Beanz Meanz Mess!

What ho chaps!

I find myself awake rather more early than I’d planned on this Sunday morning, which is pretty amazing really, as I am known for my unending and eternal love of sleep.  I adore it, and as I’ve probably said in the past (I know I do tend to go on the odd loquacious ramble) that I have been known to sleep in some rather strange places including a bus on the way to a night out in Spain…..Not one of my finer moments I’ll admit!

I tend to do that attractive pose which involves my head being flung right back and my mouth wide open as if I’m doing a terrible and highly embarrassing impression of a gormless trout.  What’s more awful is the point when my head dips and I do that thing where you wake yourself up with a jolt, then look around in what I hope was a highly furtive manner to see if anyone has witnessed this beautiful display of female allure!  I can usually detect a few smirks here and there!

But, enough about my near-constant state of gorgeously attractive somnolence, and so to today’s title:

Beans.

Baked beans, green beans, human beans, bean sprouts and coffee beans. Just some of the many different varieties of the humble yet useful and versatile bean.  (Ok, I feel as if I’m now randomly trying to do some sort of odd, bean-obsessed advert extolling the virtues of beans, so quick-back on topic please!)

The Parent and I had an encounter with a few beans this week.  Strangely, I didn’t count them so won’t be able to give you the exact number of beans we had to contend with, but I think I can safely say it was in the billions….

The Brother recently purchased three Big Bertha bean bags. (Other giant bean-filled bags are available) They arrived on thursday in the biggest boxes imaginable.  They took up my lounge to the point where I hadn’t seen The Parent for what seemed like a few weeks, and all she was doing was sitting the other side of the sofa with these hugemongoose boxes in between!

I flung down my long-nosed pliers and informed The Parent that we weren’t waiting for The Brother, and that we would unpack the boxes ourselves.  What followed was a lot of pulling, pushing and a few mild curses (on my part; The Parent is much more angelic and serene) but eventually we had finally managed to separate the boxes from their prizes.  What was now before us was the evidence of what seems to be a highly cheeky and lazy company:

A giant plastic bag of those nightmare-ish polystyrene beans in all their tiny yet inherently evil glory.  And a neatly folded suede bag to put them in.  Why they couldn’t have sent them to us ready assembled I do not know….Presumably they would have a reason, but I’ll wager not one sufficiently impressive enough to appease me enough at this point:  I knew it was going to be very messy!

Helpfully, the company had provided instructions on how to get a bag of beans the size of an average 16-year-old, through an opening the size of an average hamster. (I always measure things by ‘how many hamsters?’  It’s a very effective system for measuring things, and I still can’t see why it hasn’t caught on….that is until the hamster escapes then I’m left with lots of things that need measuring and no possible way to achieve this!)

Anyway, I digress… The company had very helpfully instructed us to fill the bean bags in the bath.  Looking back, this was the best advice we could ever have been given, because halfway through the first one, the pesky beans got carried away and decided to make a determined bid for freedom, and we were left with this:

There were beans everywhere!  In our hair, up our noses, on the floor!  I even found a few down my bra, these dratted beans were so determined to escape!  Now I found myself running around like the proverbial headless chicken looking for something to scoop up said beans.  In the end I settled for a sieve from the kitchen which turned out to be surprisingly effective!

If I knew how to tweet, I’m sure my twit at the time would be something along the lines of: ‘Crouching in bath scooping beans with The Parent giggling helplessly beside me!’  Now if that wouldn’t have brought the nice men in white with a straight-jacket running, I don’t know what would!

After having survived the inevitable snow storm that these tiny balls of hell had created, we moved on to beanbag number two.  Only a few beans spilled on that one, and by the time we were on to number three, we were feeling rather smug and proud of ourselves: Not a single pesky little bean, hurrah!

So!  Now The Parent and I were expert bean bag fillers (we were considering a change in career, we were that impressed at our obvious natural ability!), we continued to read the oh-so-helpful instructions (They should have called them destructions) and next on the agenda was removing all the excess air from each bag.  This, we thought, was going to be the easy part!  We lounged on the bags dispelling all the air we could find, with the zip open at only about half a hamster. (See? You know you want it to catch on!)

All was going rather well until those persistent little devils suddenly popped out of the hole and scattered themselves around the room!  It was a little spurt that had us in absolute stitches, and kept happening as we would try to put them all back again! Actual tears were streaming down our faces as we realised we were facing a loosing battle with the bean bags who looked as though they were breaking wind!   Phfrrt!

When we had recovered and stopped rolling around the floor as though we were a couple of giggling nutters (Maybe it was the beans? Maybe they were giving off some odourless fumes and we were a tiny bit high on beanbag, who knows?!) we zipped them all up with a mighty cheer and went to have a well-earned glass of squash. (It was 11am- pink fizz isn’t usually allowed until at least 11.30!)

Innocent looking things, aren’t they?!

We used them for this first time last night, and I can safely say they were brilliant and worth the fuss!

I’m sure I’ll be hooooovering up the odd recalcitrant bean for many years to come yet…I spotted one hiding in a plant pot yesterday, and I won’t be surprised if The Brother complains at some point this week, as they’ll probably manage to make their way into his soup!

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

Leave Headbanging To The Professionals….

Right.  Ok.

Now I know there’s entirely no excuse for my absolute tardiness and inability to write a post since January.  It’s disgraceful and I am filled with horrendous amounts of scalding shame……

So what has affected my ability to put pen to paper these past months? (Not that it’s actually pen to paper any more, but finger to key just doesn’t have the same romantic-type writer-ish ring to it, now does it?)

I’d like to say that it was because I was kidnapped by an insanely scary yet pure-at- heart band of ruffians who put me to work in a sock factory making well, er, socks. (obviously).  They’ve only just let me out for good behaviour and because I reached my own personal goal of twenty finished socks!  Woo hoo!

Twenty finished socks? I hear you say…that is an absolutely pathetic number of socks, seeing as you’ve been AWOL for 5 months!  Ah, but you don’t know what the socks were made from do you?  They were created with the silk from a very rare and scary spider.  As I have no doubt mentioned before, spiders are not my most favourite thing on earth, so milking them for their silk, (or ‘Silky Milking’ as we in the trade call it) was a harsh and acutely terrifying experience for me!

But that of course, isn’t what happened…  You, dear reader, are slightly silly for even believing that story even a little bit…I know I paint such a rich and interesting picture that you’re saying to yourself…’This must indeed, be true!’ but come on; milking silk for socks?  He he! I bet you feel just a tad bit foolish for being so gullible!

I am now the proud owner of a business!  Yeah baby!  As before (when I was writing blogs willy nilly) my laptop has been permanently attached to my knee, but I have had to employ the willpower of a god (someone really strong like Thor or Odin rather than one of the less impressive ones obviously) to keep my recalcitrant fingers from wandering on to wordpress…I have my very own website and everything! Feel free to pop along and have a gander..I’d love to know what you think:

I had some stunningly-marvellous-websitey-genius-people helping me obviously, but I am rather chuffed at what I have managed to cobble together!  It was all done with a generous helping of very little sleep, lots of cake (mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, cake!), some healthy yet probably slightly childish tantrums at The Brother when I couldn’t possibly understand why I needed to acquaint myself with SEO keywords and Cookies (I assure you-not the chocolate chip filled, interesting kind!)

So that’s my excuse (the real, non spider story one too) and I’m sticking to it!  After a ridiculously long bout of hard work and inforced reclusiveness, I am back in the world, and don’t feel such debilitating guilt for taking an hour off on a sunday to catch you all up on FBH news….

Of course, the random occurences and embarrassing happenings haven’t just stopped because I haven’t been writing about them, oh no!  They continue their at inevitable and alarming pace….And so to the title of this particular blog:

As I may have mentioned in the past, I am a person who is 5ft 9in.  Now, this in itself is not a bad thing.  I am able to reach up high in supermarket shelves to help little old ladies to the high up cake (who have been known to bark at me rather than just ask, how rude!), I can also see above most crowds, and make a rather impressive lamp-post with my arm in the air brandishing my illuminated phone for The Titchy Friends along dark alleyways when we’ve had one or two glasses of pink fizz!

So all in all, I have grown used to how tall I am, and the relative pit falls that are associated with what feels like giving the Empire State building a run for its money!  One of these afore-mentioned pit falls happens to be how often I unsuspectingly bang my head (Ah ha!  Now the title becomes clear, heh?) and a few recent instances come to mind:

Instance 1 (Also known as Handbag Head Horreurs!)

A new handbag always has me clutching it protectively to my side, so imagine me in the cinema loo:  No hook.  There’s no way on this great earth of ours that I am putting it down on any manky surface.  Ever.  What to do?  It will fall off and become a nuisance if I leave it on my shoulder…..Hang it around my neck: Huzzah!  A nifty and rather clever solution, if I don’t say so myself!  Everything is going swimmingly until it comes to pulling up my jeans (yes I know this might be ‘too much of the informations’ for all of you sensitive creatures out there, but bear with!)

I lean forward, and in that small pocket of time, stupidly forget about the sheer volume and weight of said handbag (I am one of those people who will be able to produce whatever you need: paracetamol, nail file, plasters, cake, safety pins, lip balm, mints, chocolate, washing line, kitchen sink…)  As you can probably guess, I lose the battle with my now evil and cackling handbag, and crash my poor head into the stall door in front of me.

Now this is a popular cinema, with anything up to 30-ish female patrons making use of the facilities at any one time:  Once they’ve got over the fact that there seems to be some sort of crazed monster trying unsuccessfully to escape the stall, there ensues a deathly silence only punctuated by a nervous giggle from one small girl.  The next painful dilemma for me then is: Do I stay in there and quietly die of shame and embarrassment, or do I walk out of there, head held high as though nothing strange whatsoever has occurred?  Much as I’d have liked to do the former, the latter won-just! (I think Ryan Reynolds was in the film I was about to watch, and the prospect of watching him gorgeously smoulder on the big screen for two hours would probably have got me out of that loo even if I’d managed to lose all my clothes and grow a tail!)

And now we come to yesterday’s delightful occurence, and the reason that prompted me to pull FBH out of semi-retirement:

Instance 2 (Also known as The Cake Made Me Do It)

Cake. (mmmm, cake)  Yes It would be about cake wouldn’t it?!

Picture the scene:  In a coffee shop with The Parents, The Brother and New And Lovely Sweetie Of The Brother (Catchy title, I know!) and New And Lovely Sweetie Of The Brother asks me if I’m having cake. (She’s new, she’ll learn that is a most redundant question!)  So anyway, I look towards the cake.  I can’t see what the inside of the toffee cake looks like, so I lean in to get a closer look.  What my cake-distracted brain hasn’t quite managed to compute in enough time, is this:

As with any sensible coffee/cake establishment, there is a highly polished (almost invisible – honest) pane of glass in between me and the cake.  Sensible, otherwise they’d be forever having to quell cake-induced riots I’m sure…

A most almighty crash occurs, with my head being the main protagonist in a very excruciating and mortifying scene where, thankfully the glass remains whole, and where New And Lovely Sweetie Of The Brother and I are able to laugh our way up the queue, and hopefully dispel anyone else’s view of me being mentally unhinged by our ability to see the funny side!

I also crashed my head in exactly the same place on The Parent’s car boot later on, but as this was simply painful and not funny, we shall gloss over my obvious misfortune and go straight on to the fact that:

I managed to achieve a personal best by mentioning the word ‘cake’ 16 times in one blog post.  Hurrah!

I hope this finds you all well, and in less pain than me, as no doubt you are all sensible people and manage not to be taken in by cake (woo, 17 times!) on such a regular basis!

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

Almost Midnight Pancakes

Hello chaps!

Now I know I have been beyond rubbish when it comes to actually doing any blogs for the last few months, and for this I apologise most profusely!  (Setting up your own business takes time, energy and a lot of biscuits!)  But of course I couldn’t let the Christmas season slink on by in a flutter of glitter and cake (Mmmm, cake!) without a few words on the subject….

So what does Christmas and New Year mean to me?  Well, pretty much what it means to everyone else:  The insane panic of the forgotten presents, random family members popping up when you least expect them, chocolate, pink fizz, and the same films and tv programs every year……

Now this may seem tedious and slightly boring to say we watch the same programs every year, but Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one episode of the Vicar of Dibley (Think an abundance of Christmas dinners and Dawn French squeeeezing that last mangy looking sprout in between her teeth!)

We even have a Home Alone night every year where I, The Brother and The Parents sit down to watch Home Alone 1 and 2 (Not 3-No Macaulay Culkin?  How rude!) and laugh in exactly the same places as last year!  Over the years as The Parent has got a bit older, he grumbles if we make him watch a film in the evening; yet with The Home Alones he chuckles along with the rest of us, and it is now a firm Family Tradition!

Other Family Traditions include stockings in the bed on Christmas morning (Yes I know The Brother and I add up to nearly sixty, but we will do this til one of us ambles off to have a family of our own!)  Over the years this Family Tradition has improved considerably; it now includes a snazzy bottle of fizz usually balanced precariously in the duvet, to go with the stocking stalwarts of:

Chocolate coins (get scoffed as soon at they get pulled out of said stocking!)

A Toothbrush (Father Christmas always gets the specific make wrong but hey, he tries!)

A scratch card (I’ve won a small amount once in 13 years)

A chocolate FC (I bite his head off first, oops never mind!)

An apple and an orange (I think FC picked this one up from when The Parents were young whippersnappers….a nod to healthy eating at Christmas!?  They never get eaten, and The Brother once left his in his stocking for a whole year….Mouldy wasn’t a descriptive enough word for what was left!)

There is of course different little pressies every year too.

About 5 years ago I noticed that Father Christmas was doing a wonderful job with everybody’s stocking, including his own…

SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU ARE YOUNG ENOUGH TO BE UPSET BY THE ACTUAL ORIGIN OF FC BEING MY MOTHER, LOOK AWAY NOW!

What?  That’s not how a spoiler works?  Eh?  Oh!  I’m supposed to give a warning THEN tell them the news!  Oh well…..Ooops.

So I took over her stocking so she didn’t have to open presents she’d wrapped a mere 7 hours beforehand and look excited!  Now she really is excited with the small random bits I collect for her, and everybody’s happy! (Especially after the fizz at 8am, whoop!)

Inevitably, the actual job of filling our stockings fell to me.  I am always the last one awake on Christmas Eve, so I get to actually be FC!  I am sorry to say there’s no mince pies, sherry or costumes involved, yet I am stupidly excited as though I was a little girl-so this makes up for the lack in traditional dress and nosh!

Now the naughty person that is The Brother encouraged me to the last glass of Fizz in the bottle before heading to his bed, so let’s just say I was a tiny bit Merry Christmas at this point!   Rustling bags whilst giggling and muttering HO HO HO under my breath, I filled each stocking with goodies, sprinkling a liberal quantity of monetary chocolate: the real currency of the world!

That’s what I thought I was doing anyway…..!

What was really happening was the following: I was ambling about shoving pressies in willy nilly, managed to let my stocking fall through the banisters and knock into a photo frame that resides on a ledge on the stairs and send it crashing to it’s noisy demise at the bottom!

Stealthy wasn’t quite the word!

And so to the title of this particular blog:  Almost Midnight Pancakes!

A new yet hopefully annual tradition that popped up on New Year’s Eve this year!  It was all down to The Parent planning one pudding but not quite making it with the right ingredients, pancakes being the next best (and available) alternative!

Have you ever tried making (and flipping in a slightly drunken yet very hilarious manner) pancakes at almost midnight on NYE?  No? Well I thoroughly recommend it!

So the recurring theme throughout Christmas just might have been fizz in various forms and quantities…I think I’m off to do some sort of detox thing…..Orange squash and Macaroons I think!

I hope you all had a cracking festive season, and if anyone has any annoying friends who are counting down to next Christmas as I have…Tell them to put a sock in it!  (Or should that be a mouldy fruit stocking!?!)

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

Football For Girls

Football.

Men in tiny shorts kicking a tiny ball around a field whilst thousands of people yell, sing and shout abuse at the massively overpaid actors on the grassy stage that is the pitch.

That’s the dictionary definition anyway! Well, perhaps only the dictionary in my head but an important opinion nonetheless!

The Brother (who is not an obsessed football fan but will watch England play occasionally) tells me that there is skill and finesse involved, and it’s something I’d never be able to do in a month of Sundays…..

Well, durr! Of course I wouldn’t be able to play football to that standard! (Or any standard if I’m being properly honest!) For a start I think I’d get very fed up chasing the thing around the pitch (and everyone else running rings around me!) But above all else I find I have trouble grasping the point…

Imagine an overdressed younger version of Vanessa Feltz (she would be overdressed, you wouldn’t catch me in those shorts….Ever!) lumping around in the mud missing the ball with every poorly aimed kick, falling over someone else’s feet and managing to run roughly half the length of the pitch before deciding that a cosy armchair and a glass of pink fizz would be a far more preferable way to spend the day!

Well that would be me if someone ever actually managed to coerce me onto the field. Let’s just say I’d be seriously out of my comfort zone and wishing the ground would swallow me whole.

The Brother and The Friend are currently watching ‘the footie’ as I am writing this, and thank goodness it’s a relatively rare occurrence in my house, otherwise I think I’d go mad with all the noise and yelling.  As it is I’m wondering how much trouble I’d get into if I ‘accidentally’ fell on the tv…..I’m weighing up the options between paying for a new one or simply moving my laptop into another room.  I am notoriously bad when it comes to balance though, so it is something I might possibly get away with!

Having come to the rather obvious and sane conclusion that destroying one of my favourite objects in the house is a bad idea (favourite only to my bed and the fridge!) I have removed myself to my room in an attempt to fathom why football is so popular.

I understand about the supporting the team thing, I do!  It’s much the same as being loyal to The Friends: you want them to do well in life and encourage them in their chosen endeavor.

What my befuddled and over-tired mind has trouble grasping are the aspects of football that get exacerbated on such a massive scale: what might be a little tiff with one of The Friends and necessitates both of us walking away for the day, translates into full on hooliganism in a stadium that ends in multiple arrests and jail time.
Similarly, if I were to demand a footballer’s wage packet simply for being good at my job, people would look at me as though I’d lost the plot!

Then there’s the bit when they get kicked by a member of the opposition and fall to the muddy ground in an entirely over the top approximation of being injured.  Their little acts seem to fool no-one, as the excitable yells of ‘C’mon Ref’, ‘Oooiii!’ and other general grunts of indignant annoyance can be heard throughout the land!

Yes, I know it’s one of our most popular national sports, yes I know I’m ever so faintly ashamed that I’m only 56% certain of what the offside rule is all about, and no I don’t really think my life would be richer for knowing it.

There are some things in this world that I am quite happy to carry on regarding as slightly mysterious; being knowledgeable on the subject of where people should be standing at any one time, whilst attacking an over-sized string vest with a butch ballet dancer standing waving his arms in front of it, is definitely one of those occasions!

Other world occurrences to remain mysterious include:

How people are able to do the tablecloth swipe-offy trick without breaking anything.

How Brad Pitt still manages to look strangely hot with a nasty, ratty mustache under his nose!

How to get the self-service til machines in the supermarket to stop yelling at you: ‘Unexpected item in bagging area!’  What, you silly machine!?  What on earth could you think I’d put in there you weren’t expecting?  A 70s fondue set?  The Complete Works of Shakespeare?  Or maybe it was simply the innocuous packet of butcher’s choice sausages I HAD JUST THAT MOMENT SCANNED INTO THE MACHINE!

So I’m fairly certain mine and football’s relationship is set for life.  I will continue to resignedly grimace when I walk into a pub and it’s blaring out from three different televisions in a room the size of my kitchen.  It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t have the volume on each tv turned up to the maximum, as though all of the pub’s patrons were deaf and unable to see further than the end of their pint-holding arms!

I must remember to look at life’s positives, The Football For Girls, if you will!

Gorgeous legs in short shorts, with impressive displays of aestheticism.  Then there’s the yummy ones who get underwear modelling contracts…That’s never a bad thing is it?  Maybe I need to forget about the boring bits and the fact that it turns nearly every bloke I know into a spluttering nutter, and just go with the flow!

Love,

Fatty Blob Head