Sign of the times

The photo says it all. And I love it. Hat sellers outside Trent Bridge cricket ground have a readymade market of stupid hat buyers passing their stalls. However, with grammar and prices (4.99 pence!) so badly misjudged, you have to wonder what sort of simpleton they're targetting.

I bought one.

Too busy?

I'm actually too busy to write a post. Apart from this one which is explaining why I'm too busy to write a post, even though I'm writing one. Er. This is confusing. Anyway, I am indeed busier than Mr Busy McBusy from Busytown in Busyshire. I'm recording podcasts, making video's (nothing shady, honest Guv) and have lots of hectic things going on. So, why post about this dear, loyal readers?

Guilt.

Yep. I've been perusing my old postings, right back to my first ever one on New Year's eve 2005 and I realised how inconsistent I've been. Part of the problem seems to be that I am writing quite a lot of stuff for my Twitter and Facebook chums. The thing is though, social network and micro-blogging sites just don't allow one to fully express themselves. As you know if you're a regular reader of YBATYD or, indeed, a newcomer, you'll see that my musings always require far more space than is acceptable or even allowed on Facebook, Twitter etc. And anyway, a blog should be a fuller, more rounded experience for it's readers. Hmmm. I seem to have solved my own problem. A blog is not the same as any other medium and so deserves its own style and freedom of expression. Phew.

Crikey. This is a bit of a serious posting. That's not like me at all. Maybe I should lighten the mood. Er ... Oh yes, this is amusing. A colleague of mine told me today that when she was at school there was a craze going round whereby the girls would cake lipstick on and then plant a big kiss on the mirror in the girl's loo. God knows why but hey, who needs a reason for a craze?

Anyway, the Head Teacher was a tad miffed at this and made numerous attepmts to get them to stop. Finally, she gathered a bunch of the naughty gals in the lav, along with one of the school cleaners. The teacher addressed the throng by asking the cleaner to show the girls exactly how much work went into cleaning the lipstick off the mirror. The cleaner picked up a rancid, grey dishcloth, dunked it in the toilet and used it to wipe the lippy off. The girls never 'kissed' the mirror again.

Hooray. Normal service has been resumed.

A slice of bad luck

Picture the scene: you're enjoying a bit of James Bond on DVD (Casino Royale no less), with your best friend. You've enjoyed a fab, gut-busting meal and the world is a happy place. Then you decide to make it just that little bit more perfect. Melons. Yes, you suddenly remember that you have a ripe one, nestling in the fridge between the Onken yoghurt and the 2 litre bottle of Strongbow. I'm a classy geezer you know.

So, without a moment's thought, the DVD was paused (no, not the bit many of my female colleagues get all excited about - Daniel Craig emerging from the sea in his pants) and I leapt over the sofa, did a forward roll into the kitchen and threw open the fridge door with gay abandon. Er...

Seconds later, the juicy melon was at my mercy, held down upon the chopping board by my manly hand. I whipped out my knife and got to work. Slice after dripping slice of sweet melon fell away as I powered through the powerless fruit. The it happened.

I think I may have said something along the lines of "OH F*CK!". This was because, in my haste, I had almost sliced the end of my thumb off. That knife was terrifically sharp and I had sliced two-thirds of the way through the tip of my innocent finger. The second I felt the blade slicing through one of my favourite digits, I knew I was in trouble. Bravely, I called out to me lovely friend that I was in a fair bit of pain, before almost fainting. Well, when I say fainting I mean that my natural defence system kicked in and decided that the best way to help me would be to make me sweat profusely, develop tunnel vision, tinnitus and a desire to rest my head on the cold floor. I obliged.

After several agonising minutes and a fair amount of horror-film-style blood splattering (the bottle opener and salad bowl took the brunt of it), my friend had stemmed the flow and helped me administer a rather nifty looking bandage. I knew my First Aid training would come in handy one day. Finally, we cleared up the red mess, tidied up the blood-soaked pieces of kitchen roll and headed back to the telly to resume our film. Then I remembered the melon.

Look, you have to get your priorities right. I may have nearly lopped the end off my thumb, experienced exquisite pain and bled like a halal pig, but food is food. Just because you've suffered a major, life-threatening trauma (am I exaggerating a tad?), it shouldn't mean you have to neglect your tum. So I zipped back into the kitchen, grabbed the plate of succulent (and blood-free) slices and returned to Jimmy B and his trunks. Life was once again, good.

But now I have a phobia of melons. The fruit that is.

Tiny car

Capers and such like

Do you ever wish you liked a food, but didn't? But wish you did? Even though you didn't? No? Well I do. There are at least three foods that I didn't like but made myself like them because, well, they just looked so much fun to eat.

The first one is .... celery. Yes I know. People think it's dull and that it takes more calories to eat it than it actually contains. Aside from all that though the reason I yearned for celery so much was that it just looked so crunchy, easy to use and brilliant for scooping up yummy stuff like houmous, peanut butter and salsa dip. When I first tried it, naked ... er, the celery was naked, not me. Or was I? Anyway, the celery was 'au natrel' and I thought it tasted like crunchy water. But I was determined to be a 'crunchy dunker' and I persevered with the little green stalk until I finally came to love it's fresh, bland taste. I always remember one summer's day, when I was but a child, my dad sitting in the garden, his belly button full of salt and him dunking his celery in it... Aaah memories.

My second hated food was .... olives. When I first tried an olive, the taste made my mouth feel violated. I thought they were disgusting. But olives just seemed to be the darling of the social event. They were, and still are, bloody everywhere - parties, restaurants, pubs and clubs. And they're just so, well, handy. Easy to nibble on their own or with a plate of exciting goodies. I needed to get to like olives. So I re-visited them and discovered that black olives tasted rather like metallic courgettes diced with a little bit of cat vomit but if I had them with something else they were bearable. Admittedly, I had to eat them with things that helped disguise the flavour slightly. Cheesey Doritos worked quite well, but eventually I had to 'go it alone' with an unaccompanied black olive. I liked it. The next step was to tackle the gag-inducing green efforts. Surprise surprise. My black olive training had taught my taste buds to actually enjoy the weird flavour imparted by olives. I loved the little green buggers. Then I discovered stuffed olives: pimento (what the hell IS pimento?), almonds, anchovies, sun-dried tomatoes and more. Nowdays, there is always a jar of fat, stuffed olives lurking in my cupboard.

My final challenge was .... beetroot. I blame my schooldays for my acquired abhorrence of this stupid-coloured vegetable. They used to put beetroot in loads of meals and as the meals themselves were generally unfit for human consumption, the lowly 'beet' quickly became associated with all that was vile, inedible and an insult to all things cullinary. Plus, I thought that beetroot was just showing off, by bleaching it's sodding purple-ness onto every other foodstuff on my plate. There's no need for that is there? Then, one day, about 25 years after my last beetroot-infected school dinner, I was treated to a delicious meal which was essentially a fresh tuna salad (I'm dangerously obsessed with tuna by the way) that also contained, dear God - beetroot. Unfortunately, I wasn't in a position to grab a fork and flick the offending bits into the nearerst bin/flower pot/pram and so I had to actually eat the stuff. It was delicious. It was amazing. It was beautiful. It was angelic. It was ... purple heaven. All these years, I'd shied away from, despised, loathed and reviled beetroot. And there, in one glorious moment, I discovered that it was, in fact,delicious. And did you know that if you eat enough of it, it can even make you wee go pink, which is always a hit at parties. Bonus.

And so, my life, like my tum, is now fuller because I made myself like three foods which I had just naturally avoided or disliked. I can't imagine not enjoying them again and know that I will always be happier for including them in my diet.

Capers however are rank. They taste like soil, laced with battery acid and covered in algae. They actually make me want to be sick. So why then, did I buy a jar, specifically to include in a tomato salsa recipe, as part of a meal from a Jamie Oliver cookbook? Because the recipe said so. I had faith in Jamie 'Olive-Oil". I truly believed that, despite including the single most revolting food item know to humanity, the recipe would just work. I really believed the flavours of all the ingredients would work in perfect harmony and produce a salsa of such joy, taste and sensation, I would actually need to spend some time alone for a while. I was wrong. It tasted of soil, laced with battery acid and covered in algae, but with the addition of garlic and onion. I felt my intestines trying to force their way up my oesophagus in a bid for freedom. The evil, hateful, murderous capers had invaded and pillaged all the lovely flavours from my salsa and killed them in cold blood. Well, a tomato-based juice actually, but you get my point. So, I tried. I really tried to like capers. But no. Capers are horrid. Truly awful. Utterly repellant. They are wrong!

But the jar's still in my fridge and I'm afraid. Very afraid.

Apprentice joy

I watch The Apprentice on the telly. For those of you who don't know, or are lucky enough to live another country, it's a sort of reality TV show where 'contestants' are chasing a dream job with a major international company. They spend what feels like 244 weeks being 'interviewed' by way of a myriad number of tasks and challenges, all designed to test their business acumen, leadership qualities and decision-making skills.

Unfortunately, most of them are tossers.

OK, that's a little harsh, but I wanted to raise a laugh early on. None of them are tossers. Well some of them are. Actually most of them have an 'air of the tosser' about them to be honest. We're on about the fifth series now and I'm constantly amazed at the staggering levels of ineptitude, arrogance and well, tosser-ness which they manage to display. There have been some monumental examples of stupidity. One that springs to mind was from an earlier series:

"I'm outstanding in everything I've done," lawyer/artist/tosser (allegedly) Nicholas de Lacy-Brown assured us in the opening episode. However, Nick's wide and varied life experiences clearly didn't include selling lobsters - a grave omission that saw him offloading £20 crustacea for the cut-down price of a fiver in London's Chapel Market. He totally cocked up on his maths and flogged all this top-notch aquatic grub for practically nowt. And this was a man/tosser who was earning shed loads of cash in his chosen profession. How the hell do these people do it? Let's not forget that these people must have got their amazing jobs by either luck, nepotism or by shagging the boss.

I'm sure you all have your favourite examples of unbelievable idiocy from the show, but surely who could forget, as part of the Marrakech task when the two teams had to find items in the city's huge souk? A kosher chicken was on the list. Michael, who called himself a "good Jewish boy" on his CV, didn't know what kosher meant and bought it from a halal butcher before getting the Muslim chap to pray over it, thinking that would be enough. I'm sorry but the word 'tosser' leaps from my fingers and onto this blog once again. You have to laugh though don't you? And so from this plethora of simpletons, Sir Alan (Brillo-head) Sugar must pick a winner to become a part of his uber-empire. Well, Sir Alan, when it comes to choosing a brilliant new apprentice, I have to say:

"You're fired".

Spend & save

Well happy new year and all that jazz. However, the question is, exactly how happy a new year is it? With a world economic recession circling us like vultures over a dead water buffalo, what does 2009 hold for mere mortals like you and me?

Well it depends on how you look at severe financial trauma. Me? Well, I look at my spending and cut back where I can but not to the point where I'm eating soil and making my own pants from leaves. I still treat myself to things. Like margarine and tiny oil paintings. However, some people view things like closing down sales as a retail bonanza, not to be missed at any cost, regardless of the financial situaion.

Certain people manage to convince themselves that by spending money, they are actually saving money. I knew this female, lady-woman who told me she'd saved £3 on a toilet roll multipack, so she bought a £50 coat to celebrate. Is it me or is that mental? So with all these stores like Woolies, Zavvi, MFI and The Pier disappearing from UK high streets, it's like a Pandora's box for many folks. They're like shopping-zombies, lurching trance-like through the doors of the latest collapsing retail giant. And once inside, that bonkers 'spend & save' logic takes over their enfeebled minds and they start shelling out wads of cash to buy things they don't need and can't afford. But it's such a 'brilliant price', they just can't pass up the opportunity. What wisdom.

Then, 5 months later when they've defaulted on their eleven credit & store cards, Mr Bailiff turns up on the doorstep and removes all the lovely stuff purchased in that whirl of discount-infused excitement. And the result? Cheap, nearly-new goods on sale at a reposession auction near you!

Winner.