I had a very random thought today: What is a car’s Big End exactly?
My childhood was dominated by my father perusing his maps and then attempting to drive down various pot-holed roads, always in a vehicle completely unsuitable for such ambitious pursuits.
And each off-road adventure always resulted in my mother clinging onto the dashboard as the car bumped and banged along, crying, ‘Slow down! You’re going to DAMAGE THE BIG END!’
If you’re looking for love, then look no further than the window of our local hardware store…
I love that Harry’s chosen lady has to be good-looking, have personality AND style (and if they can offer some spelling lessons that would be a bonus for old Haz).
Bless Harry. He’s not one to commit too early either, preferring an occasional luncheon to a regular dinner. Wouldn’t want to impinge on his boys’ nights out, I bet.
Still, he says he only CAN be interesting.
And does anyone know what OHC stands for? A quick Google came up with two possibilities: Over-Head Camshaft or Outer Hair Cells, neither of which sound particularly appealing.
I bet Harry’s phone won’t stop ringing… not that you would even get to speak to him (the old bean’s screening his calls!)
But maybe I spoke too soon…
Who needs match.com when you can find romance like this? As Dirty Harry himself might say: ‘Go ahead, make my day…’
It started with a simple lemon drizzle. I bought a few ingredients, threw them into a mixer and marvelled at the simplicity of it all. If there’s one way of garnering instant gratification with colleagues and loved ones alike, it’s presenting them with a homebaked cake.
And so began The Great Baking Obsession of 2012. I went from having never baked a cake in my life, to attempting several creations in one night alone.
For several months last year, this cake-making frenzy escalated to worrying heights. Most evenings saw me careering manically around the kitchen, head-to-toe in flour, with one hawk-like eye fixed permanently on the oven.
When The Husband arrived home from work, and tentatively enquired as to where his dinner might be, I would yell: ‘Dinner?! Can’t you see I’m up to my EYEBALLS here!’, whilst furiously whisking eggs like a deranged Mary Berry.
Carrot cake, banana nut, raspberry and passionfruit… my great bake-off continued to be met with glee by both my workmates in the staff room, and the husband’s cake-loving colleagues.
I was, what women’s magazines would dub, an ‘office feeder’: taking some sort of perverse pleasure in fattening up my fellow teachers with cal-horrific muffins, yet eschewing the cakes myself and smugly pecking on my porridge. As the compliments rolled in, I would mutter modestly, ‘It was nothing, really. I just threw a few ingredients together and… voila!’ – all said with a sanctimonious bat of the hand.
I was flying high on waves of gratitude, ever-hungry for appreciation of my newest creation. I thought I was the new Nigella.
Then one morning, I left my latest offering on the staff room table unattended. When I came down a little late for break time, some of my gluttonous colleagues had already helped themselves, wolfing down the coffee and walnut cake without so much as a crumb-spluttering mumble of thanks.
My cakes were no longer being appreciated.
Worse still, it was The Husband’s birthday the following day, and with it the expectation from his workmates that I would be creating ‘something special’. He had already put in a request for a Victoria Sponge, his favourite.
Wearily, I trudged down to Waitrose to procure the necessary ingredients. It had been a long day. The cake obsession was beginning to wane. Just as I was reaching down to pick up a bag of flour, I spotted it: a perfectly-formed Victoria Sponge, winking at me from behind the glass counter. Resistance was futile.
Arriving home, I removed it from its pink Waitrose packaging, poked at it a bit to give it more of a ‘home-baked’ look, and packed birthday boy off to work with it the very next day, passing it off as my own creation.
His workmates declared it ‘delicious’… ‘the best yet’, no less!
It was nothing really, I claimed. (No, really – just a simple drive up the road to the supermarket).
They wanted more but it was already too late. Overnight, the baking obsession had ended, leaving me with a couple of extra inches on the waist line, a burnt out blender, and a ludicrous amount of cake tins.
Let them eat cake.
But next time, I’m going to Waitrose.
Every apartment block has a nosy neighbour: someone who casts an overly-watchful eye over the daily comings and goings – and we have our very own curtain twitchers in the form of… Susan and Dick.
Susan and Dick are a retired couple who moved into our apartment block with seemingly only one purpose in life: complaining. Susan is a twittery sparrow of a lady, with darting eyes and an accusatory scare. Prone to odd bursts of jittery laughter, she permanently scans the entrance gate of the apartments from her perch in the window. Poor Dick is a world-weary packhorse – placid and obedient – clearly worn down over the years by hen-pecking Sue.
When I walk past their window, I have this ridiculously childish urge to yell: ‘Sue loves Dickkkk!’.
This curmudgeonly couple take Neighbourhood Watch to a whole level. Susan knows the car registration of each and every resident – and their visitors. When she isn’t peering out of the window, she is firing off angry emails to the management company, complaining of noise, bins, squirrels, door mechanisms, and many, many other mundanities. Only last week, I spotted her measuring the communal entrance door, with a tape measure. Goodness knows why.
Deflated Dick seems to spend the winter shovelling snow and gritting the car park, complaining bitterly about the lack of support from other residents. One of his favourite pastimes is to Google neighbours to discover more about them. Nothing delights him more than finding out the occupation and workplace of a new resident. ‘Did you know the blonde girl in Apartment 4 works in PR?’ (Let’s hope he doesn’t google me!).
When we first moved in, the husband and I were very much in favour with SuDick. Basically, we nodded and smiled in all the right places, tutted in agreement about whoever dared to leave the gate to the bin compound swinging in the wind, rallied round to help Dick with his snow shovelling. But it was only a matter of time before our delicate relationship broke down. And broke down, it did…
Approximately a year ago, SuDick mooted the idea of having a carpet installed in the main entrance outside their apartment, claiming that the clip-clopping heels at night were interrupting their sleep. Initially, we were sympathetic and agreeable. That was, until we discovered that they didn’t just want to carpet outside their own apartment; they wanted to smother the whole apartment block in carpet, covering the perfectly nice wooden flooring – all at a cost of several thousand pounds.
Unbeknown to SuDick, I began a stealth campaign to veto the carpet, approaching residents one by one to join the boycott. It was risky. And when Susan got wind of my renegade carpet gang, she sent me a terse email, accusing me of causing ‘dissension among residents’.
We haven’t spoken since.
But there’s more fun to come. Bird-twitcher Dick has been leaving nuts out for his sparrows, which pest control claim are attracting pesky squirrels. The nuts, they say, have to stop. Oh dear.
I’m already building up to sending an ‘all residents’ email with the subject title: DICK’S NUTS ARE CAUSING A NUISANCE…
Most student landlords fit into the stereotypical image of a burly, no-mess character, who would pitch up at the front door if your rent hadn’t been paid but would largely leave you to your own devices, unless the house was actually burning down.
And then there’s my mother.
My mother – with her cheery nature and natural desire to help – makes an extraordinary landlady. If the students so much as need a lightbulb changing, she promptly hops on her bicycle (she quite contentedly cycles everywhere, having never learnt to drive) and two-wheels down the hill to remedy the problem.
Pitching up at the front door with a deft rat-a-tat-tat, she bustles in, usually berating any poor student caught with a can of lager in their hand mid-afternoon.
‘Drinking at this time? It’s not even 5pm!’
She would then fix the offending lightbulb, wash a few dishes ‘now that I’m here’ and occasionally top up their toilet roll supply, before exiting in a whirl of energy, with a parting shot of, ‘don’t forget to put the recycling out’ – only just stopping short of actually staying to cook their dinner.
The extent of this madness doesn’t stop there. She often offers an impromptu ‘meet and greet’ service to bewildered students when they first land at Preston train station. My map-mad father once even printed off a map of Preston for one particularly feeble student – highlighting the route from the house to the University. It goes without saying that my mother has also been known to wash the occasional student’s bedding.
She puts up a pretence of exasperation with it all, her favourite phrase being: ‘Goodness knows how they are going to be able to do a degree!’
But secretly she loves it.
When I ask my mother what this year’s students are like, they usually fall in one of two categories: ‘simple’, or ‘a bit puffy’, the latter being my mum’s catch-all expression for any boy who acts feeble or slightly effeminate. The quota of puffy and/or simple students my mother encounters seems inordinately high.
Puffiness aside, it stands to reason that over the years, we’ve had our fair share of oddities. One such eccentric that springs to mind was Cameron – an idle character with unkempt, corkscrew hair, who languished in his room for days on end. Too lazy to go to the toilet, he simply used to urinate in a pan and place it under his bed. Not just one pan, but several… which accumulated over many months.
And when it came to moving out, rather than simply emptying his pans into the toilet, he placed them straight into bin liners, leaking his smelly urine all over the backyard – and subsequently the boot of my father’s car (much to his chagrin).
And how could we forget Alvaro, the hairy Spaniard, who barely spoke English – and could only communicate with my mother in exaggerated hand gestures (my mother firmly believes that adopting the tactic of speaking incredibly slowly and incredibly loudly to foreigners will somehow improve their communication). He was dubbed ‘the swarthy foreigner’ – a title which stuck with him for the remainder of the year.
And then there was The French. The French came in a pair, by the names of Idriss and Vincent. This troublesome twosome detested the English and had a strange obsession with leaving the bathroom completely sterile. If so much as a rogue bar of soap was left overnight by a fellow housemate, they would simply hurl it out of the window in utter disgust. Within six weeks of moving in, they had chased away the other three perfectly reasonable English housemates and commandeered the house for themselves, phoning my poor mother at all hours with their unreasonable demands.
Suffice to say, my mother has never viewed the French population in the same light again.
She would rather take a ‘puffy simpleton’ any day.
Parisians are a strange bunch. Not content with eating frogs legs, laughing in the face of the smoking ban and brandishing baguettes where ever they go, it seems that have taken to zombie-like antics of a weekend.
Wandering through Jardin du Luxembourg last Sunday, I spotted one man participating in what appeared to be a slow-motion fight between himself, two planks of wood and an imaginary antagonist.
It was only when I peered further through the trees that the true extent of this madness was revealed. Scores of crazed-looking Parisians were all doing what appeared to be a slow-motion zombie dance.
Faces blank, they followed their leader’s every move, swinging their arms and slowly lifting their legs in unison, oblivious to the world around them. In short, they had been zombified.
It was like something out of a Simon Pegg film. I scanned the park nervously. Were the husband and I the only ‘normal’ ones left?
Some of them even had sticks.
I later discovered this new-fangled outdoor pursuit is a form of Tai Chi – or Kata – although the husband is still convinced that it was a Karate Kid convention. No sane person, he claimed, would partake in such lunacy in a public environment.
I think I’ll stick to jogging.
From a young age, the parents drilled it into me that banks were out to rob you blind and that anyone who used them was an utter fool – a belief so solidly engrained in their minds, that even now they simply cannot believe that banks allow you to store your money in them for free. My father would sooner have stashed his life savings under his mattress then hand it over to the evil clutches of Barclays or Natwest.
No, for the parents the trusty building society, with its share options and friendly cashiers, was the only safe option to store your hard-earned readies.
This unwavering loyalty to building societies meant that while the rest of the world were embracing the electronic age of debit cards and Internet banking, the parents were quite happily driving several miles to the building society every Saturday morning, clutching their passbook and queuing patiently before drawing out a predetermined sum of money which they had calculated would see them through the week ahead.
Our annual summer holiday in Cornwall proved a little more tricky though. The weeks leading up to the departure would involve a careful calculation of how much money we were likely to need for the week’s activities. In the unlikely event that we should run out of cash, my Dad kept a map of the nearest Woolwich building society branches in the car and would think nothing of a two-hour round trip to St Austell to top up his cash supply.
For years, the parents lived in this comfortable bubble, blissfully oblivious of the need or desire to pay for anything electronically or venture near an ATM.
That was until they pitched up at Premier Inn about two years ago, brandishing a fistful of crisp £20 notes (fresh from The Chorley and District Building Society that morning, I believe) – only to be told that ‘for security reasons’ they were unable to pay for their room with cash. No cash? For security reasons?! Even now, my father recounts the story with an incredulous snort.
However, this proved the tipping point. My mother booked an appointment with the building society manager to explain this rather unnerving episode in detail, and emerged half an hour later suspiciously peering at the shiny new debit card that had landed in her palm.
To this day, the debit card lives in the glove compartment of their car. It has on it a balance of £10 and is to be used FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY (the parents don’t leave any more money on it than that for fear of an identity thief stealing their life savings – although, somewhat ironically, the pin number is permanently attached to it on a post-it note, should the four-digit date of their anniversary temporarily elude them).
I’ve tried to get them to use a cash machine. I’ve tried explained that Chip and Pin aren’t some 90s rap artists but are, in fact, a simple and convenient way to pay for your shopping. I’ve tried to explain that the monetary world has moved on.
But old habits die hard and the parents continue with their Saturday morning ritual.
Images of desperate savers queuing to withdraw their life savings from Northern Rock and horror stories of wide-spread fraud served only to reinforce the parents’ belief that BANKS ARE BAD.
And with the current banking crisis and news that soon there will be no such thing as a free current account, I’m beginning to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the parents may have been right all along.
If I told you that the parents are happy to make a five-mile drive every Saturday simply to draw some cash out (more on that next week), it might come as no surprise that they think nothing of a 120-mile round trip for lunch.
Yes, no distance is too far for the parents to drive.
They would think nothing, either, of making a two-hour detour just to look at a building my father was vaguely interested in, or trek for miles across the Pennines in search of the source of the River Ribble (it’s a small babble of water in the middle of an isolated field in Yorkshire, for anyone remotely interested).
Once, due to my father’s inherent fear of flying, we drove from Preston to France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium – and back.
In a week.
Needless to say, my only lasting memory of that great cultural adventure was playing Top Trumps with my sister in the back of the car, while gazing at great expanses of Europe passing by in a blur.
One particular episode of my parents’ travelling madness occurred on New Year’s Day 2009, when most of the population were nursing hangovers and quite sensibly padding round the house in their PJs.
Not the parents.
Two days prior, the husband and I had foolishly agreed to accompany them (and the omnipresent Uncle Stephen – more on him later) on a relaxing country drive, hopefully stopping for a bite to eat in some quaint gastropub, en route.
What we didn’t know was that we would spend two nausea-inducing hours pretty much off-roading across the Lake District, with no guarantee of a meal at the end of it.
For someone who spends a maddening amount of time pondering over the simplest of tasks, my father turns into a cross between Lewis Hamilton and Dick Dastardly the minute he gets behind the wheel.
So it was with some trepidation, that the husband and I – feeling a little delicate from the previous night’s festivities – gingerly climbed into the back of my father’s Suzuki Swift (competitively priced, excellent fuel consumption AND one of Jeremy Clarkson’s favourite small cars – just ask the parents) before embarking on our New Year’s Day sojourn from hell.
After an hour heading into the Lake District, we began to climb higher into the hills, the rain lashing down and mist swirling around us (sounds dramatic but it really was). It might have been my imagination but the higher we climbed, the faster my father appeared to be driving, narrowly avoiding the occasional bemused sheep, and pulling over once or twice to study his trusty Ordnance Survey map – with all the intensity of a Man On A Mission.
When I tentatively broached the subject of how much further the place my father had in mind might be (resisting the urge to revert back to the child-like whine of ‘are we nearly here yet?’), it was met with a stony silence. One thing the parents will never do in the face of adversity is admit defeat.
Another hour later, my father conceded that he might be slightly lost. After all, he said, he hadnt visited this pub since 1977. For all he knew it might not even exist anymore. Yes, 1977. This, you see, is all part of the adventure.
So, it was a rather weary car load of travellers that eventually pulled up outside the Blacksmiths Inn, which according to my father, dated back to 1577. Quite an impressive history for a pub that appeared to be in the Middle of Nowhere.
Stomachs rumbling, we dutifully following my father into its oak-panelled bowels – only to be met with the news that, as it was New Year’s Day, they were fully booked for lunch and there was no chance of getting anything to eat.
My parents and the perpetually-jovial Uncle Stephen seemed completely unfazed by this news (did I mention that they don’t actually believe in booking restaurants, leaving it purely to the jaws of fate), opting to have a drink instead, ‘now that they were here’, and engaging the landlord in a conversation about the pub’s original gas lamps that my father recalled from his last visit 35 years ago.
The husband and I, on the other hand – battling a strange mix of car sickness and gnawing hunger – were rendered almost speechless, collapsing into some hard-backed chairs and closing our eyes in silent despair.
But the day was to take an unexpected twist. Just as we were meekly sipping our coca-colas and contemplating the long drive back, the phone rang. It was a family of six cancelling their booking. Struck down by a sickness bug. The whole lot of them.
‘You’re in,’ cried the landlord triumphantly, throwing down menus in front of us. ‘Kitchen closes in 30 minutes.’
Fed, watered and hardly able to believe our luck, we clambered back into the Suzuki Swift to brace ourselves for the arduous journey back.
It was only when my father paused to linger over his map, that we realised this adventure might not be over.
‘Now, I’m sure there’s an old water mill around here…’
My Family and Other Oddities 