New Jobs and Get Rich Quick Schemes

New Jobs and Get Rich Quick Schemes

Times was hard as I was scrabbling about in my purse for the cash to buy a potato for my lunch. It seemed like fate when I caught sight of a notice asking for a Leaflet Deliverer. All I had to do was post a leaflet through every door in the village and I would earn myself enough money to buy as many potatoes as I wanted for my lunch for a whole week! I put my name down…

I made encouraging noises to the kids to get them and their boundless energy involved; it was all looking good.

But then I remembered the thing that I discovered when I had a stint as a paperboy (it was in the days before equality) – every house has a unique and complicated way of receiving their post / leaflets / newspapers.

There were the houses with rabid dogs, the houses with letter-boxes so highly insulated that it was like trying to push a sheet of paper through a carpet, and the houses with their gates zip-tied up when I know that people live there. There were also houses that didn’t seem to have a door and I had to run around and around them trying to find somewhere to wedge a leaflet, and that was after battling with the ones that had no gate.

The kids were worse than useless as they were unable to push things through carpets, had no ingenuity when it came to stuffing things in places and gave up pretty soon when they found that the only way into the house seemed to be via a tunnel from next door’s sitting room. 

We walked for miles, trudging up and down paths, fighting with dogs and arguing about shares of the profits.  I reckon we’ve done about half the village and have so far earned about 38p per hour, and worn out one pushchair and three pairs of shoes.

As I lay on the carpet that night, unable to reach the sofa, I felt bad about cursing the one postman on the round who hasn’t realised where our letters are supposed to go. I mumbled about loosening the spring on the letterbox that took a Conservative candidate’s finger-tip off, and forgave the Saturday paper boy who chucks the paper in a puddle next to the wellies. I also felt overwhelmed with smugness that we have obvious doors, no wild dog and plenty of places to stuff a leaflet…

If you liked this blog, why not buy the books!
Visit http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 
Also available on e-book!

Kicking pies and Licking the Sherbert off Cola Bottles

Kicking Pies and Licking the Sherbert off Cola Bottles

Apparently just as we are to get a new recycling system in our village, it is all set to change again – packaging that can be eaten…

For years we’ve been diligently separating our rubbish: cans and plastics in one bag, paper and cardboard in another, only to see the bin men sling them into the truck alongside the black bags full of my cottage pie and dirty nappies. Apparently someone separates them again at the point of discharge, after they’ve trundled along being churned up and squashed together. I cannot imagine how much those poor souls have to get paid as they ease a plastic cup from inside a chicken carcass.

I’m quite interested in waste, being a crusty kind of person. I would like to think I don’t generate as much as everyone else, but of course I do: piles and piles of it and I know that to reach my moral high-ground, I need to reduce the amounts.

Therefore I’m quite looking forward to the food waste bin, after the Mouse Man knew my voice on the phone before I said my name. After many visits and explanations of how I could try and keep the bastard mice off our work-surfaces, he lost it and told me to just STOP BLOODY COMPOSTING! I quoted the council targets of waste reduction, but his withering look put paid to that.

So the new industry of edible packaging seeks to end all of these problems – tomato membranes around soup, chocolate membranes around hot chocolate and grape around wine. The trouble is, I’ve worked in shops. I know that people sit on stacks of boxes before they are put on the shelves. I also know that they kick pies along the ground before piling them into the fridge and (if I’m honest) know that they lick the sherbert off the Cola Bottles before they go in the pick’n’mix. Can’t you just imagine the young shelf-stacker juggling these wobbly balls? Banging them on the inside of his elbow before catching them again – putting them in a microwave…

I therefore cannot understand who is going to pop to their local shop and sling a tomato filled with soup into their basket and not expect something terrible to have already happened to it.

Saying all this, I bought a sandwich the other day that was so bad, I chucked it in the bin and ate the box…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2012/apr/16/edible-packaging-fancy-a-wrap?INTCMP=SRCH

If you liked this blog, why not buy the books!
Visit http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Available on e-book !

Fifty things to do before you're 11 3/4

I was really pleased to see the National Trust's recent debate about kids playing outside rather than turning into living sofa's, playing computer games and calling for cans for Coke. It saddens me to see how many kids are indoor spuds who never get to lick cow salt-licks or put sticks in the eye-holes of dead sheep, let alone trick their younger sisters into jumping into cow pats.

I therefore looked with interest at the NT's "Fifty things to do before you're 11 3/4". There were some obvious things - climbing trees, rolling down hills or going on a night nature walk. Yeah, I thought, these are things that kids should do - as long as they do the cow-shit thing too of course.

There were others that suggested that the team were beginning to consider cutting it to "45 things to do before you're 11 3/4" - such as Balance on a fallen tree or Throw some snow. Although I did think it sad that people need lists telling them that they might get something out of throwing snow, when their instincts surely tell them to ram piles of it down their mate's neck, but I did appreciate the effort behind it.

But then it all went wrong: attached to each suggestion was a list of health and safety rules. Rolling down a hill? check for recent evidence of livestock first. Wanting to eat an apple straight off the tree? Check it for maggot holes and wash it.

Surely the point of getting the kids to do more exciting things is to give them a bit more excitement in their sofa-lives - even if that includes scoffing the occasional maggot or rolling through the occasional cow-pat - and let's face it, what are brothers for if they're not to steer you into shite? It simply turns all the effort into more sterile bland activities that your mum might organise.

I instead offer suggestions based on my own experience: try and add health and safety rules to these... 1. Strap a dead hedgehog to your bike rack for a week.
2. Throw sheep shit at your friend.
3. Light a fire and cook a swede.
4. Be the first to try a death-slide set up by stupid people.
5. Get humped by the local Labrador.
6.Play any version of Chicken.

https://www.50things.org.uk/parents-area.aspx

How to Increase Traffic to your Blog...

How to Increase traffic to your blog  

 Writing a blog should be an art form, and in the same way that some artists are good and some rubbish, blogs will be the same. However, in the same way that some artists have loads of people wanting to see their work and others sit in dark sheds in their gardens resting their chips on stacks of masterpieces , the same is with blogs. One would question the point of writing a blog that no-one ever reads, so the quest is to get more people to read them.

I recently had a spate of trying hard, and in doing so I analysed my blog-readers’ statistics (HELLO CANADA! NICE TO SEE YOU FOLKS!). It was good to see that people all over the world are reading it and hopefully enjoying it, but I couldn’t work out how Ukranian people (HELLO UKRANIAN PEOPLE!) found it. If I could only work out how they spotted it, then maybe I could work on those elements – clearly that banner with “READ MY BLUG” tied to the tree in the garden would not be the source.

The referring sources were the usual suspects – Google, Ask etc. Then I looked at which posts people were heading for: for yesterday, it was the one on February 23rd, named “Smacking Bottoms”… Now, this had intended to be a sensible blog about the merits or otherwise of smacking our kids – maybe on the bottom, or maybe on the leg. What I hadn’t thought that it might be would be a means of “release” for people.

I thought about it. I felt a bit miffed, then I sniggered a bit at those people finding my blog being really hacked off. Then I thought, maybe, just maybe I could capitalise on these people…

So please excuse me while I increase a little traffic to my blog: Big Bottoms, Get Your Free Sex Here, Increase the Size Of Your Manhood for Free,  Pizzas for 99p.

And they say that the economy is in a bad state.  

Please “Like” this blog post if you are using it for the means it was intended. Please also “Like” it if you are lying…  

If you liked the email, buy the books...  

Now on E-book format!  
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1  

Chocolate Mousse & Two Spoons - Eating Blackbirds - Cold Enough to Freeze Cows  

Lorraine Jenkin:   Author - Journalist - Blogger   

Save Water Now, Save Suffering Later…

One of my first proper memories is sitting on our step in my best red squiggly pants, in the drought of 1976 feeling hot. My mum was experimenting with cooking on top of the water butt, sun cream hadn’t been invented and the step I was sitting on was made of slate and was baking, but I was too hot to be bothered to move and so sat and burned to a husk.

                We had stickers everywhere at school saying, “Save water now, save suffering later” and I took them very seriously. The school took them seriously too as they were never washed off – I expect if I ever went back, they’d still be there. It was so simple then - if we saved water, we saved our standard of living for the future. Of course now, if we save water, we free up some fantastic dividends for water supplier’s shareholders: it doesn’t have the same impetus.

                I was in Peru for a while and stayed with a family on an island in Lake Titicaca. Everything was very basic and water wasn’t an exception. Drinking water came out of an open barrel that was filled by a dripping gutter from a dirty roof. Toilet water wasn’t an issue as one wee’d amongst the broad beans. I couldn’t work out the shower and so was happy to ignore it, but eventually even I needed to wash a bit.

                It turned out that I had to traipse for 300 yards through the fields, fill up a bucket and lug it back up again. I then had to find a medium-sized child and send him up on to the “shower block” roof where he would pour the water into another bucket. The water would then trickle down through a zig-zagged drain-pipe into the shower head. This was the solar-heating of the water. After I’d lugged three bucket’s worth up, the medium-sized child had got bored and had buggered off back to his goats and I decided that the lugging of the water was counter-productive as I was actually getting sweatier and grubbier with each trip.

I went into the shower-block, stripped off and slung my clothes onto the floor (no point in Peru in mentioning to the host that there were no hooks on the back of the door). I’d hoped that the time I’d spent dragging more water up the hill would have allowed the solar-system to do its job: it hadn’t. Freezing cold water poured out of the shower head over me and I gasped for breath. By the time I had lathered up, my three buckets of water ran out and I was left with a head full of suds and ice-cream headache.

The moral of the story was to grow my hair long, dye it black and put it into two plaits…

If you liked this blog, why not buy the books!
Visit http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1  
E-book now available.

This is the way we raise our kids...

As a parent, you need information but you don't want to be bombarded. The solution is to understand the concept, then pick out the bits that are appropriate to you and your family's circumstances.

This month is the turn of Goldie Hawn to tell us all how to do it, and she has managed to get an audience with Michael Gobe to enhance her credibility, so maybe in a few years my teacher friends will be moaning about having to teach meditation to kids who spend most of their time gazing out of the window anyway.

My problem with "This is the way you should do it" books is that they are usually written after having success with one family - usually their own - or maybe just one child in that family. even the Tiger Mum, Amy Chua, had to backtrack when her second daughter rebelled against being told her drawings were rubbish and Ms Chua had to modify her methods, which to me flawed the whole concept.

I had decided to follow traditional methods soon after we brought our first baby home from hospital. Instead of carrying her around the house, introducing her to each room and whispering to her what it was, as per the book I'd read before she was born, I slumped on the sofa and cried for tea and lots of it.

My own theories bout child-rearing are that kids should be outside with their mates as much as possible having a good time, without computers, televisions or having to think, "My mum's gonna kill me if I get my trainers dirty." When they come home, they eat piles of whatever slop I've put in front of them and sleep like logs: most problems solved.

Goldie Hawn is very welcome to come to my house and teach my children how to meditate mindfully, but she has to agree to do it whilst cooking spag bol for tea amongst piles of washing, with a pipe leaking over the carpet and a potty-training baby weeing freely into her wellies.



If you liked this blog, why not buy the books! Visit http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 Available on e-book soon!

Living the rural dream? Get a life...

I seem to be reading more and more about living the rural dream - people who apparently exist like manic fools in the city suddenly thinking everything will be different if they have a werp living a field away from them. They suddenly think that they will start talking to their neighbours if they move - be it to Spain or to a quaint Cornish fishing village.

Can I just mention a few things:
1. you don't need to live in rural Spain to shop every day with a basket and buy fruit.
2. You can wear a thick jumper anywhere you like.
3. Lots of urban people talk to their neighbours, lots of people in the countryside think their neighbours are tossers.
4. If you spend your time watching East Enders whilst living in the city rather than going for walks, it's likely that you might after a few weeks in the countryside too.
5. chopping logs hurts your hands and risks you taking a toe off.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/04/country-living-is-better


If you liked this blog, why not buy the books!
Visit http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Available on e-book too