Evidence that 'shaying nosthing at all' could even be good advice for Fran

At this very moment, I have no idea what I am about to write.  I just thought, as it's been so long, I had better put fingers to keyboard and say something.

I think this process is called 'free writing'.  It may also be called 'How to Lose Lots of Followers at Once'.

Not all of Fran's followers found they could get to Paragraph 3

Snap decision.  I am going to tell you about my meals.  For breakfast, I had some Mini Shredded Wheat.  These are essentially like little parcels of thin string, fashioned into what looks like a cushion.  You pour milk on them, and you eat them.  Habits like this, which we Brits have, are presumably what make foreigners think we are weird.  While they are buttering croissants and drinking posh coffee, or spreading maple syrup on a fresh waffle, we are eating parcels of string, and still calling ourselves civilised.

At breaktime, at school, all I had time for was to eat a chocolate frog.  One of my colleagues keeps a box of chocolate frogs (called Freddos)  .. (the chocolate frogs, not the colleague) ... in the fridge and he doles them out to kids who have done something worthy.  The only thing is, often the box is empty, because the rest of us filch them.  In fact, it is Not the Done Thing to go into the fridge and help oneself to a Freddo without saying to everyone else, 'Anyone fancy a chocolate frog?'  After we have got over the obligatory ribaldry about our tastes in partners, we all enjoy a bit of chocolate and then Period 3 with Year 10 and iambic pentameter doesn't seem quite so bad.

Socially acceptable chocolate frog eating

There's something really, really disturbing, though, about this one ....

At lunchtime, I had a sandwich made from my husband's home-made bread.  He makes bread a lot, but, as the saying goes, Results May Vary.  Sometimes the bread is so dense that if I have a sandwich of it for lunch, I can't get up to teach Periods 4 and 5 and they have to organise me a cover teacher.  Sometimes, it's just the opposite, and has so many holes in it that it virtually counts as a diet food and means that after I've had a sandwich, I can eat three muffins and still not feel guilty.  Today it was in between and the only downside was that I wasn't eating it at home while listening to You and Yours and getting ready for a nice snooze.

I will start a new paragraph to tell you what was IN the sandwich.  First, I will begin with the butter.  Butter is a source of conflict in our house.  When the weather is warm, my husband puts the butter in the fridge, which means you have to carve it off the block with a kitchen knife in slivers and lay it carefully on the bread and, to be honest, if I had time to be doing that, I'd have time to write blog posts.   Another alternative is to put some in the microwave to 'warm', but this is easily misjudged, and one can end up standing in the kitchen with a bowl of bubbling butter, wondering whether to go and pour it over the head of one's still-sleeping husband.  When the weather is cold, we leave the butter out of the fridge, but we put the oven on low to keep the downstairs warm and this .....  See previous sentence.

I don't have time to talk about the cheese.  I'd hate to bore you.

For tea, when I got home, I had pizza.  The way we do pizza is that we buy margherita pizzas, just with tomatoes and cheese on them, from the supermarket, then we add bits.  Tonight I had my favourite bits: olives and anchovies.  However, I had so many olives and anchovies that 1) I couldn't actually taste the pizza; 2) I had to drink fourteen litres of water afterwards.  We had slightly overcooked the pizzas and there was that awkward stage during the meal when you're both eating pizza crust so hard that you sound like you're crunching pebbles with your teeth.  You have to coordinate this kind of thing, so that you're crunching at the same time.  In the end, we couldn't get it together, and just had to turn the radio up.  It was such a relief, to be able to crunch out of synch but not to feel shame.

What was funny was that Radio 2 was playing Ronan Keating singing, 'You shay it besht, when you shay nosthing at all' and then suddenly the radio went off because of a technical fault, meaning that Keating was, indeed, shaying nosthing at all, and we were yet again crunching pizza base in total disharmony.  Life doesn't get much more distressing than that.

If you are still reading this, you deserve a knighthood, a medal or, at the very least, a Freddo.

I promise, next time, to stay away longer.  Or, at least, to have more interesting meals to write about.

This is the same person as the first picture, just to show you how much
they aged while reading Fran's thrilling, imaginative blog post