Most moist

You could knock me down with a feather. I would really rather you didn't though. Seriously. Apart from anything else, it's quite an undignified way to fall over. "How did you fall over, Laura?"

"Some cunt knocked me down with a feather."

I digress. Yesterday, in honour of TheBloke (TM)'s birthday (happy birthday, TheBloke (TM)!), I made Esme's Secret Recipe Chocolate Orange Drizzle Cake. Esme is my grandma and makes the best cakes... anywhere. She's also (in true Nunn tradition) an old slapper. Luckily she doesn't read my Plog so I can get away with it.

Anyway, I Tweeted about Esme's Secret Recipe Chocolate Orange Drizzle Cake and I was overwhelmed with recipe requests.

Never one to disappoint my Ploggers, I requested permission to publish from Esme herself, and here - in full - is the secret recipe. One condition. Let me know when you've made it - I promise it's the best, most moist cake I've ever eaten. All measurements are in old money. And I'm not going to spell out how you mix a cake. You read my Plog so you must be clever. You can work it out.

Cake

Greased 2lb loaf tin

6 oz caster sugar

6 oz butter or marge

3 eggs

6 oz self-raising flour

Grated rind of 2 oranges

2 tablespoons of cold milk

Cook for 1 hour on gas mark 4 and turn out onto cooling rack.

Drizzle

2 oz caster sugar

Juice of 2 oranges

When cake is still a little warm, make small cuts on top then drizzle orange over the top. Stand on a plate so cake can soak up excess drizzle.

Chocolate topping

4 oz block of plain chocolate

½ oz butter

Bain marie or microwave on low heat and mix. Use palette knife to cover top and sides of cake.

Enjoy - and tell me what you think!

Bunch of bankers

Every so often at work we get a little motivational speech. An uplifting re-asserting of our corporate values and a gentle reminder about our financial targets for the year.

Today 200 of us gathered in an overly warm room, with video links to India, Leeds, Birmingham and Edinburgh. All the glamorous places. The head of department took to the stage and shared with us his goals for 2010. We clapped, ovinely.

Then he told us that he wanted to make our company (a large banking corporation) the best place to work and the best place to bank in 2010. He had clearly learned about the power of three in rhetoric as he repeated it. "We need to be the best place to work and the best place to bank."

One more time for luck. This was, in retrospect, a mistake on his part. As our esteemed leader proclaimed to 200 managers and 10 senior managers: "I want to make our office, the very place you're sitting now, the best place to wank."

There was a horrified pause. Then a lot of laughter.

But I remained confused. He says he wants to make the office the best place to wank, and yet, when I did exactly that back in October, I got a written warning and a permanent note on my staff file.

Hypocrite.

Breakfast banter

We park the car at the Wetherspoons pub on the way to Tesco. I wait in the car whilst TheBloke (TM) puts loose parking change in the ticket machine.

We enter the pub and sit at our usual table. We both glance cursorily at the menu.

"Usual?" asks TheBloke (TM). I nod. This is the only conversation needed so far. He goes to order.

After five minutes or so, our food arrives. A traditional breakfast for him, a breakfast bloomer for me (fried egg, bacon and sausage sandwich) and some tea and toast.

Then the silent ballet begins. We identify who has the runniest egg. If he does, we swap. I then carefully cut the yolk out of the egg and spread it on my bloomer. I place the egg white on TheBloke (TM)'s plate. He hands his hash browns to me. I give him my toast.

We chomp contentedly.

"Ready?" asks TheBloke (TM) after we have disposed of our breakfast. I nod.

We get back into the car and go to Tesco.

Most Saturdays the only two words we say before midday are "Usual?" and "Ready?"

It works.

Baby steps

I'm not one of those people who frequently gets asked to babysit. I'm not particularly maternal. I'm not entirely sure if this is because the thought of squeezing something melon-sized out my foo-foo seems desperately unnatural, or because I view children as small versions of stupid adults. Either way, I don't get asked to babysit often*.

I'm getting to the age where probably about 50% of my friends have children. This is OK. I heartily approve of the repopulation of the UK - so long as they don't have to come out of my foo-foo, as previously mentioned. This weekend saw the chance to go over to Bristol to meet up with my old university friends - and my friend Jo's two children.

The children are very, very cute, in a kind of Anne Geddes' way (http://www.annegeddes.com/Default.aspx). You almost expect them to be routinely peeking out of a tulip or balancing a flower pot on their heads, cutely.

It is known amongst my friends that until their child can laugh at my jokes, discuss literature or do my laundry, I find it difficult to make conversation with said child. However, determined to make an effort with the exceedingly cute children, when offered a cuddle with the youngest adorable baby, I agreed.

I took little Ben without dropping him (I actually awarded myself Maternal Points for this, but didn't tell Jo). I made him giggle by waving a teddy bear towards him. All was going splendidly. Until suddenly, for seemingly no reason, little Ben let out a howling scream. After more teddy bear wiggling he seemed OK again, but Jo's comment, "I haven't heard him cry like that since he needed codeine at the hospital" meant I ruefully subtracted my recently-awarded Maternal Points.

Still, the child was still sitting on my lap, cutely, wasn't crying. I was doing pretty well. With every two minutes that passed, I awarded myself more Maternal Points. I was feeling smug. And perhaps a bit over-confident. I attempted some knee-jiggling. This was a storming success and produced some more giggles.

Until cute little Ben leaned forward and (I'm going to say "brushed", others might say "bumped") his head on the table. It definitely wasn't a hard bump - and I think it barely made contact. I wondered for a second if we'd got away with it, but after considering this for a few seconds, Ben decided to dob me in and cry again. Loudly.

At which point I had no choice but to deduct all my Maternal Points and hand the baby back to his rightful owner.

So, sorry Jo. And thank you for having me - it was lovely to see everyone. I hope we can do it again soon, and that it was merely my imagination when I thought I overheard a muttered, "restraining order".

* However, when I was fifteen I regularly babysat five girls called Debbie, Dawn, Donna, Della and Delise. You can't make this shit up.

Slip up

As a child, falling snow was of huge excitement. I'm not entirely sure why, but seeing it flurrying down would send the entire class (and often the teacher) to the window with the cry, "Snow!". The next question would it be whether or not it was settling. Only once in my memory was the snow bad enough to close the school for the day, yet still, there was something in the whiteness, the transformation of the familiar into the unknown that was thrilling to us as children.

And if I'm honest, much of that feeling remains into adulthood. Singing away with my choir doing Christmas carols whilst snow fell behind us, I did get that gleeful feeling when it's nearly the school holidays. And of course, as an adult, I'm fully aware that snow brings problems - travel issues, slipping issues, and it's more expensive to run the central heating. But it's still quite exciting.

Even prevented from going into the office one day a few weeks ago, whilst I was able to work from home just as (if not more) effectively, it was still exciting and a bit of an adventure. Each time a fresh snowfall fell, in spite of myself, I grinned and thought, "Snow!"

And now? Three weeks later? I'm genuinely bored of it. I'm fairly sure we've never had snow on the ground this long in my entire lifetime. I am sick of nearly falling over on my way to work each morning. I am bored of coming home every night thinking, "This is the coldest I have EVER been". I am especially irritated that it's dragging on so long it looks like it might threaten my weekend plans to drive to Bristol.

And TheBloke (TM)? He is planning an entire snow family. Snow woman, snow children... I told him we hadn't really discussed this, and it was a big decision to make. He said he was willing to give up his job to be the carer.

I'll be the one standing in the garden with a hairdryer on full blast.

Cat-atonic

There is a battle that rages in our house. It rages like a slightly vexed butterfly, beating its wings in a futile manner. I am so good at similes. You can tell I did really well in my English degree.

The battle is between TheBloke (TM) and me, and concerns the fluffy, ginger git that you might know as Monty Cat. TheBloke (TM), full of his love for man's fellow creature, is all for letting Monty Cat sleep with us every night. I, on the other hand, am not. Now, before you start labelling me some sort of hygiene or control freak, please let me assure you, I would like nothing better than to have a cuddly feline snuggled up to me all night long, purring gently. It sounds wonderful.

But Monty Cat is not really the snuggling sort. He'll snuggle for a few minutes, to lull you into a false sense of security,

and then, just as you're dozing off gently to sleep, he'll creep underneath our bed, and lie on his back, claws upwards, scratching the bejesus out of our mattress. For fun. And to make noise. A lot of noise. The aim of this game is that we wake up and play with him. Alternatively, he loves nothing more than a 4 a.m. game of, "Do you think my nose is wet enough?", whilst pushing his wet cat nose into my face. He is nothing if not manipulative.

And I am something of a light sleeper.

And so the battle rages. I say "sleep with the door shut", TheBloke (TM) says, "leave it open, poor kitty".

Sometimes I relent. If I do, it's usually on a weekend when I don't have to get up too early. Sometimes TheBloke (TM) waits until I'm asleep and opens the door for the naughty cat. If we don't open the door to him, Monty Cat stands outside mewing and scratching the carpet to make as much noise as possible. Stupid cat.

Last night, through a winning strategy of alternate threat-making and sulking, I won the battle to have the door shut. Our door doesn't easily shut completely because of the carpet, but we can push it closed enough to stop Monty Cat coming in.

Or so I thought.

After shutting the cat out last night, I slept well. Until at 2.35 a.m. I was suddenly wide awake. The reason for my sudden wakefulness was a ginger fluffy git had attached himself ("playfully" as TheBloke (TM) would have it) to my toe. With his teeth. The furry fiend had crept under the duvet and decided to nibble my toes as a mark of his affection.

"How did you get in?" I asked the naughty cat, and promptly took him outside and shut the door again.

The next morning TheBloke (TM) told me the cat had actually been in our room for hours - had spent an hour sleeping on the bed between us, had scratched the mattress as was his wont, and - apparently - has now learned how to push open a door. Apparently he had even played a couple of rounds of "Do you think my nose is wet enough?" with me and I hadn't noticed a thing.

Perhaps I'm not such a light sleeper as I thought.

Does anyone want to buy a naughty cat?

Snow joke

Lots of snowy snowy snow. It's cold enough to freeze a flea.

TheBloke (TM), being of the South African persuasion is a little bit overexcited by this much snow, and, prevented from going to work because of the weather, yesterday he built his first ever snowman. You have never seen such an excitable, out of breath, perfectionist Saffa snowman builder. I tried to help at one point but was instructed, "No, I don't want to be able to see any leaves on him. Get some more snow and cover them up. No. Those buttons aren't good enough. He needs a hat." And so on. Eventually I left him to it and assumed the role of photographer.

Here are some photos I took.

And here's what happened when I turned my back for five minutes.

"Well, people need to know he's a snow MAN," insisted TheBloke (TM). I worry that we may give our 900 year-old neighbour a bit of a shock when she goes into her garden today.

De-friended

Ladies and gentlemen, Ploggers and Ploggeresses, it is with a grave tone of voice and furrowed brows that I must make the following announcement:

Annabelle is no longer a Facebook friend.

I can hear you gasp in shock and awe. "But Laura," you might say. "Where on earth are you going to find your comedy from now? What happened to make this person whom you don't like, and who quite clearly detests you no longer be imaginary friends on Facebook?"

Well, Ploggers, the issue came to my attention a few weeks ago when a mutual friend made me aware of another hysterical Annabelle update. Something along the lines of, "Taking my lovely Mummy to dinner at the Ritz. Hope the food and service is better this time - getting fed up with their standards slipping." or "Having trouble parking the Rolls. Always tricky when the boot is weighed down with gold bullion" or "Just had my fifteenth orgasm in five minutes. Can't help it when my boyfriend's cock is two feet long. So tired!"

Anyway, I trundled along to her Facebook page to have a gander for myself, and you know what? I couldn't see it. The privacy settings had been changed so (perhaps entirely fairly) I could no longer make fun of her ridiculous status updates. (Of which, as she quite rightly informed me at our high school reunion, I must be jealous. See http://laurasplog.blogspot.com/2008/06/orange-and-greene.html for more giggles). As a result of this meeting, I changed my Facebook page so she couldn't access my blog from there - she'd have to actively seek it out if she wanted to read tales about herself, which of course she did, amusingly later tagging a photo of herself at the reunion with the - frankly Wildean "Yes, I may be orange, but at least I'm not an ugly geek". Which as you can imagine made me cry until tears poured down my cheeks (with laughter, obviously, and then I forwarded it to all my friends).

So, no longer able to amuse myself with her brilliant status updates or slightly sick-making wall posts ("Young Conservative and proud!", "I love the Daily Mail") etc., I decided that it was time to terminate the friendship. Ploggers, I clicked "remove". However, as she has approximately 1000 other friends, most of whom I'm guessing haven't spoken to her more than once (or if they have, perhaps they enjoyed her status updates as much as I did), I don't think she'll particularly miss me.

I love Facebook status messages. It's a way of getting things so spectacularly wrong. Here are some of my favourite genres:

The passive-aggressive - Sarah is pissed off at a certain someone for reasons she won't go into here

The trying to be funny and failing - Jeremy just is

The "existential" - Jeremy isn't

The weird - Julia loves penguins on old lady toast

The twattish - Simon wishes his new baby would shut the fuck up, and wonders when he's next going to get a shag

The too-personal - Felicity can't wait to be in bed with her new man. (NB almost always followed with a passive-aggressive "Felicity thinks some people should know better than to lie and hurt you when you trust them.")

The badly-spelled - John cant w8 2 Friday!!1!!!1!

The Annabelle - Annabelle is making the most amazing curry with wild coriander and organic mince. Yum. Annabelle is having more fun than you could ever have in all of your sad little life.

So Ploggers, it's over to you. What's the best (worst) Facebook status message you've seen?