toilet flush button. Because now you can’t press it, because there’s a big flowery thing attached to it.

The letters page is pretty good this week. There’s a picture of a baby with a shocked look on its face. There’s nothing wrong with the photo. It’s just that that’s all it is. And that’s the photo of the week….

They must not be getting a lot of entries to this photo of the week competition….

Then there’s a bolognese sauce from a jar competition thing. They review three and tell you their favourite, which is the Sacla Dallaglio bolognese sauce. God forbid, we might suggest one makes their dinner themselves… No! Food from a jar! That’s the way forward!

Then there’s the obligatory I-used-to-be-fat-then-I-lost-weight story. Then an I-met-a-man-on-the-internet-now-we’re-getting-but-we’ve-never-met story.

Then comes the good section. The psychic section. The first story in this section is about a woman who moved into a haunted house. The proof that it was haunted? Her daughter got locked in the bathroom one day. Obviously a ghost. Obviously. No question about it.

She realised what was going on, an evil portal. Of course. So she decides to close it. You know, as one does. She gathered her archangels around her, are you ready for the good bit? Her archangels… Gabriel….. Michael…. Raphael… And METATRON! Yes. Really. Metatron. Her archangel, Metatron. I’m glad he was there for her. Phew!

Then we have the Lucky Key. This is always amazing. I touch it and good things will happen apparently. To legitimise this Lucky Key thing, there are little stories from people who touched the key and great things happened to them. Now I’m not certain what’s going on here. Have they touched the key and immediately something great happens. Or do they touch it on Thursday and by Sunday, they’ve had a bit of luck? Because I don’t think you can really say it’s the key then, can you?

When I touched the key this morning, within five minutes I got a little note through the door from the post man saying I needed to go and pick something up from the post office because it had been posted without the proper amount of stamps on it. So I need to give them £1.50 for the postage if I want my parcel.

Is that lucky? Really? Should I tell Chat about it and see if they print my story in next week’s magazine? Maybe I will. Watch this space to see if I get printed! It will say:

Laura from London got a note from the postman saying she needed to pay £1.50 to pick up her parcel, all thanks to the Lucky Key!