Fickle Picky Ickle Friend
It happens occasionally that Puppychild gets to have a friend for dinner at our house (with some fava beans and a nice chianti) and from experience I’ve learned that the simplest foods go down the best where five year olds are concerned.
So, I served wholemeal spaghetti with tuna and sweetcorn flavoured with a wee blob of butter and a squitch of olive oil, a pinch of salt, pepper, a squeeze of lemon and a dash of fresh cream. Then I made a mistake. I added a sprig of well chopped parsley.
Puppychild’s friend pulled a grimace when I placed her little pink bowl of food in front of her. She poked a finger into the depths of her spaghetti and withdrew a teeny speck of green… she looked as though she were about to vomit.
“Wha is dis?” she waved her green speck at me.
“It’s parsley” I explained, “It tastes lovely and it’s very good for you, there’s only a tiny bit in there though.”
“I don’ like ih.” she folded her arms in a huff and shoved the bowl away with her elbow.
“But how do you know you don’t like it, if you’ve never tried it?” I implored.
“I just don’ like ih.” She began to tweeze bits of sweetcorn from the food, but only the sweetcorn that had in no way come within any distance or association whatsoever with the horrible, terrible parsley.
“So what’s your favourite food at home?” I asked.
“Kebabs” she replied.
“Your mummy makes kebabs?”
“No from de chipparse” she replied.
“You like kebabs from the chip shop?
“Yeh s’yummy.” She assumed a hangdog pose, lower lip thrust forward… it was that look that small children make when they’re trying to convey to you that they’re so cruelly starved they’d happily eat a leper’s arse through a hedge (as long as it didn’t have parsley on it).
“But kebabs are full of all sorts of artificial crap, spurious stuff out of cans opened by men with hairy fingers and sweaty arse cracks, you big pink freak!!”
That’s what I didn’t say to her. I just made her a ham sandwich instead which she ate happily and when the children had finished eating, they rushed gaily outside to eat grass soaked in dog pee and to dig up worms and slugs.
Children are so weird.
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(img found spuriously via Public School)
Almost happily ever after
I’ve been trying to fill out this questionnaire for what seems like years now, and again here I am having become distracted by the lure of the internet… it just seems so silly, is all. It’s asking me questions about a good buddy of mine, I’ve known her since secondary school and they’re asking me intimate details about her life, her habits, her weaknesses, and any racial opinions she might have. So silly.
She’s been unlucky in love in the past, this girl. She has a herd of children by different fathers who diddled her over in their various ways but finally, finally she found an amazing fella who not only fell in love with her, but with her children too and that’s something that isn’t exactly easy to do. She married him, and is living her happily ever after with their dogs and their white picket fences and the future is finally rosy.
Except there’s one thing darkening her horizon, the fact that she now has to adopt her own children.
How bizarre is that?
This is what the questionnaire is in aid of. She’s declared me as an unrelated friend of the family and it’s now my job to let the Health Board know that she’s fit to raise her own children. It’s making me feel really uncomfortable. I mean, I know that her husband likes a few cans after a hard day working, but should I mention this? Should I keep it strictly corny and gush about her well adjusted children and not mention that her toddler eats out of the dog’s bowl occasionally?
It just seems so silly. I could write whatever I want and it might not necessarily be true… they know we’re friends, I’m not about to dump her in it am I? Perhaps they have someone tailing me to see if I’m a stand-up citizen, perhaps there’s someone else out there filling in a dumbass questionnaire about me.
Questionnaires, red tape, paperwork… I don’t know why I’m even worrying about it. It’s not like anyone will end up actually reading it, in all probability. I just feel sorry for their family. All they want to do is live, and love each other under the one surname, but they have to parade themselves and confess their weaknesses to do so.
At the same time you have crack head parents smacked up on gear on trains with sweet little children in decrepit buggies who have no ounce of security in the future, totally escaping the radar. Where’s the sense in it all, at all at all?
Why you need to sleep with a teddybear
Created by deviant artist Begemott.
Why nobody had a sense of humour before 1960
Rain has been pelting on damp soil, the fire has wanted to be lit, a dreary week in July such as this would have been very boring if it hadn’t been so much fun.
It started last week on the bus to Galway with friends and a hip-flask and several spurious games of dirty 20-questions. It travelled through a night of drinking and dancing and marshmallow fighting and on into the next evening for several sober games of cards and deep thought and soulful talking… old wounds were unexpectedly torn apart and spilled upon the kitchen table, our agonies seemed less agonizing once their funny sides were pointed out. It was like drinking champagne after a long walk through a desert, only it wasn’t champagne, it was peppermint tea.
The following night, I returned home and received the welcome of a queen. I was quite pleased to see that my pretty flower hadn’t been eaten by slugs too.
Say hello to my pretty flower!
Of course, a dampner can be placed on such an idyllic weekend upon close examination of snapshots stolen by an inebriated trigger finger… embarrassment is bound to ooze at the state of one, and the drunken poses one can pull when suitably excited. It made me think of old photographs, and the restriction that was imposed on their subjects.
“Stay fucking still, you little shit.”
Before daguerrotype photographs were replaced by better photographic equipment in the ’60′s, there was no barstool posing, no sneaky bathroom shots or arms-length group photography. They had to sit with as fixed an expression as possible, and a serious face is the easiest to hold for the hundred seconds it took to expose their images. It’s a sad thing missed, all those instances of happiness that happened back then, it’s as though they never happened.
It’s only eighty years later, and my one-year-old is taking his own photographs, albeit very spurious ones. How times have changed.
Crocs my arse.
‘Would you not put some aul’ shoes on the poor child’s feet?’
they say to me, eyeing me up and exchanging worried glances with onlookers as Sir Fartsalot wombles barefoot, only two weeks qualified as a provisional walker. It’s adorable.
He jaunts around on hot tarmac and stony patio and squishy grassy patches, on sharp pebbles and fluffy carpet, the more textured the better. Touch is so important for learning and what better way than through your feet? I’ve no idea why they make shoes for babies. Welly boots are pretty much all they need. Shoes are often too tempting for babies to remove anyway… have a look at the floor of your local toy shop or supermarket, littered with socks and sandles they are, in a little oddsock parade of wasted money.
And ANYWAY, runners are a hazard to your health!
I’ve always thought it funny that sports brands advertise shoe support so well and get away with it. They put cushioning in every available crevice of the sole of your foot and tell you that you’ve just parted fairly serious money for something that’s great for your feet when it’s entirely the opposite case! They have us all suckered!!!
Think about it, if you support something, you make it weaker don’t you? If you try to correct something that’s already perfect, say by walking around on just your left leg and a pair of crutches for a year… chances are you right leg won’t thank you for it. It’s why marathon runners usually end up with dodgy knees, apparently.
Imagine running barefoot through a forest on a warm summers day after a rainshower to absorb it of all its squelchy nourishment, and tell me it doesn’t sound tempting. And how good for your body would it be if you actually went and did it every now and then?
I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and loved every word of it, it all made so much sense.
Doesn’t it?
Which reminds me…
Here’s a video showing you how to put your cat in standby mode:
Maybe this trick will distract the neighbours from the baby’s feet for a feckin’ change.
Eating – ur doin it wrong.
I was at a wedding dinner last month in the company of other carrot slurpers and talking about the awful state of the weather when I suddenly got a terrible shock. As I looked around, I discovered that everybody… absolutely everybody was eating with their knives and forks in the wrong hands.
I do know how to set a table; the knives go on the right of the plate, the forks on the left. Whenever I pick them up to eat, however, I always switch hands. It just makes more sense to shovel with the right, or use a right-handed anchor to hold the meat down while I saw through its sinews with a left-cutting knife. I’m right handed, ergo my right hand has more control, Shirley? Until that day, I had presumed that everybody ate this way.
It was a very shameful moment, but nothing champagne couldn’t fix.
Almost as stupid as this, I felt. Almost.
I did try switching last week, I shouldn’t have worn that new blouse… shouldn’t have trusted my left hand to take control out of the blue like that, I should have eased it into the idea gently, dammit! Poor lefty bottled it halfway on the journey from plate to mouth and had an awful case of the shakes, discombobulating all over the boobal area of said blouse. Disaster.
But what have I done to my brain?! This lack of control practice for poor lefty has probably damaged it beyond repair, synapses’ bags packed, they’ve gone in search of sunnier climes probably. In fact, I’ve most likely passed the tendancy to eat incorrectly to my growing foeti… if their left hands drop off in their mid-50′s, it’ll be MY fault.
I’m a freak and I’m screwing up the evolutionary chain, the smell of antiestablishmentarianism is rank. I flatly refuse to conform to being a left handed forker though, it’s everyone else that’s wrong, not me!!!
Don’t be racist
… and drives like an Irishman!!!
Stolen from Blame it on the Voices
Would yeh ever go an’ shite?
This post will be a load of crap, but sometimes talking shite is all I have left.
This is especially true for every conversation I’ve had with Laughingboy’s teachers or nurses at school over the last three weeks. He hasn’t seen his schoolroom in over a month, thanks to this bizarre diarrhoea spate he’s been suffering, so they call me up every now and then to check his status.
For the last week, however, there’s been nothing excrementally newsworthy to tell them… the poor kid hasn’t produced so much as a nodge of poo whatsoever, so I don’t really know whether he’s better or not, meanwhile much-needed summer camp respite is on hold.
There aren’t that many ways to express this fact politely though, it’s hard to phrase the problem nicely… there’s:
-He hasn’t produced anything solid, nappy-wise.
-No bowel-movements as of yet.
-Bowel openings are a negative.
I yearn to just come right out with… “The little shit hasn’t had a dump in ages!”
…but that wouldn’t go down too well.
It was out in the garden earlier when I smelt the spurious hum. Laughingboy was swinging in his hammock with a smile on his face, Florence and the Machine was blasting through his earphones and he looked like he was in the zone… you know, that zone.
I whisked him out sharpish and brought him to his bed where I whipped off his tracksuit bottoms and tore at his nappy like a five year old at Christmas, hoping for a flash of brown underneath.
But it wasn’t to be.
I suddenly heard my mother’s voice, that wise poem she used to recite under the right circumstances:
Poor aul’ child, broken hearted;
Paid ten pee, but only farted.
