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

Comments

  1. I loved this and the pictures were fun. Made me chuckle before bedtime.

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    1. Thanks, Debbie. Glad you liked it. One of my favourite things is looking for suitable (or unsuitable) pictures.

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  2. I didn't know you could still get Freddo Frogs! As I recall from my frugal childhood (a zillion years ago), Freddo's were popular because they were the cheapest chocolate you could buy.

    That is to to cast no aspersions on your colleague who supplies the Freddos, of course.

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    1. I can vouch for the fact that you can still get Freddos. We have three hundred of them in my work fridge.

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  3. Excellent and I love the before and after pictures!

    Anna :o]

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    1. Thanks, Hyper. I loved that baby photo especially.

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  4. I remember a Saturday Night Live skit where someone (Dan Aykroyd?) took a full sized shredded wheat, moistened it , sprinkled it with cleanser & started scrubbing a sink. He said that he'd heard that some people actually ate those things but he didn't see how that was possible!

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    1. Yes, that would be a much more sensible use for them than eating them! In fact, I might take them into school and get kids to scrub the desks with Shredded Wheat. That would be a detention to remember.

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  5. Shredded Wheat should be seved only to criminals or used to stuff the mattresses they sleep on.

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    1. You cruel man. You've really thought about this, haven't you?

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  6. My dad always reckoned Shredded Wheat were made with stable floor sweepings.

    Radio 2 at dinner time? No no and thrice no, it should be children demanding Simpsons, Dad giving in and Mum sulking because (although ironic) children too young to get this therefore Simpsons=moral bankruptcy. This should then be followed by Mum exclaiming that civilised people do not have the TV on during meals because families should have time together. TV is then turned off and meal eaten in silence due to all at the table now being in a massive sulk. Crunchy Pizza optional.

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    1. We didn't have a TV in our house when the kids were little. But same thing ... they soon found something else to sulk about at dinner. Usually the dinner, in fact.

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  7. Well if that was you free writing, can you do it again sometime please?

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  8. Chocolate frogs?

    So you DO work at Hogwarts?

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  9. Good to see you posting again. I thought you'd packed it in. By the way, I'm the bread-maker in this household, too. My focaccia is a real treat.

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    1. Focaccia? Blimey. Nothing as posh as that round here. I will speak to the chef.

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  10. Well....I am glad to see you back! I was beginning to think you had been laid low by something awful. You can make frogs and boring food sound fun.....(.I am with you re the second choc frog!!)

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    1. I have been laid low by something awful. It's called marking.

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  11. I had a ball! Give be a chocolate frog, quick! It'd probably taste better... (think about it)

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    1. ... taste better than a real one, do you mean?

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  12. I GOT TO THE END!
    never mind chocolate Freddos, the whole pond is looking quite appetising!
    xx (and some :):):)s to soften the gruffness of this comment- would hate to insult someone I don't even know)

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    1. Well done for getting to the end. You win today's prize. Guess what it is?

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  13. I'll have to become a Follower now . We eat exactly the same pizzas .
    Uncanny , isn't it !!

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    1. You have taste. Ya boo to those silly ham and pineapple people.

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  14. I loved this post! And so agree about our breakfasts, which tend to be quite dire. I was thinking this only this morning, as I mumbled my way through yet another bowl of something that looked (and tasted) like cattle fodder.

    And Froddos! I always bring them when I go to see my grandchildren (a) because I like to take them something but (b) I don't want to turn in into one of those "what have you brought us, Granny?" grannies. They know what I've brought them; Froddos. They don't seem to mind.

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    1. I wouldn't mind either if you were my Granny. Although, if you were, there would be some explaining to do.

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  15. Welcome back! Looking forward to more tales of synchronised pizza crunching...

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  16. This made me giggle! I do the same thing with my pizza - in fact I've got some mozerella left over from Christmas, so this time I'm going to buy pizza with nothing on at all* and start from scratch.

    * I mean the pizza will have nothing on at all, not that I will be going to buy pizza with nothing on at all

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  17. Fran, you have re-invented Mass Observation for a digital age. Wrap the blog-post up in non-biodegradable cellophane, bury it for 200 years and people will be able to write theses (is that really the plural of thesis, it sounds like a disease) on it.

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    1. I love the idea that, in 200 years' time, someone's thesis will be called 'Chocolate Frog Eating and Pizza Crunching in 2012'.

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  18. The secret is No Milk. String pillows should be eaten crunchy. Pizza would rather be chewy than Oh Dear have you broken another tooth?

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    1. You eat them DRY? Aren't you there for HOURS?

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  19. I love this new Reply function. How exciting!

    Today's menu:
    Breakfast - 2 croissants.
    Breaktime - Freddo.
    Lunch - leftover mozzarella, anchovies and olives from yesterday.
    Pudding - Freddo.
    After school treat - Freddo.
    After Freddo treat - Freddo.
    Dinner - baked potato with cheese.
    Pudding - lemon cake at friend's house.

    Just keeping you informed .......

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    1. Tut-tut . Haven't you heard of the Five A Day rule ? Eat another Freddo quickly .

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    2. I made up for it today.

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  20. Free writing clearly becomes you! Do all we teachers have the same bizarre eating habits? The almond kisses in my office are almost gone. Must find chocolate frogs.

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    1. We don't have anything as posh as almond kisses.

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  21. How you can take a post about eating and turn it into something I'm craving more of is amazing. Hilarious. and...
    are we married to the same man? Does yours only show up for six months or so every year and a half when mine is missing?

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  22. Judging by the number of comments you were clearly missed Fran. I just want to know when my chocolate frog's coming - and I don't want the disturbing one either!

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    1. I'm sorry, hausfrau. I wrapped one up ready to send and then ... got hungry.

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  23. Why do you have a picture of a chocolate Matthew Kelly on this post? And why are you calling him Freddo?

    Anna May x

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    1. Ha ha! Yes, see what you mean. HOWEVER, I did see Matthew Kelly once playing Lennie in a production of 'Of Mice and Men' at the theatre and he was amazing. And, at the time, I remember thinking, why are you in so many stupid pseudofunny shows on TV if you can act like this?

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