It's January: even the lab rats have worked out that I shoudn't be bothering...

It's January and therefore we are likely to be filled with great hope for the year ahead, as well as more sludge inside our colon and a further layer of cholesterol within our pipes. I am not immune from such feelings.
If anyone were to ask me, I would declare that I don't bother with New Year's Resolutions any more; they are somehow for lesser mortals. I not only know that they are mainly broken by the end of January, but setting oneself up for failure is not a thing to bring happiness or fulfilment. But in a secret place within me is a person quietly thinking This Year (Rodney) Everything Will Be Different.
I have a planner for my kitchen wall and on this not only am I going to put things happening this week, but plan meals ahead (ha, ha,ha!). I'm also going to slot in what work I'm going to do in order to save me slipping into sitting and chatting and then at 3.27 pm thinking, "Shit, I've got to go and get the girls from school - now, where on EARTH did that day go?"
Since the new year I've been doing some research on resolutions, goal planning and time management (note, instead of actually doing the feckin things I wanted to achieve) and I've found the ultimate method. Apparently you mustn't tell anyone your resolution.
The thing with this is that if you tell people your goals, they usually congratulate you and nod appreciatively as if you've already DONE the thing you're planning to do (although in my world people tend to raise an eyebrow and say, "Yeah, course you are, Lorraine" before returning to whatever they were doing before). This praise gives you a feeling of well-being that makes you feel as if you've pretty much done the thing already and therefore there's no real need to make any effort - you've already had the buzz, so you can return to your custard slice / sofa and feel good about your achievements.
This resonated with me. In my twenties when all around me were talking about diets, I used to occasionally think I should do one, and the seams in my jeans would back me up. I would decide that those difficult ones that involved giving things up were not for me, and nor were ones that were too strict - I liked my beer and it's hard to find any diet plan that allows for ten pints of lager and lime followed by eight slices of toast of an evening.
Instead I would decide to do it scientifically. I would haul the trusty calorie counter off the shelf and work out how many calories I would burn off in the days ahead. I would say to my friend that I was probably fitter than the average woman and therefore I could allow myself a little more (lager). I would assume that I would probably run up and downstairs two hundred times in the day, so that meant the toast was accounted for too. By the end of the chat, I would have a coloured chart in front of me that demonstrated I should actually be eating more than I was currently eating. The kettle would go back on and I'd finish the evening feeling very pleased with myself for having achieved my goal weight.
Although this is a shit way to go about anything, it was probably as successful as anyone else's diet and fitness regime and a lot more comfortable.
So what about this year? My plan is to quietly fill in my weekly planner, not gloating to anyone that I've worked out we're going to have sausages for tea a week Friday and that on Thursday morning, my coloured-in Prime-Minister-Diary detailed chart says that I shall mostly be filing whilst considering Chapter Four's dilemma.
Anyone up for taking bets on what will really be happening?

Check out TED Talks http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a5A7hdR7q7g and then you won't have to actually DO anything as listening to these makes you a better person already!




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Egg McMuffins and the Guinness Shits

Imagine going to an international sporting tournament in which the competitors are only allowed to go through the back door, can’t get into the changing rooms and have only one toilet between forty-odd players. During the recent World Cup, did Rooney have to pay for his own Travel Lodge and arrive ready-dressed in his kit? When Saurez had the pre-match shits, did he have to wait in a queue of three blokes and a woman before relieving his nerves in the only toilet available to him? And when the Queen parachuted into the Olympics, did she have to do so on a stomach full of Sausage and Egg McMuffin because some tosser had parked in the disabled space outside her preferred café? Probably not: but then she’s not an international player in the Tri-Nations Tournament of wheelchair rugby…

                For the uninitiated, wheelchair rugby pretty much follows the structure of the more usual rugby union - except that the players are in wheelchairs. Scrummages happen by a line of three wheelchairs going head to head with the opposition’s line to push the advantage, kicks are done with the heel of the hand, mauls are called when the ball-carrier is hemmed in by at least two other players, and tackles are carried out by smashing your wheelchair into your opponent as hard as you fucking can. Be aware: wheelchair rugby is not for the faint-hearted.

                The point of having this version is not to have some fluffy physical lip-service for those poor chaps who can’t walk very well; it’s to have a bloody good game for anyone who wants to play. It’s a great leveller and the Tri-Nations was played by men and women ranging from their teens to their fifties. Able-bodied people played alongside those with disabilities and the difference between these last two groups was not always apparent on the pitch. It was a real-life version of the Guinness advert in which a group of friends have a great game of wheelchair basketball and at the end, all but one get out of their chairs, then they all go to the pub together. The reality of course would be that the poor sod in the wheelchair would have to sit outside in the rain as the pub wouldn’t be accessible, or he’d be on shorts as having the Guinness shits isn’t much fun when you’re sharing the disabled toilet with the pub mop and bucket, boxes of paper-towels and a couple shagging in the corner.

                So for two days at the Wheelchair Rugby Sevens Tri Nations, I shouted, screamed, clapped and cheered. I chucked dozens of pounds at the children to go and buy junk from the catering van so as not to disturb my enjoyment of the games (Beckham buying a sandwich from a guy with the same blue glove on for two days? Don’t think so…). I watched men and women slam into each other so hard that they were thrown from their chairs, snapping ratchet-straps as they went. I saw wick teenagers whip around three opponents, only to be sandwiched to a halt by two eighteen-stone props, and I breathed in relief as players gave-up their advantage in order to hang on to a member of the opposition so that they didn’t up-end and slam, teeth-first, into the floor.

                My point being, that all those magnificent people entertained me for a whole weekend with their fantastic sport. In that hall they were leaders of men. They were sportsmen and sportswomen, wheel-chair mechanics and captains of teams. In that hall they were fit, capable, feisty, stroppy, hilariously funny and they were the same as everyone else.  No-one looked, no-one stared (well, they did when the ref took his leg off and waved it at the kids). Amputees chatted with people with cerebral palsy and the conversations weren’t What’s wrong with you? Or Can your friend understand me? The conversations were What position are you? Is the crapper empty yet: I had two McMuffins For breakfast or Are you going to try and nick your Wales shirt?

                The sad thing for me was that the moment those magnificent sports-men and women left that hall either to the crapper they had to queue for, or the changing room they couldn’t get into, or the car that their partners had to help them load up, their disabilities became apparent once more. They would return (via the fire exit as the main door had a flight of steps) to offices that refuse to adapt to them, homes they can’t get around, jobs that are presumed to be beyond them and shops and restaurants that can’t be bothered to accommodate them. This is not a bitch about a tournament that didn’t manage everyone’s needs as well as it might - or as well as it would for those without disabilities - this is a bitch about a society that’s missing out on all that energy, all those skills, all that humour, all that resourcefulness, all that willingness to hit the crap out of someone else if that’s what they have to do in order to get the job done.

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No Longer the Amazon

Have you ever realised that you are not the person you thought you were? Well, although I’d been having an inkling over the past few years, today was the final thump as I realised that I was not the Amazon that I thought I was, but actually a bit of a wuss.

                We’ve been having some scuttling going on in our cupboard and something has been snaffling our cashew nuts, nibbling a corner on each of my buy-four-get-one-free bags. I did the usual thing, cursed the devil, nearly took my finger off with a trap, scrubbed out the cupboard and then cheered as I heard a SNAP late that night.

                Then the little blighter was back (or at least one like him)… But this time, it seemed that his big brother had come with him. It wasn’t just my new stash of cashew nuts that copped it, it was every bag of flour, every packet of pasta, every pack of those rice noodle things that have been sitting there for three years that no-one knows what to do with. He’d even eaten through my clever device that was supposed to stop the little sods making it through into the back of the cupboard in the first place.

                So, it was back to the same routine: cursing, scrubbing out, putting packets up high, feeling relieved to chuck the rice noodles out legitimately. The trap went back down in my clever place down the side of the washing machine and then it was time to wait.

                In the meantime, Huw came home and made little sad noises about mice being people too, and why couldn’t I just get a humane trap and then pop the little fellow across a river and let him play in the grass for ever n ever.

                He was right. I was a shit. Why kill the little critter, when I could just get him to move house? So I went back to the washing machine – but it was too late. The trap was not just full, it had moved: it must have been a beast…  I thought about it all night, that poor little sod lying there amongst the fluff, whose last supper had been rice noodles, whilst I was in my nice cosy bed with a belly full of pizza. I made a few mouse-related humane decisions…

                However, before I could put my bit-of-chocolate-cake-into-a-humane-trap decisions into action, I still had to get rid of my rice-noodle eater.  The next day I zipped my coat up to the throat, put some boots on and started inching the washing machine forward, peeping behind with each wriggle in order to locate what had, by that time, turned into a thing the size of a badger in my mind.

                Luckily, there was a knock on the door. Great, reinforcements, I thought. “Just in time,” I said to my mate as she walked in, “you can help me get that out of here.”

                So, I the ex-Amazonian, watched as she picked up the washing machine and tossed it lightly out of the way. The she reached into all the fluff, rice crispies and mouse shit and picked up the critter –not the trap, note, but the stiff critter – and said, “This thing? It ain’t no mouse – it’s a rat, by the way,” and started to walk towards me.

                Having three brothers, I assumed that she was surely going to stuff it down my back and I ran out into the garden squealing a little and hid behind a car. It was at that point as I crouched there, trying to explain that I wasn’t really afraid, that I realised that I was no longer a woman to contend with, I was a bit nesh and quite a bit feeble.

                The reason that this has such an effect on me isn’t so much that I’ve got flippin’ rats scuttling around my kitchen, it’s more that I now have to reinvent myself. Sadly it’s not so much in the Madonna way, in that each time I do so, I hook another few million dollars, it’s more of the thing that if I’m no longer the brave strong Amazon, what am I?

Answers on a postcard please.

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Haunted by "Have I Got News for You".

There won’t be many people who’ve been haunted by Have I got News For You, but I’m one of them.

            It was a few years ago, but my memory is of Ian Hislop reading the “sexy bit” from some politician’s novel (if that’s not too much of a misnomer). In his cheeky little style, he mocked their hand-stretching, pulsating, sweating (or more probably glowing) and all the other clichés that go into making a book a bit raunchy. Everyone laughed and cringed and enjoyed imagining the discomfort of whichever politician it was. I was almost over that when it was time for Paul Merton to make us all cringe at the thought of Tony Blair being urgent with Cherie.

The Telegraph’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards is a good way to keep authors on their toes; it’s all too easy to think that stuffing a load of heaving and grunting into a text will make it more exciting and saleable. And of course, sometimes it does – Fifty Shades managed to do it very well but every time my characters start heading towards that bit I start getting all hot under the collar - for all the wrong reasons.

First I imagine my mum proof-reading it over afternoon tea and being convinced that I’ve done all of those things. Then I imagine myself on Have I Got News for You (see, good imagination us writers have, eh?) and Ian reaches under his desk and hauls out one of my books and it falls open at a certain page and his wicked little grin explodes across his face. This is enough to make my pen grind to a halt.

However, of course people do have sex and in books they also need to have sex. It is up to the reader as to whether they choose a book which guarantees to have it at least every three pages or whether it is veiled and glossed over in a stream of euphemisms: “As the sun set, Lady Petunia took a deep breath and let the dog see the rabbit”.

I had gotten a little bit English about it and in the book I’m currently editing, I’d struggled with my two main characters doing anything other than smiling and nodding at each other. When the time finally came whereby they had to do at least Something, I realised I’d written it through the eyes of woodland animals – just wrong on so many counts.

However, I (think) I’ve been saved. I’m currently reading Faulk’s “Birdsong” and that does have quite a bit of grunting going on and I’ve realised that it’s not cringey, it’s just part of a story and if you want your work to be good, you have to have all parts of it meaningful and that includes the intimate bits.

Therefore, I will retrieve my manuscript, take out the squirrels saying, “Ooh, that looks like it might smart a bit”, the hedgehogs nodding at each other and raising their eyebrows, and the gang of slugs saying, “Pass him over when you’ve finished, love, we could use a bit of that.” And if Ian Hislop ever gets his cheeky little chops around any of mine, I will just sit back and enjoy the publicity.

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Jamie’s fifteen minute life lesson.

Jamie’s fifteen minute life lesson.

 

I’ve gone and done it again: I bought the quick fix and the damn thing didn’t work. It didn’t do what it said on the blurb – or at least what I thought it said on the blurb.

                Cooking in our house had gone shaky. There was more scrambled egg than roasts and even the roasts were becoming formulaic and greeted by groans from all around. I decided that I needed to address the problem and so I did what every busy person would do: I went and bought Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals.

                I leafed through it, hoping to see, “Take one packet of savoury rice, add two teaspoons of flour and some milk and mix together in a bowl.”  Sadly I saw page after page of recipes that included ingredients such as squid and medallions of pork.

                Of course, what I really wanted wasn’t a recipe that I could cook within fifteen minutes, I ideally wanted Jamie to do it for me too. I also felt it fair enough that he not only cook it, but bought the ingredients and manage to find a space in my cupboard rammed full of pasta shells to stack them all in.

                All that Jamie has done, bless him, has reminded me that there are no quick fixes for anything. He started cooking in his parents’ pub kitchen aged eight – I spent most of my eighth year trying to pull wheelies on a scooter that my dad had run over. That’s why Jamie’s a great cook and I can pull great wheelies (but only on a scooter that has crossed-over handlebars).  Sadly, great wheelies don’t make people inhale and say “oooh, lovely!” when they enter my kitchen. Mainly they say, “Can I smell rotting veg?” to which I reply, “Probably: I was going to roast it, but I didn’t get round to it – too busy making a ramp out of two planks and some wire netting for my scooter…”

                When I slapped my cash down on WHSmith’s counter, I of course should have also bought a pen and paper to make a shopping list on, then stopped by at a massive supermarket and bought some ingredients, then thrown out lots of pasta shells (or at least put them in the garage in case I regress at a later date), heated my pan and gotten on with it.

                Instead I grumbled a bit about the lack of squid in our local post office stores and decided that I’d write a blog about it instead. Surely that would equal the same effort? Perhaps the rules of fairness would mean that Jamie – or at least one of his little friends - would pop by and just point me in the right direction?

 **********************

Epilogue

Of course, the irony of moaning about doing things other than cooking when I need to do some cooking has not been lost. I have just returned, refreshed, from the kitchen. I did consult Jamie, but really didn’t have enough ingredients, so I compromised by making some flapjacks whilst the savoury rice was cooking. I also threw a few peas and a teaspoon of fenugreek or something into the rice, so that I can technically say that I’ve cooked from scratch. Jamie has pointed out the bleeding obvious and is now mocking me from the front of his cover: could this be the start of something tasty? Or will this be another cookery book gathering dust on my shelf whilst my harrissa paste goes slowly out of date?  

 

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