St Albans Mums Archives -

Mum’s The Word

So, you lose one hour’s sleep every Mother’s Day as kids wake you up early with their creative attempt at breakfast in bed but this year is a double whammy and you will actually lose two hours as the clocks are springing forward.

On top of that at some point during the day you will lose yet another hour when you go around changing all the clocks.

As your breakfast starts to get cold, the kids will insist that you open the card.

This will take shape in one of two forms.

An insulting “funny” one that is a not so subtle message from your other half that he wants to see results from that gym membership he bought you at Christmas or, worse still, the one they made at school!

This will be on cheap (probably blue) absorbent material that wouldn’t be out of place in a washroom paper towel dispenser and be adorned with a simple black vertical line topped with a small squashed yellow mass of papier mache.

“It’s a daffodil mummy”.

Anyway, if you are lucky enough to be able to open the “card” (despite an entire Pritt stick being used to fix the white paper to the inside)
it will reveal your child’s representation of their life. So pay close attention to the imagery.

Social Services possibly already have so you should too.

Warning signs are usually in the shape of

A – a cat/dog like image when you have no pets – check for neighbours livestock in your shed and your child’s bedroom immediately
(this task can be easier if your shed is your child’s bedroom).

B – a small stick figure with huge amounts of red coming from it may indicate a soupcon of friction with a sibling/fellow pupil.

C – Any sign of a milk float or an Amazon delivery van means you’ve been rumbled so you may well get an insulting card too!

Card(s) done. It’s the present or presents.

Now, we’re guessing you have some of those bath bubbles leftover from Christmas? You know, the ones that make you itch.
So, chances are it’ll be a box of the ambassadors favourite over-wrapped chocs or (and this really depends on the stocks at whichever petrol station is nearest to you) flowers.

Be grateful, it’s the thought that counts. Mind you, if the other half had thought about it 6 weeks ago, they might just have booked you in for a nice lunch then dropped you off at home while they took the kids to the park and ran them ragged so you could put your feet up and watch Love Actually. AGAIN!

Breakfast is stone cold now but the kids want you to eat it as they “made it speshul”.

Tell your offspring to snuggle up under your duvet while you go downstairs to warm it up.

IMPORTANT! Once you have deposited the breakfast in the kitchen bin do the following:

1 – Cover it up with something to avoid accidental discovery just in case anyone else in your household actually knows where the kitchen bin is.
2 – Advanced users only – smear chin with ketchup or egg yolk.
3 – Make yourself a decent cup of tea and return upstairs licking your fingers making “mmm” noises.

Well trained children will ask what else they can do for you but, if you’re lucky, yours will ask what you are making them for breakfast?

You will suggest Maccy D’s as by now you are really hungry and you’ve only had a Ferrero and cup of tea for breakfast – win win.

That’s it, the rest of the day will be like every other Sunday unless the other half actually did start planning 6 weeks ago!

Have a great day you Mothers! x

Old El Paso Fiasco

So here we are, Mother’s Day gone, Easter over, first week of half-term all done, the clocks have magically sprung forwards (except the ones for the oven, microwave, two cars, three wrist watches, bedroom hi-fi, kitchen wall clock, bathroom wall clock and the 1984 ghetto Boomblaster) AND the sun has come out! But the threat of a disturbingly dark menace is about to descend upon some of us…………

I speak, of course, of the most unwelcome double act since Jedward (if only they had been christened Peter and Rick?). Yes, DIY and gardening.

Yes, duty calls for Snorbenite males. Our better halves, under the guise of interior design/landscape gardener experts, pay no heed to the fact that the football and rugby season ending crescendo is upon us. Instead, without fail, they begin the annual ritual that is the writing of (imagine a Vincent Price voice-over) ‘The Little List of Things’.

The only certainties about ‘The List’ are that it shall contain things that are little, things that are not so little and things that are big. For verily, it is written that, though ‘The List’ may hath items crossed off it when they are completed, new items will be added by the Forewoman once she hath watched the latest episode of Kirstie’s Fill Your House (with stuff you didn’t know you wanted) For Free. Well, that’s “Free” unless you can get it ready made or have to cover it with Farrow & Ball liquid gold.

My interior designer was preoccupied over the recent Bank Holiday so I, temporarily, escaped ‘The List’ but it stills hangs like the sword of Damocles waiting to drop whenever it is most inconvenient.

Not for me bedding plants and emulsion colour charts, oh no, no, no dear readers. My Bank Holiday sports fest was to be interrupted by the urgent need for ……………packets of fajita mix!

Yes, fajita mix and yes it was ‘urgent’. There was an emergency and I was required to make a mercy dash to get the ‘Old Alamo’ fajita kit and be quick (or should I say ‘muy rápido’) about it too.

‘What could possibly be “urgent” about Old Amarillo fajita mix?’ I hear you ask.

Well, dear reader, I am reliably informed that, due to the current composition of your standard fajita mix packet, there is a condition called “EXTRAS” – EXcessive Tortillas Remaining After Supper. This can lead to Cupboard Room At Premium (see pic) syndrome and despite my thoughtful suggestion that they may come in handy should we be caught short for toilet paper the pile never seems to decrease.

Where were we?

Ah yes, mercy dash.

‘Ok my dearest, sounds simple enough’ (silly me).

‘It’s in the yellow and red box, but not the Original recipe one. You have to get the one with “extra mild super tasty” written in blue.’

‘Ah, so that’ll be the yellow and red with a bit of blue on it box then?’

‘Just ask in the shop if you’re not sure!’

So, with those words of encouragement ringing in my ears, I left for the joy of Painsbury’s. Now I must confess that I mostly shop at Waitrose, mainly because, when I first moved to Snorbans, I was led to believe that it was compulsory if one was to be accepted in social circles. PS – Before any accusations of snobbery are made, I have been known to pop into the odd Chavsda too.

However, I had ulterior motives for going to Painsberries. No, not to look at the latest TU spring collection. Firstly, it gave me the excuse to nip into Homebase to look at all the gardening and power tools that I had no intention of buying or, even if I did buy them, using. It’s a man thing.

Secondly, I wanted to look at and photograph the location for AL3’s pet project.” If you build it they will come.” All will be revealed in a later blog but, suffice to say for now, ‘support us or the puppy gets it’.

PS -To the lady passer-by who saw me taking pictures and gave me a look as if I’d farted at her baby’s christening (wind-breaking at other religious gatherings is also available) I was just taking a photo!!

Anyway, important stuff done, I strolled over to the superstore and (to my delight) the only thing longer than the till queues (presumably Waitrose was closed?) was the distance to the aforementioned paquete de tortillas. Superstore? SuperLONGstore more likely.

Suffice to say, an hour later I was homeward bound armed with 3 packets of Old Eldorado fajita mix all resplendent in yellow red and blue, well at least two of them were. Why don’t people put things back in the right places?!

Two would be enough though, we won’t be having fajitas more than twice in the same week surely?

I returned, hunter-gatherer duties complete and satisfied in knowing that there would be no panic in our home should we run out of toilet paper.

Obviously the error in the shop (1 in 3 failure rate) was mentioned by the interior design department who deemed it “typical”.

‘No, no I ask for nothing in return dear, after all, my reward is your pleasure my dearest.’

I was swiftly reminded that I was fortunate that the best things come in small packages.

OBVIOUSLY she was talking about fajita kits!!

Hasta luego muchachos.

Who Do GÜ Think You Are?

After extensive polling among residents of St Albans, AL3 WTF can exclusively reveal the most accurate way to measure exactly how middle-class one is.

Our research identifies that the glass ramekin is the modern-day yard-stick by which the ‘class’ of local residents can be measured.

You know how it goes: You eat your GÜ desserts; you wash the little glass ramekins they come in; you think ‘ooh, they’re nice – they’ll be handy for something’; you stack them at the back of a cupboard – the only dilemma being whether to put them with the glassware or the crockery (they’re actually made of glass, but you eat out of them so they’re not really glasses as such…). And there they sit in the cupboard. Untouched. Untouched, that is, until the next time you buy a little box of GÜ desserts (probably on special offer – c’mon, admit it). You eat your GÜ dessert; you wash the little glass ramekins; you think ‘ooh, they’re nice – they’ll be handy for something’; you put them in the cupboard…on top of the previous ones. This continues over a period of time until you’ve constructed a row of small glass versions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

And one day, in a moment of complete madness, you think ‘I should get rid of some of these’. So you take one off the top of a tower and then you’re faced with the next dilemma: how to dispose of it. It’s not technically a bottle or a jar so you can’t put it in with your recycling for fear of attracting the council’s yellow sticker of shame on your recycling box – ‘YOU ARE A NUMPTY. DO NOT PUT UNAUTHORISED ITEMS IN THE RECYCLING’ and you can’t just throw it away as the rubbish goes straight to landfill and you really care about landfill and the legacy you leave to future generations. So you pursue the only sensible option open to you: you put the ramekin back on top of the little glass tower from whence it came.

And this is how it goes. Forever. You can’t break the cycle: you buy GÜ dessert; you eat GÜ dessert; you put glass ramekin in kitchen cupboard. There’s no way out. One day your whole kitchen will be full of ramekins – piled ceiling high. Across St Albans the same problem is encountered by many ramekindred spirits and whole sheds and garages will soon be stocked full of towers of glass ramekins. People will get ever-more imaginative as to what to do with the out-of-control supply of ramekins: they’ll be made into serviette holders – the napkin ramekin; people will sculpt them into Hobbit figurines – the Tolkien ramekin; KFC in Marshalswick will start to serve food in them – the finger lickin’ ramekin; they’ll be used for snacks after sunset during the Muslim holy month – the Ramadan ramekin; Amazon will even launch one you can read e-books on – the Ramekindle.

Ultimately, across our fair city, loft conversions and cellar playrooms will become rammed full of ramekins. Necessity being the mother of invention, some bright spark will find the solution: every evening after nightfall you’ll hear the gentle chink of glass as people sheepishly put two empty ramekins out on their doorstep ready for collection early the next morning. All the old electric milk floats will be brought out of retirement to hum about in the half-light of dawn collecting glass ramekins while we all sleep safely in our beds resting before another busy day waiting for the Waitrose home delivery man to drop off fresh supplies of GÜ.

(Actually, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if you look closely at your mywaitrose loyalty card, you’ll see there’s even a 24hr ramekin hotline should you have need for any late-night glass receptacle-related advice – Have you or anyone in your family been affected by issues surrounding ramekin storage?)

Anyway, the First World problem outlined above was all a long-winded way of explaining that how many ramekins you own defines how middle-class you are:

0: You are upper class. Your chef decants home-made chocolate dessert into bone china receptacles that have been in your family for generations; your butler then carries these on an engraved silver tray to the west wing to the least formal of your three dining rooms. You don’t even own a mywaitrose card.

1-5: You are middle class. You moved to St Albans from a town north of Coventry. If your great-grandparents were alive today they would be shocked and proud in equal measure that you not only now say ‘dessert’ rather than ‘pudding’, but that you also buy these sweet courses ready-made rather than cook your own using the mixing bowl that lovely cousin Julie bought you as a wedding present.

5-10: You are very middle class. You are part of the 1.3% of people in AL1-3 who have actually lived in St Albans their whole life.

10-30: You are extremely middle class. One day you will move to Harpenden.

30+: You are upper class. You probably own a ramekin-making factory.

Our survey findings also revealed a few supplementary ways to accurately confirm middle-classness:

If your first name ends in a consonant, but your first child’s name ends in a vowel then you are definitely middle class.

If you have ever been to a Center Parc, you are, without doubt, middle class.

If your heart missed a bit when you discovered that a Farrow & Ball shop had opened right by Caffè Nero in town then you are probably middle class (sooo convenient – coffee and colour-matching charts so close together). And if more than 11.6% of the wall-space in your home (excluding stables and staff-quarters) has been decorated with F&B paint then you absolutely are middle class.

And there’s nothing wrong with being part of the muddled class. Well, not too much.

About the author:

The author has no connection whatsoever with GÜ and has not even been covered in goo since that unfortunate incident all those years ago with the lamp-post and the 21st Birthday cake. However, the author does own eight glass ramekins (empty), has two rooms decorated with a colour called ‘Pointing’, has an older sibling living in Harpenden, a vowel/consonant combo…and a small scar on the left elbow from an over-enthusiastic descent on an indoor water-slide somewhere near Ampthill.