Chit Chat

Ok, here it is. The long awaited next installment of Chat. In this latest offering, I’m going to concentrate on the Top Tips, which are absolutely phenomenal. Fasten your seatbelts because it’s going to be a rollercoaster.

Ok, top tip number 1….

Store your special crockery in plastic bags, we are told. Just go and bloody do it, alright! Put your crockery, the special stuff, not the normal stuff, this is important. Put it in plastic bags. Why? you may ask. Well, isn’t it obvious?! When you usually get the special crockery down to use and you give it a quick rinse before using it then dry it off and put it on the table, don’t you ever think about how irritating that thirty second process is? O goodness, that was the longest thirty seconds EVER! I wish there was a way to cut down on that rinsing and drying time. Dah, dah! Chat to the rescue! By wrapping your special crockery in plastic bags, you will be able to unwrap it and use it straight away, without having to wash it first. Wow, what a revolutionary time-saving idea.

Next up, the non-flowering plant solution.

Ever had a plant which wouldn’t flower? A cactus, perhaps? Ever had some artificial flowers hanging about the house, no longer of any use? Well, you can do what this woman has done and snip the heads off the flowers and simply glue them to the plants which are being naughty and not flowering! What a marvelous solution! The keen eyed among you will notice that this helpful reader has even glued some big plastic ladybirds to their naughty unflowering plant too. There’s nothing I like to see better than a real cactus with artificial flowers and ladybirds glued all over it. Such beauty.

The next unbelievably good tip is as follows: “Drawer stuffed with tops that crease? Attach small hooks to your wardrobe door and hang them up.” Now I’m not one to point out the obvious but, just this once, I think I’m going to speak up. Is this reader in fact suggesting to us that we attach small hooks to wardrobe doors to enable us to hang our tops from them by the straps? And is that, or is that not, the basic premise of a clothes hanger? Have they in fact suggested, a rudimentary clothes hanger-esque device which, actually, is less convenient as it is attached to the door, whereas a clothes hanger offers the versatility of being able to transport the top around, still hanging straight, to whatever destination the chooser should see fit? Is that what’s happening here? The top tips section has given itself over to the ramblings of mental patients who’s best offerings are rubbish versions of things that already exist?

I despair.

Rubbish captions, boobs on the loose and wellies on hangers

I can’t wait to show you guys what is in Chat this week. It’s got some real gems. Firstly, the obligatory animal photo inside the front cover with some extremely weak puns.

This time the pun is ‘he’s going bananas!’ And I am then asked ‘orang-you jealous?’ Poor. Even for Chat, that’s poor.

Then the worst man-to-woman transvestite photo I have maybe ever seen in my entire life.

I’m sorry if you are reading this and you recognise yourself. But really now. A little bit of work needs doing on that get-up.

Then we have some photos of things that no-one cares about apart from the people who sent them in – a girl and a dog, someone on their wedding day, a carrot that looks like a pair of legs, someone’s cat, someone’s granny etc etc.

Then my personal favourite, the ‘Blimey! That’s clever’ page. The top tips are fabulous, as ever. The best one is this. It’s basically, store you wellies upside down on a hanger.

There’s no real reason why, apart from it saves space. Does it? Does hanging a pair of wellies on a wall which looks, from what I can see, quite silly, really saving so much space that it’s worth it? I’d rather just have a little less room on the shoe rack and keep the wellies there, thanks.

Another tip is, keep the little dregs of paint in a small jar rather than in the tin it came in. It’s not even worthy of a response, is it?

A bit later, there is a story about a little boy who didn’t have a belly button. I don’t know why. I dost read the story. My eye was immediately drawn to the inset photo and the caption…

There is also an info box about a condition called bladder exstrophy. The title says ‘What is bladder exstrophy?’ This is followed by the words, “This congenital defect affects around 1 in 50,000 births and is more common in boys than girls, and the risk of having a second child with the condition is approximately 1 in 10. The problem occurs somewhere between the 4th-10th week of pregnancy.”

So I’m sorry, what’s bladder exstrophy again? I’m still none the wiser. That info box contained zero ‘info.’ If I find out I’ve got it and I rush to grab my nearest copy of Chat, something I do whenever a crisis occurs in my life, then I’ve actually no idea what’s wrong with me or what to do.

Next is an atrocious photo of a woman who’s had loads of surgery on her body, yet still can’t make sure her boob fits in her bikini before she has her photo taken for a magazine.

The next thing, which might make some of you laugh is a reference to the a previous time we checked in with Chat. Do you remember the story of the odd unsettling horror dolls a lady was collecting and sending as gifts? A lady has written a letter in to Chat to say she also has a collection of horror dolls and felt a real connection when reading the story. Fab.

The recipe this week is bangers and mash. O, sorry, that’s wrong. It’s actually called ‘Sausage Mash-Up!’ Cause they is well cool, innit.

Lastly, we finish on a disturbing story about a woman who collects rubber ducks. There is a huge, rather unflattering photo of 43 year old, slightly overweight Charlotte, in a bath surrounded and covered by some of her ducks. From her little naked knees poking out among the ducks, I think we are supposed to believe that she is naked and that it is an arousing thought. It is not arousing. Not at all.

Kiwis, curries and rats with style

It’s that time again. Time to see what Chat has to offer this week. Once again, I am blown away by their fabulous witticisms, sprinkled throughout. For example, I open the magazine and the first thing which greets me is a photo of a pig in a picnic basket, with the caption ‘designer ham bag?’

Brilliant. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the massive photo of the pig is there, just a little sentence about how the pig looks so comfy, “there’s no way we could ‘rasher’ to go anywhere.”

And on we go, to the photos page and there are a few good ones this week. The first is a here-are-some-cupcakes-I-made photo. The second is a here’s-me-with-a-huge-plastic-ape picture. And no, I’m not kidding. Someone really thought that the world would be interested in a picture of her with a huge plastic ape. Check it out.

There are some others of dogs and cows, which aren’t even worth mentioning in any greater detail.

So onward we go, past a story about a girl who had a maggot living in her back and a story of scandal with a 9.9 shock factor (!), to the Blimey, That’s Clever page.

And what have we here today? I think my favourite might be the kiwi fruit tip. Put it in an egg cup, we’re told. And that’s it. That’s the tip. Eat a kiwi out of an egg cup. £25 they got for that.  

Maybe I’ll make up some top tips and try to get £25 from Chat. Watch this space. I’ll think some up for tomorrow.

Another of the top tips is to use toothpaste to clean your mugs if they have tea stains. While I can’t see anything initially wrong with this, it just sounds a bit dodgy, cleaning a mug with toothpaste. You’re bound to have toothpaste-tasting tea for the next few days, I reckon.

Another tip seems to be, my granddaughter chewed the straw bit off her favourite beaker, so I put a new straw in. I don’t know whether that really warrants a place on the Blimey, That’s Clever page, do you? It’s not as though, previously, people have been throwing away their children’s beakers every day with no clue how to fix it and then they open Chat, see this tip and go ‘Wow! I’ll just stick a new straw down the hole where the old straw was. That’s genius.’

Next we have some more scandal, a murder, some letters, some weight loss stories and then the baby photos page. Ahhhh, the baby photos page. Photos of babies. Doing nothing at all. Just being babies. A whole page. One is a baby on a slide, one is a baby swimming, another is a baby and a cat, one is two children smiling a bit. A whole page.

To the side of this page, we have the recipe section. Now previously, I have seen some amazing gourmet recipes that opened my eyes to a whole new world. The week they had a recipe for mushrooms on toast was a week that changed my life. This week’s recipe? Onion and potato curry.

Mmmm. Doesn’t that sound great? Onion and potatoes. In a curry. Like when you look in the fridge and you don’t have anything in so you bung together some nonsense and fill up on ice cream afterward. Mmm. Nothing-in-the-fridge curry. The ingredients? Olive oil, 4 potatoes, 2 onions, spices and mustard seeds. And the attraction in making this meal? It’s only 54p per head.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it’s not 54p because Chat are so great at providing good meals on a budget. It’s because there’s NOTHING IN IT.

If you want great meals on a budget, I can give you far better, go-to ingredients – squid is really cheap, people. Fry it with fennel. Re-use old bread by chopping tomatoes, adding red wine vinegar and basil and ripping your old bread up and mixing it in for a panzanella salad. If you want a curry, spend your money on some chicken and chuck it in a pan with tomatoes (tinned or fresh) and add whatever combination of spices you find in the cupboard, depending on what country’s cuisine you are chanelling.

See? All those will probably be about £1 per person but don’t resemble student food or invoke severe depression in the person who is eating it.

Anyway, back to Chat, the finale is the ‘Ratwalk models’ story on page 46. Yes, RATwalk models. You know what’s coming. It’s a story about a lady who designs and makes clothes for rats. Yes. Rats. It started with making ‘couture creations’ for her pet chihuahua, inspired by a dress worn by Penelope Cruz to the Oscars.

A few years later, business was booming, she went full time into her pet clothing designing and her friend asked her to help “raise the profile of her annual rat convention.”

Honestly, this is not a joke. It’s all true. Her friend runs a yearly rat convention.

So she designed and made the dresses. There was a fashion show with 12 of the ‘models’. Post-show, fame and fortune came her way, she got calls from everyone, even David Letterman.

The article finishes with the touching line, “After all, every single pet should feel like a star.”

That’s something we should all remember as we go on with our days today.

I hope you have learned something here.