Evidence that we haven't heard the whole story behind the Merkel ale attack

My take on the Merkel beer story on Poetry 24

The truth behind the story

Evidence that Fran is always thinking of things to keep you busy

My e-book 'Being Miss' has a new cover.  My son put it together for me.  I think he's a very clever boy, and obviously destined for great things, especially as he's only just had his second birthday.......













Kidding you.  He's nearly 26.  And just about to become a father ....  Which will make me Granny Franny, as my sister delights in telling me.

Fran found that even getting dressed up and trying to make the most of herself didn't make her feel any younger

Evidence that chocolate can bring you pleasure and excitement in all kinds of ways

We bought about six boxes of Matchmakers at Christmas, right, thinking we would give them away to people we visited.

Shame we never got invited anywhere.  (I guess answering phone calls, emails and texts would have helped.)  Anyway, in the end, we had to eat them all ourselves.

For the unitiated, Matchmakers are chocolate sticks which look like this ....

... and it's a very clever marketing ploy, to have chocolate in such a thin form.  In fact, the advertising even claims that Matchmakers are a healthy diet food ....

You too can lose so much weight eating chocolate that you make no indentation
on the sofa

It's all a Big Lie, of course, because no one, no one, says, after one Matchmaker, 'Hey, guys, I'm STUFFED.  Let's put these away and have more tomorrow.'

Still, you can nibble away at a Matchmaker while watching Downton Abbey and pretend you are being elegant like them.  It makes a change from usual practice ...

... which leads to your sofa looking like this ...

Well, friends, I didn't come here to talk about food.

No.... get up OFF the floor.  That was a very silly, immature over-reaction from you all.

I'm actually here to talk about the enormous difference the Quality Street company which manufactures Matchmakers made to our Christmas because of the FREE GAME we received inside each box.

It is a very entertaining game and I honestly don't think I could have survived Christmas without it.  Here is what you get in the packet.  (I'd take a tranquilliser right now if I were you.  This could excite you beyond reason.)

1. a piece of square crinkly paper, the type you normally get covering a box of chocolates
2. on the square paper, a circle, which is split into four quartered sections, like this:

They call this the 'Lucky Launchpad'.  Don't ever tell me the days of hyperbole are dead.

Here are the instructions, as set out carefully on the packet:

Stand a Matchmakers stick up on its end in the middle of the lucky launchpad
Before you let go, guess which quarter the Matchmaker will land in.
Call out your choice.
Let go of the Matchmaker.
If it lands in the right segment, you win the Matchmaker.

I am almost in tears with gratitude to Quality Street, who have provided me and my family with such an innovative, fascinating team game to play, giving us hours of pleasure with which no number of Christmas visits from George Clooney in an Italian suit could ever hope to compete.

I know you are all jealous and want to play the Lucky Launchpad game immediately.  You must rush out and buy a packet of Matchmakers, so that you too can while away a happy evening balancing a Matchmaker on its end and letting go.

Next year, I am expecting further entertainment.  Perhaps there will be the ....

'Roll a Matchmaker along the table and guess how far it gets' game

or the

'See if you can line up some Matchmakers in a straight line' game

I prefer, myself, to play the ....

'How many boxes of Matchmakers is it physically possible to consume during the back-to-back watching of two episodes of Downton Abbey on iplayer' game

Reasons why Fran is not an Olympic athlete

Overheard at a bus stop.....



I lie.  I overheard nothing.  It was my own conversation.  But, for a moment there, you thought you might hear something interesting.  I hope you enjoyed your nano-second of tension.  It's all down hill from here.

Me: 'So, your father and I are coming up to Sheffield to see you at half-term, then.'

Daughter: 'Yeah, that'll be nice.'


Me: 'Dad says you'll be wanting to visit some remote place called Castleton.'

Daughter: 'Oh, fine.  Okay, then. Yeah.  Let' s go there.'


Me: 'Dad says you took him there before, and you love it there because of the beautiful scenery and the bus ride through the countryside.'

Daughter: 'Well ....'


Me: 'He says you love the whole nature thing, the walking, the views.'


[Pause.]


'Mum, I like it because of the fudge.'


It's at moments like these that my little mummy heart bursts with pride.  There's nothing more rewarding than knowing you have passed on to the next generation the best bits of your personality, your skills, your attributes, your instincts, your ambitions and desires.

I once made a whole batch of fudge to give people at Christmas.  I put it all in a box and hid it at the back of a wardrobe from the rest of the family, forgetting that, in fact, the only person who was likely to raid it and eat it was me.

We gave everyone tins of biscuits from Tesco that year.

Tonight, I am not eating fudge, but I have persuaded the husband to open a box of toffee he was given for Christmas (presumably by someone who could Control Themselves).  I have eaten SO much toffee, and I feel bad, because someone could have used that same amount of toffee to stick together our broken world.

The husband said he was going to put the box somewhere Up High, just in case.  I presume he meant one of the shelves in the house......

Fran's husband was taking no chances. 

I have started a new blog post category called Me and Food.  I should have done it years ago, because the topic seems to creep into completely dominate so many of my posts.

Fran's book on Amazon Kindle - evidence that she can write for longer than 5 minutes

Just letting you know that, should you feel inclined, you can now read my first book called 'Being Miss' if you have a Kindle or something else you can download it to - and it seems to indicate that you can download it to your PC, too, if you don't.  It will cost you less than the price of 10 chocolate frogs.  It is about one day in a teacher's life precarious existence.  And it should make you laugh.  At least, that's the idea.

Here's the link below ...

Ooh, I must go and download that now

And if you do download, and you like it, please write me a review on Amazon.  I'd give you a big virtual hug.

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