Hiding from the Pooparazzi

30 SECRETS IN 30 DAYS # 1:, originally uploaded by Me & my life!.

It’s been a long day thanks to Keith and Norman who gave Richard some homemade Bolognese sauce which they said was “a little spicy”. Richard joked that it contained five types of chilli which I thought was a pun on the old “5 types of cum in a Swansea curry” story - years of working on a helpline meant that more than once callers began a conversation with “Can you get AIDS from sperm in curry?” A case for CSI Madras methinks! But no, the Bolognese did had five types of chilli including jalapeños and tasted hot on the way in – and even hotter on the way out. So I have been stuck at home near the lavatory for most of the day.

I discover that Gavin has also had an explosion: he left the office today and when he got to his car the bottle of Lucozade left on the passenger seat had exploded. The entire interior was covered in sticky orange goo! And I mean covered - it's stained the roof lining and took him three hours to clean what he could when he got home. How happy do you think he was? As he said “Seats, windows, dashboard, carpets... even inside the cubby holes, over my CDs: fucking everything!” And to think they used to say it was good for you – I never trusted the stuff myself.

There have been other culinary mishaps. Picture the scene, as Sophia used to say, Haverfordwest 1986, me with big hair and shoulder pads galore making curry for my friends who had come around to help sew clothes for my wedding (it’s a long story and I’ll explain it some day - for now let’s just say “I liked cake” and have done with it). Could they resist meddling – no! Into the kitchen they trooped in twos and threes adding a pinch of something here and a pinch of something else there until the curry was metaphorically black and blue. One of the then decided to put a little salt in it and rather than use a teaspoon – oh no too simple – they upped the jar and heaps poured in. I tried sugar, vinegar, lemon juice everything but it was still the saltiest meal ever eaten (unless you count the Swansea curry above).

Of course using a teaspoon doesn’t always help. One former partner took me strawberry picking – turned out he wasn’t meaning M&S for a quick point at the fruit counter but a real farm – what next tobacco crops, cotton, nights spent running from Simon of Legree! (I only know Uncle Tom’s Cabin from The King and I – gay musical-loving stereotype that I am!! I’m still waiting for a food range containing Uncle Tom’s Carbonara – much safer than Mr Uphill’s Bolognese recipe!)

We made pounds and pounds of strawberry jam and then having used up all the preserving sugar, we turned the last few strawberries into a tart and a smoothie. The tarts were baking away in the oven and I was baking away in the kitchen as it was bloody hot day. I really fancied a cool smoothie but it was undrinkable. Thinking the Apostle spoon meant that the white stuff in a salt pig would be sugar, he’d heaped it in the blender. We poured the smoothies away and drank Canton’s water supply dry only to realise the tarts would be similarly saline! I’m not sure which of the Apostles was actually responsible so I blamed them all.

Had any culinary mishaps - email me on fathobbit@ntlworld.com