Katyboo1’s Weblog

Uncle Robber will be forty on Wednesday.

We will be celebrating by watching The Great British Bake Off.

To be fair, we have already done the birthday celebrations. He jetted off for a week in Vegas last week, and coming home with crippling jet lag on Saturday, he met us all for lunch in a round the world buffet restaurant he had chosen, on Sunday.

We were expecting him to fall asleep in his pudding, but he soldiered on remarkably bravely for someone who should either have been asleep or attempting to eat a lightly boiled egg.

He is a trouper.

We had a marvellous time. We ate a lot, we laughed a lot, Oscar took nine thousand photos with the camera granny had given him. I ate twenty or so small puddings of my choice. It was a smorgasbord, without actually having smorgasbord.

Which is good, because I cannot abide pickled herring.

While we were there, there was a lady who did balloon modelling coming round to entertain the children. It was a kind of loss leader for her promoting her children’s party entertainer business. She was dressed as a sort of bubble gum pink Marilyn Monroe. Except that you don’t usually see pictures of Marilyn wearing a huge apron full of rubber balloons.

Would that you did.

Anyway, she approached our table, and made Oscar and Tallulah a balloon giraffe each, very competently. Oscar asked if he could take her picture, and she obligingly agreed. Then she asked if I would post them on Facebook and friend her so that she could basically make the most of the marketing to promote her business.

I applauded her chutzpah, but I don’t want to befriend a balloon modeller on Facebook I’m afraid. Although if you are in the Leicester area and you are looking for one, she was very good at what she did.

I took a photo of her with my phone. When I looked at it it made me snort.

I don’t think it’s the sort of promotional shot she was hoping for:

But it was too good not to share.

We English can be a rather passive aggressive lot, particularly when it comes to the world of etiquette and manners.

This is taken to extremes when you are in a theatre. There are rules of behaviour, and then there are theatre rules of behaviour.

Andrea and I are draconian in our adherence to and dissemination of these rules. The day my mobile phone went off in a theatre was the day I seriously considered harakiri. I was MORTIFIED.

We are great believers in the following:

No rustling of sweets. We particularly hate those people who think if they unwrap a really crinkly piece of cellophane slowly it will make it better. It won’t.

No crisps. Ever.

No flexing of water bottles/plastic cups etc, so that you have something to do with your hands. Having the ‘scrunch/scree’ of a mangled water bottle in your ear for three hours – unacceptable as Super Nanny would say.

No crunching the ice that is melting in your plastic cup. You sound like you are munching through metres of loft insulation.

No big hair. Or hats. Or enormously fat heads.

No whispering, particularly not in that way where everyone in the entire fucking stalls can hear you explaining something to your wife, even though she understood it perfectly but you were so tickled by it you had to say it again.

No using the programme as a fan indiscriminately so that you are swiping it into my field of vision every fifteen seconds. If you must fan, fan carefully and in your own space.

No pointy elbows that loll into other people’s seating area.

No talking while the play is on unless you are about to give birth/expire/have noticed a lone gunman in the Royal Box.

No phones. Just no.

So, you see, we are really fun to be with when we go out to the theatre. Really fun.

We know we are miserable bastards, but when you have paid a frankly insane amount of money to have a once in a lifetime experience, having someone sitting next to you whilst they are eating barbecue beef crisps in between picking their nose and checking their text messages is not conducive to getting your money’s worth, or indeed, breaching the fourth wall.

We are much more relaxed about getting into and out of the theatre, and what you do at half time is frankly your own concern. You can strip naked and swing from the chandeliers as far as we’re concerned, as long as you’ve got it all out of your system by the time the lights go down, have at it.

One of the laws of the theatre is that people who have seats in the middle of a row are always the last to arrive to be seated. This happens all the time. Everyone knows it. The people getting to their seats must apologise profusely whilst bumping into knee caps and making eyebrow to eyebrow contact with the people they are attempting to sidle by. The people who are seated have to decide whether to stand up for the incomer, or do the side half crouch with knees balanced carefully atop each other.

On Saturday we had middle row seats, so by the time we got into the theatre we had to do the ‘sorry, sorry’ walk. It was fine until we got to a couple of very well groomed, chic, elderly ladies who were in our way. One of the ladies in particular took great affront and sighed, and tutted and raised her eyebrows at us.

We took our seats. Next to me were two other empty seats.

These should have been filled from the other side of the theatre, but two people walked in a couple of minutes after we had taken our seats, and started to do the ‘sorry, sorry’ walk down our side of the row. I assumed they were going to fill the two empty seats.

The lady who had not been happy with us, was equally undelighted with them. If looks could have killed they would have dropped on the spot.

They got to the empty seats and checked their tickets against the seat numbers. Then they turned round and checked ours, looking confused.

Quite often people get their rows mixed up. We were in row D. We wondered if the people had got the right row. We entered into discussions. Nope they were definitely in row D. The angry looking lady was looking on in deep displeasure at the sort of people who mess up their seat allocation.

We all looked at the tickets. Then we checked the seat numbering. Then we looked at the angry lady. Then Andrea and I looked at each other in delight.

It turns out that the angry lady and her companion were in the wrong seats.

WOT JOY!

They should have been in row C.

The seats they should have been occupying were directly in front of them. The whole of the rest of row C was seated. The curtain was about to go up.

Angry lady’s companion took it all in good part and scrambled over the seat to take her place with minimal disruption to all. Angry lady stood up, looking really, really angry and rather sheepish. Andrea stood up and offered to help her climb over the back of the seat.

Angry lady turned to face Andrea directly with a look of utter horror on her face:

‘Young lady. I do NOT climb ANYWHERE.’

With that she had to do the ‘sorry, sorry’ walk of shame all the way back down row D and half way up row C, and made it to her seat just as the curtain rose.

It was beautiful.

On Saturday I juggled child care and slotted flap A into flap C and glued, and held whilst cutting down the dotted line, all so that I could run away for the day with Andrea to London.

It is quite a while since we’ve done a whole day of running away. Usually I manage an evening, but a day is a bit of a luxury. Specially when you’re spending it in London.

We were, as is our wont, heading to the National Theatre. We stuck to our usual routine when we are seeing a weekend matinee. We parked in the National’s underground car park and headed to Wagamamas for super fast lunch. You can always rely on them to feed you in plenty of time so that you’re not panicking about waiting for curtain up. We even managed to sneak in a quick trip to Foyles on our wander back to the theatre. A hearty lunch before the play means that after the play we just need cake and coffee to give us some much needed oomph for the drive back, and we’re all good.

Andrea, who is way more competent than me, had managed to bag tickets for the new play by Richard Bean who wrote One Man Two Guv’nors. We were seeing Great Britain, which debuted a few weeks ago to much fanfare. If you are keen to see it, by the way, there is still some availability and it is transferring to the West End shortly. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t NT Live it at some point too, and if they don’t, it will be a crying shame.

It is basically a much nearer the knuckle Drop the Dead Donkey (British satirical show set in a newsroom for those of you who are a) not old, b) not English), based very closely on the Leveson enquiry findings and the whole media circus around Murdoch, MP’s expenses and phone hacking. It was being written as the Rebekah Brooks case was going through the courts, and rehearsed in secret until the verdict came out.

Billie Piper takes the lead role, and is absolutely brilliant. She is, for a girl who was once one of the most irritating teen songsters in Britain, shaping up to be an exceptionally gifted and versatile actress. This is the second thing I’ve seen her in at the National, both completely different kinds of roles, and both managed with enormous éclat by her.

The play was very, very funny indeed. It leaves no stone unturned in its quest to lampoon the media, the government, the police and the public taste for salacious gossip. Whilst bordering on farce at times, it is saved from being ludicrous by a very, very dark edge which keeps everything uncomfortably current and forces you to ask and answer some questions you’d probably rather not, about your own collusion in the state of the nation.

The dialogue was sharp. The acting was, to a man, superb. The sets were clever and innovative and made full use of what the National has to offer in terms of its resources and creativity. In short, it was everything The White Devil wasn’t.

The icing on the cake was, as we were coming out of the theatre, an elderly lady turned to the man she was with and said: ‘I thought Philip Glenister was superb, didn’t you?’ (Philip Glenister is Gene Hunt in Life on Mars etc). Philip Glenister was not actually in the play, so her companion seemed suitably confused and said: ‘Err. I’m not sure he was in it.’ She wouldn’t have it: ‘Of course he was. He was very good.’ There was a silence as they both thought about this for a moment. Then she said: ‘Of course, he has let himself go rather since I last saw him. His neck has thickened and he’s lost a lot of hair.’

Last night, Andrea and I scooted off to Stratford to go and see Webster’s The White Devil, a classic revenge tragedy, and a play we had never seen staged before.

We got an email several weeks ago, warning us that the play was rather shocking and we might want to prepare ourselves beforehand.

We were duly warned. We were not quite sure what to do in terms of preparing ourselves beforehand. I thought a bit about Nightmare on Elm Street and ladies with their nipples hanging out and decided I could probably handle all of the above.

The last time we got an email like this was when we went to see Marat Sade, which was actually quite shocking, but nothing you wouldn’t expect from a sadomasochistic odd ball writing about perversions in a mental asylum. You’d hardly have booked tickets and expected to see everyone swanning around in Laura Ashley nightwear taking tea on the lawn.

To be honest, we were a little sceptical. We wondered whether ticket sales for The White Devil were a little on the sluggish side. Nothing invigorates a box office more than the warning of scandalous behaviour, with the possible exception of notifying everyone that Benedict Cumberbatch is actually going to take the lead role at short notice.

We discussed things with great earnestness on the drive home. We were profoundly unshocked, it has to be said. I think if you are the sort of person who has not been in a night club in the last twenty years, nor ever seen those sun, sea and sex programmes about drunken teenagers from up North giving it large in Ibiza you may have raised an eyebrow, but otherwise it was distinctly meh.

The director did a version of King John a few years ago at the RSC I rated, and I was hoping for great things, but what I actually got was the sense that she is perhaps a bit of a one trick pony. King John was given an update to give it a kind of Eighties disco theme. The White Devil simply moved things forward to the rave years. Otherwise it had a lot of the same gimmicks. There was a great deal of lycra club wear, some pounding beats, and some synchronised dance moves that were supposed to merge the courtly dances of the Elizabethans with the grimy moves of the contemporary urban scene (or something), but which just ended up looking a bit silly to me.

There were hints of drug taking in the wild eyed, slightly out of control behaviour of the lady Vittoria, which updated the themes of debauchery getting a bit out of hand, although I would remark that debauchery has a duty to get out of hand, and if it didn’t, I would want my money back.

There were sexual perversions aplenty, but you actually find this a fair bit in Elizabethan plays, because the Elizabethans probably had a thing or two we could learn about what to do on a wet Saturday night in Southwark, and dressing things up in latex dayglo nun’s outfits and lycra fetishwear over eggs the pudding rather.

I did feel sorry for the cast in this play to be honest. The costume designers had really gone to town on a series of outfits that left nothing to the imagination, and quite a few of the ladies were pulling down very short hemlines when it came to taking a bow, and I suspect there might have been a fair amount of tit tape involved to keep everything reasonably in order up top in some cases. If you are the least bit body conscious I wouldn’t suggest understudying for a part in this particular show.

The story was fairly typical of the revenge tragedy, i.e. the revenge is a bit pointless and all the least blameworthy people get murdered first, which would annoy you if you didn’t know that everyone else was going to get murdered shortly afterwards. There were, typically, fairly huge plot holes and jumping around with time lines to fit all the murders into such a short time, and it was utterly silly. The best you can hope for with a play like this is either a fantastic, fresh staging which makes you marvel at the things you can do in theatres these days and the imagination of the people in charge, or such outstanding acting that even though it is all bollocks you have some sympathy for the characters, no matter how ridiculous.

In this situation there was none of that. The actors did a good job to a man, but there wasn’t anything that lifted the whole event for me, and the staging was predictable, and sadly, to me, a little bit lazy.

I used to hate picnics, which is a shame, because all children I have ever met are pre-programmed to love picnics and in their younger years I found taking my children for a picnic one of the worst forms of torture the summer holidays could devise.

There were several reasons for this:

Ants. The bastards.

Rain. The bastard.

The traditional British concept of a picnic; i.e. plastic bread cheese sandwiches which have been allowed to sweat gently in cellophane for several hours, crisps, bottled drinks with spitty crisp in. Everything too warm and slithery. Urgh.

Sand. The bastard.

etc.

My children were the faddiest of faddy eaters, and unless a picnic consisted of Party Rings, Cheese Strings and warm squash, with added Wotsits. They were not happy.

I was suicidal.

In recent years they have grown more sophisticated in terms of taste which has helped enormously. I have also discovered Tiffin boxes, which are a thing of beauty and a joy forever. For those of you who have yet to come across these marvellous things, they are a series of stacked boxes in which you put different food based treats. These then clip together in a metal frame with a little handle, allowing you to transport all sorts of wonderful things wherever you like.

For the purposes of the modern picnic I now own two Tiffin boxes, one with four trays, one with three. I also own a fantastic little picnic set which sits inside an insulated ruck sack. it has a pocket for you to put ice packs to keep stuff cold. It has lots of other pockets to stuff food in. It has two bits at the side for bottles/drinks containers. It has a front pocket which consists of a four piece dinner set complete with salt and pepper shaker and bread board. It is genius, because unlike a picnic hamper in wicker, which is admittedly a lovely thing, it is not unwieldy or difficult to carry, or rips your legs to shreds as you bump around with it smashing into your thigh. And I have a double sided picnic blanket which is waterproof and yet still comfortable to sit on.

I am in picnic gear heaven.

Yesterday we went to Knighton Park, which is our local park, and which I had never managed to visit before now, for a picnic with friends.

It was rather splendid.

I filled my Tiffin boxes with lots of different types of salad and veg; mange tout, radish, mooli, baby toms, cucumber, leaves of varying descriptions, Chanteney carrots, and loads of stuff to dip in the chilli smoked houmous we had bought with us. For Oscar and Tallulah, who are still food philistines I had added mini sausage rolls and chopped up pizza. Tilly and I had home made spicy cous cous with veg and pomegranate seeds, and home made chilli paneer (paneer is a semi hard Indian cheese, which is delicious cooked in curry). We had plenty of carbs with French sticks and tortilla chips, which were also good for dipping and scooping. We also tested out a recipe I had seen on Food and Drink the other day, which was shop bought gnocchi (Michele Roux approved, so I tried it), fried with garlic until toasty on the outside. Very nice and made a change from potato salad.

For pudding I had bought along boxes of cherries and red grapes.

Spread out on the blanket it looked very appetising.

Certainly a small black pug dog with a very blinging collar and a nose for a sausage roll seemed to think so.

Oscar is cultivating a fear of dogs. I do not approve. Particularly when it is a fear of tiny, black pug dogs who are more likely to lick you to death than rip your face off. Oscar leapt from the blanket and raced round and round, while the dog gaily followed him, thinking: ‘A picnic and a play date. Perfection!’ We were howling with laughter as the dog and Oscar raced in ever widening circles around the blanket. Even the dog’s owner got the giggles.

Eventually we managed to persuade Oscar to stand still and the dog to get on with its walk, and order was restored with Oscar having worked up a hearty appetite for his lunch.

The afternoon was lovely, the park was great, with tons of different areas for the children to explore, including an outside gym, a regular playground, a toddler playground and an adventure playground, and with six children ranging from 2 to 15 we managed to take advantage of them all.

I was rewarded for my picnic prowess with a distinct lack of ants and no sand in my sarnies. Result.

Granny has recently blogged about her visit to the Falcon supermarket in Leicester, and we thought it sounded so excellent, Oscar and I persuaded granny and grandad to let us tag along on our next trip.

Falcon is an Asian supermarket, so although you can buy stuff like Heinz tomato ketchup and washing powder, what you are really going for is the enormous, and I mean enormous, variety of herbs and spices, fruit and veg that you might not be able to get in a regular supermarket. There are vast tables full of boxes of mangos and aubergines, chills and sweet potatoes that you can pick through. Great towering boxes of bunches of fresh herbs are stacked high above your heads, and pallets and pallets of onions and garlic of every kind. There are also numerous boxes of fruit and veg I simply couldn’t recognise if my life depended on it. Things that look like fat, round gooseberries, but with no prickles on. Things that look like mutant cucumbers, covered in spines and bumps, four or five different types of mango, bananas of every shape, size and variety.

You can buy herbs and spices loose in big drums which you scoop your required amount into bag, or by the sack load, or in kilo or two kilo bags. I found out that cloves are called ‘lovely’. I found out that there are about three hundred spices I have no clue about and which all looked intriguing and slightly needful.

I highly recommend a trip if you’re interested in Indian cookery and you’re trying to source some hard to find ingredients. There was everything you could possibly want from huge cones of jaggery (sugar, basically), to tamarind paste, black cardamons, to amchor powder and everything in between. All the items I’ve either paid through the nose for or found impossible to source in mainstream shops were there in bucket loads.

My top buy had to be a huge bag of star anise for about three quid. Which is what I usually pay for around three or four heads in a jar from Ocado. I also got a bag of about twenty cinnamon sticks for about £2.50, which is insanely good value.

Everything tends to be sold in vast quantities, making it much cheaper, but it also means you have to know what to do with a kilo of gram flour, for example. We found what worked best was to share the shop, and split everything down when we got home. That way ten limes for a quid becomes much more manageable, because you can share them out.

We had an absolutely fantastic time there, and will definitely be visiting again soon.

Be warned though:

The car park is small, crammed, and terrifying. You have to have nerves of steel to park. If I were driving I would have skipped the car park, parked in a nearby street and walked.

The shop is pretty chaotic. When we went it was absolutely heaving with people and there was no order at all. If you like everything in neat lines, looking sanitary and wrapped in cling film, do not bother. You will probably faint within thirty seconds.

You need to be patient. The till staff are massively over worked, and as lots of people there are buying in bulk (it has a section that is basically a massive cash and carry where you can buy giant sacks and drums of stuff), it is not a place you can really pop into in a hurry.

English is not the first language for the majority of people there. The labels on the packaging, the labels for the fruit and veg and spices, are not always in English, and you have to know a bit about what you want and what it looks like/might be called, to make the most of your visit there if you are looking for more obscure items. Staff are very willing to help when they are not rushing about doing trillions of other jobs, but they may not know the name of what you are looking for in English if they have always referred to it by one of its other names.

If you are prepared for an adventure, you love ethnic foods and you don’t mind being a bit experimental, it is huge fun.

I am still knitting.

At the weekend I bought my first knitting pattern.

My mini project that I alluded to in the last post, was to make a scarf and hat as a present for my sister in law. I had no idea if she wanted a hat and scarf (in this weather the answer would be a resounding NO, but I am knitting for the future. Silver jump suits next), but I had found some gorgeous wool and when it knitted up it turned out to be the colours she loves, so I decided it would be a gift.

I checked with her, once I had finished the project, that she actually did want them. I remember as a child the evil things people used to knit uncle Robber and me, and how mortified we were that my mum made us wear them so that the people who knitted them would know we appreciated the gift. We did not appreciate the gift in the slightest. We hated the horrible, scratchy, usually brown, lumps of knitwear, hated them. And the problem with wearing the things people gave you, and being suitably grovelly about them was that this only encouraged the evil knitters even more. It was a vicious, itchy cycle, which had Dante been gifted a ribbed, polo neck sweater in 100% acrylic two ply, would have definitely made it into the Inferno one way or another.

I specifically told her to say no if she hated them, and she didn’t hate them. Which is nice for both of us, and because she had given me the green light, and had seen them, it meant I could show them to the world.

Ta dah!

and

Ta dee!

It may not look like much, but given that in a theoretical year book from a fictional high school I didn’t go to in America I was voted woman least likely to do anything practical due to being utterly cack handed, it is nothing short of a wool based miracle.

The hat was the thing I used my knitting pattern for. I bought it because it said that it was an easy pattern to follow.

Ah ha, ha ha ha, hahahahaha.

This is the laugh of Inigo Montoya as he says in his loveable Spanish accent: ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’

It is easy only if you are a) a super knitter and b) skilled at mathematical equations and algebra stylings.

There are a great many letters and numbers in knitting patterns it turns out, and brackets. Sometimes they are your regular curled brackets. Other times they are squared brackets. Sometimes they use both types of brackets together.

There was a lot, and I mean a lot, of unpicking, swearing, and pacing. At one point there was a huge amount of paper and a brown felt tipped pen (all I could lay hands on in a moment of crisis. Hardly Virginia Woolf).

I finished the hat on Sunday night. When I say Sunday night I mean the early hours of Monday morning. I had hit a rich seam and was not prepared to quit until I had finished the damn thing. I was going great guns until I came upon another bracketty line with forty seven numbers and a lot of K, P, inc, dec, pfft action.

I wrestled with this for some time dear reader.

At one point I went out into the garden, where if I were a woman who smoked, I would have paced the decking, dragging on a fag and rolling my eyes to the heavens. As it was I merely did all that while thinking of that episode of Miranda where she is attempting to show the world she can actually cook a meal from scratch. She starts off all lovely and serene with ingredients lined up on the surface in order. It cuts to her, flour in hair, batter up the wall, four million pots in the sink shouting: ‘I just can’t tell my tusspers from my tusspurburs.’

That was me.

I just can’t tell my knuskers from my purlpurburs. With the added complication of brackets.

Which is always worserer.

Anyway. As you can see, I beat the hat. Which made me very proud. I know it is a little stiff. If you do not slouch it back on your head, you look like a deranged Pope in favour of gay rights (which he bloody well should be), because I used a much chunkier wool than required and knitted said wool on too small needles.

But apart from that it’s fine.