Collateral.

I’ve spent 4 minutes staring at that word and now, far beyond knowing whether it’s spelt right or wring, I now believe it never to have been a word at all. Ever.

But no, it is a word. Or I think it is. It was certainly a word the other night, because we watched it. Not the word, that would be very dull. We didn’t just write it on a piece of paper and watch it, for a while, no. We watched a film called it.
Not a film called ‘it’. A film called Collateral.

The film was pretty good, and had the following plot:

Jamie Foxx was a man who drove a taxi, and a generally nice man at that. One evening he picked up a nice lady, and she seemed to like him very much. This was a nice thing. His taxi was very clean. Then he picked up Tom Cruise, who was a BAD MAN. You could tell he was a bad man because - well mainly because he kept shooting people and not being sorry for it, but also because he had a BIG SCOWLY FACE. This is what Tom Cruise calls ‘doing’ the ‘acting’. And Tom Cruise forced Jamie Foxx to drive him around, by threatening him with his gun and his terrifying eyebrows. And Jamie would drive and drive, and Tom would sit in the back of the car, with his eyebrows. Eventually, Tom and his eyebrows lost, and Jamie and the nice lady won. Sorry if you’ve not seen it. But those who did want to see it and and don’t want to read a spoiler - look away now:

In my opinion, the eyebrows were to blame. It was the eyebrows what done it.

I realise that many people who have seen it may not remember Mr Cruises eyebrows as giving a particularly notable performance in this film. But I assure you, for me, they were the biggest thing in it. They were about 20 Tom Cruises high.

You know when you’re lying in bed and you suddenly hear a quietly dripping tap in the other room? Yeah? And then You know how, after a couple of minutes, that dripping sounds like the power of the Niagara falls forced into drip form?

It gets like that sometimes with movies too. And television. And, well, pretty much anything, I suppose. In an attempt to make Tom Cruise look older and more distinguished, they’d stuck some grey colour in his hair, you see. Then, in order to co-ordinate, they’d stuck some grey in his eyebrows too. Then they’d added a bit more grey. Then a bit more. Then they’d shaved a sheepdog, rolled two chocolate eclairs in the resulting sheddings, and stapled them to his forehead with some kind of hairy grey staple-gun.

Two minutes into the movie they didn’t bother me. By three quarters of the way through there was barely anything but eyebrows in the whole thing.

Similarly, I have a problem with the growling of Horatio Caine. See, when it started, I tried to get into CSI Miami, I really did, being a big, big fan of CSI Vegas. But after a few episodes I realised that before every third line, David Caruso made a little growling noise like a faraway lawnmower.

And then I couldn’t watch it anymore, because it all became about waiting for the ‘rrRRRRrrrrr…’ noise that signified he was about to speak.
And also because of the way he took off his sunglasses. I really, really hated the way he took off his sunglasses. Sometimes he took off his sunglasses and went ‘rrRRRRrrrr…’ at the same time. GrrRRRrr.

It’s just a tiny thing, but, like when you have a spot in a hard to reach place, or you need to go to the bathroom but there’s no bathroom to go to, it just becomes a bigger and bigger thing until there’s nothing you can think about but that.

Owen Wilson’s nose has very much the same effect on me, I have to say. I watch movies with him in, and whether he/they are good, bad or goodandbad, I just spend the whole time in a stare-out with the wonky nose.

And while I love the OC, and can’t do without, my beloved has to leave the room, because the sound of one particular actress’ voice makes him want to hit things.

There was once a song that I quite enjoyed, until I thought I heard ducks in the background. And the more I thought about it, the louder the ducks became. Kind of ruined the song. What was it called? No idea. ‘The duck song’, as far as I know.

Tom Hanks’ big smug face, of course, is a different matter. It does render me incapable of watching any film with it in, but not in the same way.

But I think it’s quite a common thing, isn’t it?

The little things that bug you? Isn’t it?

Tell me - everyone has this sometimes, don’t they?
Doesn’t everybody get consumed by eyebrows sometimes?
Haven’t you ever had a little niggle that ruined the whole thing For EVER?

Since first thing this morning, there has been
- No Internet
- No internet and no pilot light in the boiler
- No internet, no pilot light in the boiler, and no central heating
- No central heating, No pilot light, No Hot Water (the internet came back at this point, but how warm does the internet keep you at night?)
- No central heating, no hot water, cold water, or, in fact, water.

This is where we are now.

There are good things to be said about this situation. We’ve put the gas fire on for the first time ever and, curled up in front of it on my ikea cushions in my ikea blanket I felt quite the cosiest person in the room.
Which, to be fair, I was, since I was sitting so damned close I was blocking the heat from getting more than three feet from the grate.

Restored to the sofa with my popsicled beloved, we’re now discussing the prospects for the rest of the night, hygienically speaking. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything more disgustingly, hideously, middle-class than the prospect of a toilet cistern filled with waitrose sparkling water. Oh, apart possibly from that paragraph above where I mentioned Ikea twice. That was pretty disgustingly smuggyclass.

I wasn’t going to write about this at all. I was going to write about something else. Still, the bathroom thing is worrying me a little. We phoned the water people, whose reassuring recorded message assured us they were ‘aware of a problem in our area’. Oh good. Well, so are we.

We also are aware, messrs Wettywetwetwaterpeeps. Because we’re the people that aren’t at all wet. Not even damp. Not even a bit.

I’m going to go now, to think about weeing. But not actually wee.

There you go.
It’s all about keeping you informed, blogging. Apparently.

Deciding to spend Saturday teatime at Ikea - because we clearly hate ourselves and believe we deserve pain, I think it’s the result of our strict Catholic upbringings (neither of us strictly had Catholic upbringings, but we’ve decided to start making things up to make our childhoods more interesting. If anyone asks, I was raised by Catholic weasels in the slums of Cambridge) - we pootled up the road on the buses of North London.

At one point it was pouring with rain on one side of the bus, and bone dry on the other. Well not bone dry. Sort of dry. Strictly, it was sort of raining. You just couldn’t see it. Not a great story, sorry, should have thought that one through.

At one point, in a dreary, rundown area, there was a terrifying looking pub, with a scuzzbucket bar’n'club tacked onto the back. There were notices outside promising a ‘Blazin Friday Nite‘, on which ‘Laydeez‘ got in ‘4 free b4 1‘. There was a banner suggesting the possible presence of a stripper in the coming week. It promised “cheap drink’s” (sick) (sic sic) It looked, to me, like the seventh circle of hell. I would rather poo in a hat and wear it than ever have to spend the evening in this place.

It was called, and I do love this: The Golden Stool.

Or ‘The Polished Turd’, as it shall be known forever more.

I took a picture of it for you. Here it is:

(Yeah, sorry about that. I was on the bus).

I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms in my comments that I last wrote on this blog on Monday. And that that is simply Not Good Enough. I agree, and have arrived before you this slightly hungover Saturday morning to chastise myself roundly in public. BAD ANNA! There, that feels better.

I could offer excuses, from the training course I was on this week to a hectic evening schedule and lack of inspiration/anything to write whatsoever, but I know you wouldn’t care. You don’t want the excuses, you just want the goods.

So fair enough, I pledge here, now, I will will write something every day from now on. Promise. Every day, apart from the days when I don’t. But they will be less than the days when I do. Honest. And you have to promise to keep coming back. Deal. Good.

(Update: I’ve changed my mind. Every two days? I promise at least every two days)

In other news, there is a lot of nice stuff in the world of Anna, inbetween the busy, with the possibility of all my dreams coming true - or some of the ones that haven’t already, anyway. My nose is still bruised from where I fell on my face, and I fear it might be quietly broken in a subtle kind of way. Did I say I fell on my face?

There’s an old Celtic blessing that begins ‘May the wind be at your back, may the road come up to meet you…’ and that pretty much describes the whole thing, apart from those who may argue that I went down to meet the road. It was 3am, and very very very dark on the Isle of Iona, and there were gale force winds, and the road was extremely uneven. And it was extremely dark. And also I was very very very drunk. But I think it was mainly the dark that did it. I think.

Anyway, the nose went pink, the nose swolled up a little, the nose went down a little and then the nose developed two little dark patches that won’t go away. Not *very* dark. But still annoying. Is it broken, do you think? I’m only asking because I have no intention of going to the doctor, so this is the only way I’ll find out.

I shall go away and think of things to write with the aid of a bacon sandwich.

Sorry, Again. Think of my little hurty nose as punishment for my bad.
ow.

A couple of weeks ago I said something about surprising myself by a sudden affection for kitchenalia (I’ve just surprised myself again, by using the word ‘Kitchenalia’. I must stop this). Flicking through the Saturday supplement one Friday (it’s a perk)(I mean, I was flicking through the next day’s supplement. Not a six day old one. That wouldn’t be a perk, unless you understand perk to mean ‘something a bit crap‘) I had chanced upon a very lovely oven glove. “Ooooh, what a Lovely oven glove.” I had said. With not a hint of sarcasm or snarl, it seemed I’d suddenly become a growed-up Ladyperson, without having to do anything. Not a thing.

As you may remember, this shocked me not a little.

I had no idea, however, how tiny the tip of the iceberg that would actually turn out to be.

For the admiration of an ovenglove can be explained away by a love for design, liking for a fabric used. What I said last night, however, can be given no excuse At All. There is no Reasoning, no neat tying-up, no simple explanation can be given to the depths of my domestic sinkage in the last two weeks alone, as exemplified in the following words, spoken last night, to my beloved.

From nowhere.
Prompted by nothing.
A propos of… sorry, I’m stalling, for shame.

‘Oooh! We get paid at midnight, don’t we? Shall I order a handheld vacuum cleaner?‘

They words were suddenly there, hanging in the air in front of me. And the way that my beloved was staring at me, it was clear that he didn’t think that he’d said them, so it must have been me.

They made me laugh. A lot. I couldn’t work out the train of thought. It had just, all of a sudden, seemed like the most sensible thing in the world to say. And no, I have no idea why the purchase of domestic appliancage couldn’t wait until morning, but - and I think this was the logic behind it- if you’re going to buy something as potentially exciting as a hand-held vacuum cleaner, how can you possibly wait another moment to do it? The reason behind the logic, of course, I simply cannot fathom…

Well, I have one theory. But it can’t possibly be so. It is this: I was in an Oxfam the other day, and there was a book by Martha Stewart on the shelves. And I think she may have looked at me funny. Now I realise she hasn’t strictly passed over (except to the other side of a bloody big fence, but that doesn’t count), but I do believe I may be channeling Martha, in some small, pretty unimpressive kind of way.

Pretty unimpressive but getting worse by the day, mind - not to be sniffed at. Not to sniff at all, in fact, if you could possibly use a hanky instead. I could embroider you one, with a little boat, and Oooooh, did I tell you I started knitting again at Christmas? I mean, I’m not very good, but I’m only thinking of making a Oh Christ’s Tits, kill me now, it’s starting again, another fit of the wifey. It comes in waves a troughs (clean troughs, obviously). one minute I’m Anna Pickard, the next I’m the blogger’s own Stepford Ladywife. I’m a manic-domestic. It must stop.

How has this come about? Have I been to too many weddings and caught a case of ‘Wife’? Is there a cure? Is there a suppressant? Are there recorded cases of full recovery? And, most importantly, can anyone recommend a good hald-held vacuum cleanerdamnit damnit damnit, there she goes again.

That’s it. That’s it, I’m going to go and dance in the snow, on the way to the pub, in the late afternoon.

Screw you, Martha, and the hoover you rode in on.

This is the wedding we were at last week. This is the ceilidh. This is the bride.
I like this photo.

The other day Dan was asking in the comment box about feeds.
Other people have asked about feeds previously, and I’ve always stayed rather quiet on the issue, mainly in the hope that someone would pop along and say something more knowledgable on the matter.
And they always did.
They were generally people like my lovely seeester who built the site and would therefore know, or highly technically minded people (I don’t think many of them like me though, so they wouldn’t stop by so often). But these people shouldn’t have to answer this question repeatedly. I am 28 years old, or 27 or something, and should be quite capable giving a rational and intelligent technical answer to questions such as these.

So now, just to make things clear for and by myself, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands, be practically decisive on the matter, and show myself to be the independent, assured and proactive young woman of the twenty-first century that I am, by making a conclusive statement on the matter of ‘feeds’ for littleredboat.

And I have done this through the medium of asking my boyfriend (for ironic purposes only, of course) to tell me whether I have these ‘feed’ things or not.

The answer is, Yes, Apparently, I do, and always have. Got ‘feeds’, I mean.

Apparently (my beloved says) they are here:
littleredboat.co.uk/index.rdf
(apparently this is an rdf ‘feed’ which is something like an ‘rss feed’. I don’t know what an ‘rss feed’ is, apart from the fact it sounds a little like ‘arse feed’, and is therefore funny. ‘rdf feed’ doesn’t sound like anything funny, which I consider to be a failing on behalf of the techie community, or perhaps the alphabet. Or something.)

and here:
littleredboat.co.uk/index.xml
(this is, he says, an ‘xml’ (extra-medium-large, I think) feed, which from his description, seems to have quite a lot in common with the ‘rdf/arse feed’, even beyond their shared use of the word ‘feed’, although there also seemed to be some marked differences which would go some way to explaining why two existed not one, because if they were that similar, there wouldn’t be any point in having two names. I don’t think.)

Anyway.
For those who already knew about those, thank you for listening, and sorry for taking your time, for those who didn’t know about those things, then there they are, please take, and use them in whatever way you were thinking you might use them, and I hope that when you use them in that way they produce the effect that you were hoping for when you thought to use them.

Whatever that effect may be.

Unless it means you don’t ever come here and leave comments and read the site anymore, in which case don’t. But I don’t think it *can* mean that, because why would you want a url for something you didn’t want to read? Or something. Maybe it’s not for reading. Whatever. There are two little urls up there, and I’ve been to them, and there’s stuff there, but it’s kind of ugly, and has lots of brackets and no pictures of clouds, but my beloved says that’s what they should look like, and that I’m not to worry, and there’s no way we can put a picture of a cloud on the page, because that’s not what you want. Or something. Then he tried to explain what an Arse feed was, again, and how it was different from the extra-medium-large feed, but I stopped listening and wrote this instead.

I hope that’s ok.
The feeds, I mean, not the post, which is rather headachey and rather rambly, and may not make as much sense as I think it does.
Please comment if you have any questions.
Or just to say hello.
Don’t try to explain ‘feeds’ to me though, I actually don’t care.
Sorry.
You can still say hello, though.
Or, you know, if you have any questions about any of the above, you’re welcome to ask them.
As I already said.
I probably won’t be able to answer them.
But I might try, and I do so hope it won’t mean that you all go away and read this from an ugly page with no clouds.
But, you know, it’s up to you.
It looks like the kind of page that technical people like.
Yes. Erm.
I’m going to put the laptop down and walk away now.

Hello.
I’ve got feeds.

Wandering round the Isle of Iona this weekend, I was reminded of all the wonderful things, the things that I miss, the things that I really loved about being there.

And there was also wind.

I would say I was ‘reminded’ of the wind, but it wasn’t just that I was reminded, because reminded sounds like a *nice* thing, and wind isn’t a nice thing. Sorry.
‘Reminded’ also sounds like a soft, gentle memory jogging, rather than a physical slapping round the chops with the moving-air equivalent of a bucket of spackle.

A gentle breeze is ‘nice’. A warm zephyr, a breath rolling over the savanah - these are nostalgic, evocative winds. The winds in the Inner Hebrides in early February are not. It is thought that the Ministry of Defence secretly holds a laboratory under the sea, and has been developing and testing the world’s largest cold-air only hairdryer in the area for many years. The hairdryer is thought to be over 900 metres high, to have absolutely no practical application whatsoever, blowing icy cold air chilled specially in the hearts of the developers themselves.

I remember living there, and the wind, that started blowing in late September or early October, and blew straight through til April or May. Nonstop. Non. Stop. It didn’t stop. It just blew. I remember seeing people in March actually stopping in their tracks and shouting at the sky. But I couldn’t hear what they were screaming, you understand, because of the stupid cunting wind.

Do I want to move somewhere like this, my beloved kept asking? Shall we run away to the sea and write random stuff for a living? Well, yes, we could, I spose, as long as he was prepared to swaddle me in draft excluder within reach of a computer and prop me in a corner til spring. Wrapped in a duvet. With a hat on.

But other than that, not really, no.

I love my windy beloved, but we will not wander somewhere windy.
It’s all about the windies, you see.

Other things I need to remember to write about:
- What happened to my face that means I can’t wear my glasses.
- Wedding Singers.
- What, exactly, I’m supposed to do with these sausages that the bride gave me.
- Buckeroo for growedups.

Or if anyone has any better ideas, I’ll write about those instead. Or maybe do a minute-by-minute report of the Channel Five movie tomorrow. Or whatever you think best, really. Does anyone think best? Or better than me, at least?

From something someone said in the guestbook)
Does anyone read ‘company’ magazine?
Is this url given in it, or something?
I’m curious, but just not enough to go as far as buying the thing.

Outside Glasgow yesterday, as the bus pulled in at the airport, my beloved pointed out of the window at a sign poked into the hotel gravel.

“Valentines Disco/Dance, 8-late Monday 14 February“, it said, outside the Holiday Inn.

Unfortunately, our plane was due to have left by that point, so we weren’t able to go, but still, the image stuck in my head all evening. A Glasgow kitchen: A husband has handed over some flowers, and tells his wife that he has a special surprise in score. She looks at him, expectantly shimmering in her pinny.

“Happy Valentines day, darling! Get your gladrags on, we’re going to the Airport. There’s a Disco STROKE Dance at the Holiday Inn! Aye!”

My mental images of what happens then are wide and varied - sometimes involving anvils and frying pans - and amuse me greatly. But then, that may not be the case at all.

Maybe, as was my second suspicion, it IS all about people surreptitiously biffing their colleagues in airport hotels while no-one’s looking.

Good god, now I’ve written that, a drunken conversation from Saturday night about testicles being used as - no, I don’t think I do want to start the post like that, you’re right. I’ll start again.

You know, I realise, before now, I’ve been a little dismissive of the Feast of St Valentine - along with the rest of weblogging community and, in fact, almost anyone employed to write for a national newspaper. But now I realise I was wrong. We were all wrong. Valentines day is a great, great thing. A day to celebrate romance! A day enshrouded in all things Cupid! How better to display your unique and individual love for your No, I’m sorry, I can’t do it. I’ll start again.

…

Incidentally - in case I didn ‘t mention it (I didn’t mention it) - I ran away to Scotland for the weekend. To the Western Isles, in fact. It’s a long way.

And so, from here on in - and I realise that a lot of the big attraction to many women about Valentines Day is the sheer quality and scope of the oneupmanship possible (’A single red rose? Aw, how frugal your husband is. I got four HUNDRED red roses.‘ ‘Four Hundred? Really? How cliched. My husband reanimated Elvis’ corpse to sing to me in the bath…’) I would like to point out that - in the interests of pure unadulterated oneupmanship - my Valentines Day was longer than ALL’a Y’alls Put Together. Oh yeah. So Much Longer. We were travelling, in fact, for over 17 hours, all the way from waking up way pre-dawn, clambouring on the schoolbus in a windswept island village, through the worst timetable glitch in the world ever, to a delayed plane and a dead mouse. Did you have so long a Valentines day? Jealous?
Yes, you’re Jealous.

etc.

I shall be sleeping today. And some of tomorrow, but writing and sleeping is the plan overall. And valentines schmalentines to all. It’s a silly day anyway.

But, but…

But on the tube home, as my beloved and I slipped further and further into a zombified stupor, clinging on to each other, with welltimed sharp elbows every now and again to keep alert, well-dressed couples piled onto the tube train, clutching their Musical programmes (I mean programmes FOR musicals, not ones that play tunes. Although that would be pretty cool). They looked happy, in a Valentines kind of way, tied-on foil helium hearts bouncing off the carriage roof in the same rhythm that was rocking me to sleep, and each woman with a single RosefertheLady sticking out of her dress handbag. Hormone-heavy and homeward bound, each couple swapped glances every now and again, fuzzing and buzzily. I hope it isn’t the only time each year those people look at each other that way.

And now to sleep.

I was chatting to friend the other day - ‘chatting’ meaning typed conversation via the medium of the interwebnet, you understand - when he mentioned that he’d soon have to log off (to ‘go away’ in old English) because his dear lady partner (’girlfriend’) was clearly declaring her intention of imminently distributing the edible means of facilitating meaningful quality couple-time, vocally asserting her feminine identity and right to free sceech, while simultaneously emphasising the corporate need for resposiblility in modern monogamous co-dependent relationships (’shouting up the stairs that dinner was almost done and if he didn’t come and set the table he could eat it off his sodding trousers, which was fine by her’).

The thing he said, the thing that got me thinking, was that apparently sometimes this ‘dinner is ready‘ announcement was made meaning ‘dinner’s going to be ready in 15 minutes‘ and sometimes meant ‘dinner’s ready this very second‘.

I pointed out that it might be useful to him to visit one of those websites where you can type in phrases and get them translated from language into language.
I told him someone had just developed a new translation engine that provided almost perfect male-female translation.

Of course, one problem with this - as he’d already experienced - was that you could type the any phrase into the engine, request a female to male translation and it would give you what it meant. However, you would type it in fifteen times, and get fifteen different translations. Because that’s just how it works. Sorry, son.

He asked me at which url he could find this incredible tool? I announced that I had made it all up. Who was the incredible tool now, eh?

At that moment, I decided that I *had* made it all up. I suddenly decided that nurturing the technical prowess to develop and market this translation engine would, eventually, make me my name and millions, and it was a matter of some urgency that I start to develop technical prowess as soon as possible.

Then I remembered that I’m not terribly keen on technical prowess, and that I needed to go to the bathroom, and, remembering that, my flash of inspiration, my incredible invention slipped away from me, like wee, into the night.

I still don’t think it’s a bad idea, though. It does of course have hte possiblility of turning into sub ‘Why dogs are better than women‘ style dross.

I still say that in the right hands it would work. I mean, if only one in five Male to Female queries resulted in a translation of ‘Can we have sex now?’, then I would think that was more than fair (if not overwhelmingly kind) to the male flavoured sex.

Still, let’s give it a go. I’ve set it to Male to Female. Here we go.

Query Submitted:
“Single to Zone 3, please”
Translation Returned:
“Single to Zone 3.”

Query Submitted:
“I’m on the train, I’ll be home in five minutes. Is dinner on, darling?”
Translation Returned:
“I’m having to sit rather too close to other men on the train, and I want to assert that I’m Not Homosexual by talking to my WIFE. I’m sitting VERY close, and I’m a BIT sweaty, but I’m NOT GAY. Is that clear?”

Query Submitted:
“Congratulations”
Translation Returned:
“Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

Query Submitted:
“Does anyone want anything from the coffee machine?”
Translation Returned:
“I’ve just farted”

Query Submitted:
“Dinner smells nice”
Translation Returned:
‘Can we have sex now?’

Query Submitted:
“I was reading an interesting report today about the growth of the textile business sector in the Middle East”
Translation Returned:
‘Can we have sex now?’

Query Submitted:
“I’ve just farted”
Translation Returned
‘Can we have sex now?’

Seems fair.

And then, yes, Female to Male translations would have many similar things, some perhaps suggestions of confusion over the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, some over-use of the Translation Return ‘Could mean Anything, frankly’. And possibly some allusion to marriage. Some points, of course, would remain the same. You can’t escape the fact that the phrase ‘I’ve just farted’ signifies a heartfelt desire to do the wild thing in Any language. Doesn’t it?

And then, of course, there’s be a whole world of ‘Male to Male’ and ‘Female to Female’ translation, I’d need help with these - which means employing a staff, obviously. And then you could move into the world of bisexual translation tools, but that just makes my head go all wibbly, so I suppose you’d be safer to stick with a plain old relationship translator, or perhaps just a monolingual mutli human bean translation device. or something. Or perhaps just the relationship translator.

A relationship translator. It’s a funny idea for about five minutes, until you realise that you’re crossing the border into a world of obvious joke pain, and then it rather loses its sheen.

Still though. Maybe. When I have the technical ability, I’ll develop it myself, market the idea, get backers through my contacts in the world of new media and make my millions. (Translation: I’m thirsty. Have we got wine? I need to pack. Bored now. Where are my hair straighteners? I need a wee).

Whooopses, again - yet again - again and without giving you prior notice beforehand (what would Emily Post say?), I fell into a sad-hole and quite neglected to write about it. Not very easy to write about, and all. Not terribly funny. (”And then, right, I burst into tears for no reason! It was Hil-A-rious!”)
Apologies for this lack of comedic writtinging on the little red boat of late.

Let me have a little think.
Only half an hour’s think.
And then it will be better.

I will Make it So.

I just went impulse shopping and bought a whisk, two pan scourers and sensible food.

The other day I was looking through a magazine and found myself actually saying the words ‘Ooooh, what a lovely oven glove’.

Is this it, the growedupness, is this it?