This morning Chris was standing behind me, while I added tonic water to our online Tesco order, and a sizeable chunk of chewed Shreddies and banana fell out of his mouth onto my head. He barely batted an eyelid. I'd like to say this was unusual but Chris seems to struggle keeping things in his mouth. It's not that he's disabled or anything, I think he just gets distracted by something more interesting and doesn't notice the smear of ketchup or flake of haddock clinging onto his face for dear life.
The one I took pictures of was dreamy, I loved it. It was both quiet and powerful at one and the same time, understated yet striking. I beginning to sound like a 1960s housewife.
Sometimes I worry I'm going to become one of those people that marries a rollercoaster or jizzes on the Eiffel Tower. I've never even been to Paris, let alone jizzed on the Eiffel Tower. I'm afraid of Parisians you see, in much the same way that when you go to a cool nightclub you're scared of all the people inside. Until that is that you realise the people you bump into on the dance floor are just called Mandy and Aiden and they work in accounts. In my mind, in Paris, they'd be called Madelyn and Andre and they'd be less friendly than Mandy or Aiden. Probably because Madelyn and Andre were less inclined to tolerate a gurning idiot, two hours into an ecstasy fuelled rave.
Alison told me that she broke a plate this morning by dropping a bowl on top of it. The end of a dinner service is a misery that can go on for years. You don't want to replace an entire set just because you only have five side plates but then you know at some point, you'll be throwing a dinner party and one person will have to have an odd one. We recently replaced our classic white ones that we'd bought at The Pier when we lived in London. I bought a stoneware set with a charcoal rim from that website Lorraine Kelly advertises. They've not been great; covered in cutlery scratches already.
I was in the shed recently and found the remaining plates and bowls from the old set in a box. I thought Chris had thrown them all away but it seems he's hoarded them because - you never know.
Sets of towels are another thing that eventually go to the wall, slowly and painfully. You start with a lovely set, fluffy, clean, and most importantly matching, and bit by bit over the years they turn into the sort of collection you might find in a crack den. The only way towels ever leave our house are when they're wrapped around a dead cat and buried in the flowerbed. In the meantime Chris, with his magpie tendencies, collects 'lost' towels. We have a collection of towels stolen from hotels and gyms around the world, all white, none of them matching. It seems a shame to buy a full set when we have loads of serviceable towels here, who the hell cares if by using them we appear to live in a homeless shelter.
When we had a garage we had two tumble driers in there - neither of them were ever used. I asked Chris where the second one had come from and apparently it was his parents' and they offered it him when they bought a new one. He accepted their offer because you never know when the first one would break down. Our towels could do with a few spins in one of those now, if we still had them. As it is they go on the line with everything else where they become stiff and scratchy. I actually had towel envy a few weeks ago when I saw Paul remove and fold a matching set of soft fluffy towels from his tumble drier. I've known one of our freshly laundered towel to cut my face open before now.
While scrolling through Facebook earlier I came across an advert for giant elastic bands that you use for exercising. You can hook them over a door, attach them to a gymnastic step, or simply slip them under your feet and use them as resistance bands.
I'm usually suspicious of adverts on social media because you don't know if the company is vetted or if they're going to swizz you out of your hard earned cash so I decided to do a bit of research. I wish I hadn't because now every advert on Instagram is for bloody resistance bands and other home workout paraphernalia, and they're making me feel fat.
The lockdown has seen a proliferation of workout at home solutions and every other twat on Instagram is doing it. People half my age, and half my weight, looking buff and feeling great with their multicoloured elastic bands and dumbbells. What I want to know is where these hideous twenty somethings get all their money for the kit they use, let alone the dental work, while I find myself sitting here, poor, snaggle-toothed and with a mild gin problem at the age of 44.
Sometimes, on a whim, I'll find myself dragged into the notion of keeping fit. Every couple of years I'll join a gym or buy some contraption designed to tone my arms or give me a six pack. The last time this happened I found myself paying seventy quid for a four week membership of a gym a few weeks before I went on holiday. I went swimming three times which works out at over £23 per swim. I think I may have paid over the odds.
Naturally I blamed the person who took my induction meeting. He asked me what I wanted to get out of my four week membership and when I told him that I was going on holiday at the end of December and I'd like to lose a couple of pounds he practically laughed at me.
'Well that's not going to happen,' he scoffed with a smug look on his face. 'I'll show you a workout you can do though.' He said all this while checking himself out in a mirror, tensing his muscles and running his forefinger down the outside of his own perfectly toned arm. I hated him immediately.
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