Smokey the Magnificent

So, yeah, that driving test. Well, the good news is that until the last ten seconds of the test I had 91%, and had in fact passed. The bad news is that while parking at the conclusion of the test, I panicked and kindasortaslightly bumped the car next to me, which is a thing I never do; whereupon the tester muttered a world-weary expletive and said “Come inside, we need to have a little chat”. (The car was fine, by the way. There was a young lady in it who found the incident amoosing, and was fortunately able to reassure the tester that the scratches above the wheel had been there earlier and were not made by me.) Anyway. Some other bod had cancelled his appointment for next Wednesday, so I shall get to take it again fairly soon; but still though. And the particularly peeving part is that she nearly didn’t let me take the test at all, again, because our registration card thingy was out of date; I explained that we’d updated it but the new one hadn’t arrived yet, and showed her the receipt, but she hmmed and hawwed and eventually oosed back into the AA to print out a new one; but it was a close thing. Also, apparently I coast too much. And I think I was a bit jerkier than usual with my gear changes, again on account of Nerves; not that she was going to fail me for that, though. 91%, as I say. So there it is.

Let us talk of happier things. Did you know a study has shown that women with D-cup or larger breasts are on average 10 IQ points smarter than women with A- or B-cups? This intrigues me. I read it in a book. Also, I am shortly about to make mango sorbet. And yesterday I finished knitting the back piece of a wraparound kimono-type top for the Auxiliary Pig. Also, the snortlepig calls me “flatcheeks”.

I was going to put up a photo of a spectacular car crash, just to put things in perspective, but on reflection it seems a tad tasteless. So here’s a tortoise instead.I bet he wouldn’t bump the sides of another tortoise while parking, even if very nervous. And yet, certain subspecies of the species are endangered. So it just goes to show.

Did you know there are different kinds of chopsticks? Chinese ones are square at the end you hold them, and round at the pointy end; Japanese ones are shorter and pointier; and Korean ones are flattish and rectangular. One can also obtain training chopsticks, which are held together at the end like tongs. This is a thing I did not know before.

Tomorrow I am having my 20-week ultrasound to check on the sex, wellbeing and possibly numbers of the Auxiliary Pig. The snortlepig is enthusiastic about the prospect, although I’m not sure she’s quite grasped it - she thinks the Auxiliary Pig will be wearing clothes, and that we’ll be able to see it smiling. She remains adamantly convinced that it is a boy; as do two Filipino couples from church, who feel it is my moral duty to produce one; and my brother-in-law, for reasons he is keeping enigmatic. Myself, I do not like to venture a guess, as my maternal instincts have proven in the past to be completely off the wall. It makes me feel a bit left out on Mothering.com, on which everyone knows their child’s sex and middle name from the night she was conceived, preferably in a Vision or Dream; but there it is. Anyway, if the snortlepig had fulfilled the dreams I had while gestating her, she would have been a) quadruplets and b) stolen from the hospital immediately after the birth. Which might have been a blessing, really, at least if the thief had been kind enough to leave one of her.

My health, thank you for asking, is creeping slowly back from the abyss. Today we ate sprouted French lentils for lunch, made by me; and I then went for a walk to buy groceries, made vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, kneaded bread dough and baked a banana cake. To be sure, I then had to go lie down and eat a great quantity of olives; but it is Progress. Hopefully soon I will summon up the oomph to begin knitting.

Ooh, yes, I was going to ask. What is the protocol for revealing the sex of one’s unborn child? We didn’t find out ahead of time with the snortlepig, so it was easy; I just got Helpdesk Man to do all the ringing around after I was born, and trusted to the natural garrulousness of a small church to fill in the (no doubt vasty) gaps caused by his antisocial nature. But what does one do when one finds out beforehand? Should it be announced with pomp and ceremony? Should the family be reverently gathered to hear the news in hushed and thrilling tones? Should one barter the information for sweetmeats? I do not know.

1. Passing or failing a driving test are not the only two options. One can also work oneself up into a fever pitch of nerves for half an hour, loitering around the AA building reading “Tips for Passing Your Driving Test” in a frenzied panic and sucking on glucose sweets in order to prevent oneself passing out, only to find out that one’s left rear indicator light is out and the only skill one will get to demonstrate for the grey-haired matriarch is opening one’s car door. One must then pay a hefty fee to rebook the test for the nearest possible date, which is two weeks in the future.

2. According to second-wave feminist Germaine Greer in her classic polemic The Female Eunuch, one has, and I quote, “a long way to go, baby” if one reacts with disgust or horror to the idea of drinking one’s own menstrual blood.

3.  The bit of a sari which goes over one shoulder is called the pallu, and can be used for covering one’s head, holding hot dishes, wiping a baby’s nose and sundry other helpful activities. One can even knot one’s keys up in the end that dangles down one’s back.

4. Spare ribs can actually taste pretty good if you marinate them in honey, soy, balsamic vinegar and other nice things and slow-cook them.

5. Glass chopping boards look arty and do not transfer the dank stench of garlic to dark chocolate when you chop it up for a cake, but they blunt your knives and are dangerously slippery.

6. Most of the times honey is mentioned in the Bible, it does not refer to honey from bees but to date honey, which is made (I think) by squooshing them.

7. No culinary heights I ever attain are likely to garner me as much adulation as I get when I mix garlic with butter. This disturbs me.

8. If you write an article about using catnip as a hair conditioner, seven months later a woman who has also written an article on the subject will fire off numerous angry emails to the administrator of your site accusing you of plagiarism; and by numerous I mean “every couple of hours”. Not only will this rankle for professional reasons, but it will remind you sadly that your own experiments with catnip rinses neither produced a luxuriant shine nor cured your split ends, but turned your hair into a lank, greasy mess, leaving you with an almost-full bag of catnip that mow constitutes a disposal problem in a neighborhood inundated with cats.

9. Pet shops sell fish called penguin tetras, which are like neon tetras only a) much less pretty, b) more expensive and c) not at all reminiscent of penguins. I do not know why. Have they ever sold one?

10. Burning a dead Christmas tree is fun! The needles all light up and send flames shooting for the sky, or rather the (live, planted) tree in the way of it; and then, after a few nerve-wrackiug moments, it subsides and leaves a a mere charred shell, which would probably be poignant if you weren’t in a hurry to cook sausages over it.

Did you know Helen Keller was a socialist? I always thought she was famous merely for being blind, deaf and mute, but apparently in her own day she was a well-known social activist. Have a keek at this:

“Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?”

Alexander Graham Bell and Einstein were big fans of her. So was Mark Twain, but I do not look kindly upon his opinions. He was very anti-Jane Austen. Smegger.

Also, I made a loaf of herby bread to take to Mother’s on Sunday, to greet practically my only sister when she flies in from London for the wedding of practically my only other sister. But I want to eat it. I want to eat it very badly. I find myself calculating the time it would take to make a replacement loaf, which will not do - we’re out tomorrow night, and during the day I have to bake a fruit cake for the aforementioned wedding, which will take about six hours - but it saddens me greatly. Then again, as Helen Keller said, “A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.” And I’m sure she knew a thing or two about carbs.

I’m currently freezing a shmallow. What happens when you freeze a shmallow? I don’t know, but I will tonight. I could probably google it, but Isaac Newton didn’t discover gravity by googling it… and that’s factually true - think about it. It’s a temporal thing, probably a bit beyond you. Certainly the coyote doesn’t think much of you.

On Sunday I decided it was Friend Day and I would rank my friends according to their pleasingness on that day. By lunchtime Helpdesk Man was down to -8 points and the snortlepig was in the lead with 1. Then I decided to invite some Friends over for dinner and make a Friend Day cake, so I did (chocolate rum cake with caramel icing and “Happy Friend Day” piped on the top; also a pigeon, which I designated the official bird of Friend Day), and bullied my Friends into bringing cider and bacon to add to the festivities. (Not all of my Friends. Only two. I have more friends than that, but there wasn’t much chicken.) Strangely, Helpdesk Man ended up with the most points, but only after he found out he could win a chocolate pigeon. It was a nice day. The end.

Also, I made a cake. A different, nother cake. Here it am.

Also, I decided this week that I would not surf the internet at all. It was supposed to make me productive, but then the dishwasher broke and my psyche became paralysed with horror and languor and a general all-pervading sense of swimming in treacle, and the table got all covered with dishes so I couldn’t get out my sewing machine and make the cunning skirt for the pig that I was intending to whip out in an afternoon, and then the pig started saying things like “I’m SAAAD, I want to DIEEE” in full-on tragedy voice, so I decided Enough was Enough and went to town to buy some L-Tyrosine, and while I was there I went to the library and got out a bunch of books, so I have spent most of this week reading them. Which is probably an improvement on surfing the internet, at least. I got out a book about adoption and a very bitter memoir by a fat lady about being fat, and some others I haven’t read yet about Celtic Women in Myth and History and a woman who had a face transplant. Also the Usborne Book of Castles, but that was for the pig.I thought she should know about castles so when we go to Disneyland she will be groovy and au fait with Sleeping Beauty’s.

I took the L-Tyrosine a few hours ago, but I don’t feel any more zingy. Well, I made some muffins. They had rum in them, but I’m not convinced, even though Alison Holst doesn’t usually steer me wrong. Hopefully the aminos will kick in in a day or so and I can post photos of myself taking salsa classes atop a mountain at dawn.

Also, we are potty-training the pig. Mixed success. She just throomed on the couch…. for instance.

1. I am frequently amazed by the kind of men who manage to get wives.
2. Yesterday I finally bit the bullet and attempted to cure myself of fatigue, anaemia and the moops by consuming raw, frozen liver cut into little pills and swished down with water. It was horrid, but considerably less horrid than downing liver in its customary cooked, chewable form. I only managed to ingest about a teaspoon’s worth, and it had no appreciable effect on my desire to train for a half-marathon, but they say it’s cumulative. I will Let You Know.
3. I found out at the supermarket today that the salmon I have been smugly purchasing to ward off the brainworms is farmed, not wild. There’s always something, innit. Farmed salmon is evil; they keep them in cramped conditions and feed them soy and grains and things, which mucks up their omega 3-omega 6 ratio and no doubt makes them discontented in their squish. And then they have to feed them dye to get their flesh the correct pink. I got cod instead, which is cheaper and hopefully less evil, but not very appetising.
4. Did you know more women have blonde or red hair than men? Wikipedia said so. I wonder if it’s due to the Barbie/Ken beauty model.
5. Speaking of Barbie and Ken, Toy Story 3 is excellent.
6. I need a way to make a lot of money fairly fast. Nobody’s going to lose an eye or anything if I don’t, but it would be handy. Ideas?
7. I made white chocolate ice cream with homemade ginger cookies crumbled through, and it is mighty tasty, but Helpdesk Man does not like it. I am torn between wounded scorn at his dismissal of any ice cream that is not double chocolate, and smug because it means more ice cream for me.
8. The snortlepig is probably going to grow up to be a taxidermist or a serial killer. She has a penchant for Death. The highlight of supermarket trips is visiting the “dead fishies”, to the point where she refers to grocery shopping as “seeing dead fishies!”; and today when we went to the butcher and they had large portions of cow hanging up out the back, visible through a window no doubt designed to prove that everything is sanitary and pukkah, the pig was delighted and insisted I lift her up so she could beam at them for five minutes while a butcher whacked off bits with an evil-looking knife and gave us uncomfortable glances. Also, though? According to the sign, the Maori word for beef is “kau”. This gives me more happiness than words can convey.
9. Would you rather lose all your worldly possessions in a fire, or be stranded for a month on a desert island after your plane crashed into the briny?
10. I have megalophobia.

10:32 - Under-layer of fondant successfully applied to all three cakes. Helpdesk Man, who was also stricken with the deathpox, is lying in bed next to a bucket. The snortlepig thought it would be amusing to watch as I dusted the table with icing sugar, and then plant her foot in the middle of it. Oddly enough I still like her; it must be the fever. Am keeping body and soul on nodding terms with scraps of cake and fondant.

11:39 - Realised any skill I once possessed at making icing roses has disappeared, either due to the passage of years or rapidly-progressing nerve damage. Am Googling “how to make icing roses”.

12:02 - In a martyr-like display of maternal solicitude, made bacon and eggs for me and the snortlepig. Snortlepig choked on a piece of bacon rind. Proudly: “I throw up!” Peering, delighted: “I throw up BACON!”

1:36 - Seven roses of somewhat dubious botanical verisimilitude completed. The pig keeps eating the flower paste. Helpdesk Man has staggered out of bed and had a bowl of ice cream, despite my warnings that Dairy is Mucous-Forming.

2:56 - Have piped a large number of royal icing butterflies on greaseproof paper. It calmed me temporarily into a trance-like state, until I sneezed three times and my amygdala got lodged in my sinuses.

6:13 - All cakes fully masked. Had a break for a while giving the pig the milks and watching a bit of Volver, which Helpdesk Man and I started watching last night upon discovering it in several Top Feelgood Movies of All Time lists. Last night the main character’s no-good husband tried to rape her teenage daughter, who killed him with a knife. About the time she started dragging the body to a nearby chest freezer we decided we didn’t Feelgood, and went to bed. Today, while the snortlepig slept and had the milks, the main character engaged a local prostitute to help her dump the body. I also learned the main character’s father had had an affair with another woman, who may or may not have burned him and his wife to death before leaving town, and whose daughter is now dying of cancer. It’s a gay romp, I tell you. It’s also subtitled, so after half an hour of this my eyes started to frizzle and I decided icing the wedding cake would be more Feelgood. Incidentally: never trust things you read on the internet.

8:11 - You know what I’d do if I ever wanted to torture someone real bad? I’d find one of those tiny freezer compartments you get in fridges, all iced up thick around the edges. And I’d hold his hand in it for five minutes until it was good and chilly. And then I’d bang it back and forth, not particularly hard, against the sides. And then I’d do it again. It would be extremely unpleasant. I’ve affixed the roses to the top tier and placed a few butterflies on wires amongst them, but they had a high mortality rate when I peeled them off the waxed paper so I’m making another batch. I asked Helpdesk Man and Flatmate Man to saw my dowelling, but Flatmate Man is as drunk as a large, smallish fish and Helpdesk Man has oosed off to get some Burger Fuel for dinner, me being both too busy and too infested to make the boeuf bourguignon for dinner, which yes, actually was on the meal plan, although admittedly not spelled quite that well.

10:39 - Yay! Apart from putting in the ribbon, the cake is DONE. Including some spare butterflies to give the transport girl in case anything shatters in the car, which is sadly likely - those butterflies are ridiculously fragile. As are the real ones, though - realism, innit. Anyway. I am going to bed.

I write you all from a haze of cheem. A few weeks ago I rashly agreed to make a last-minute wedding cake for my sister’s friend, and what do I do but contract septicaebola three days before the big event. The batch of cake batter I mixed up this morning contains 1 kg butter, 6 cups of caster sugar, four blocks of chocolate and not less than four parts per million of my own personal pus, mucus and other bodily fluids. Something old, something new, something fetid, a bit of goo, as the old saying goes. I’m supposed to be making icing roses right now, but whenever I try to alight from the couch I see this

and my brain goes

and I have to pass out for a bit.

Today I told the snortlepig she could not lick the beaters yet, because I still had to beat in the vanilla essence. She called me a pesky wench. (A “peshky wench”, technically.) At times like these, I begin to doubt my parenting. Discuss.