Work it out

Those of you who know me in real life, or those of you who are long-time Ploggers will know of my aversion to any type of exercise.  It's not that I'm a massive fatty, I just don't enjoy any type of sport.  Partly this is owing to my total lack of competitiveness (well, lack of competitiveness at anything I've got no chance of winning.  I wouldn't test my competition commitment in a game of Scrabble, for example).  Partly though, it's a hangover from how much I hated PE at secondary school.

As every school in England, by law, has to have masochistic PE staff who enjoy nothing more than seeing a group of fourteen year-old girls shivering in a tiny little skirt, gym knickers and a sports bra, whilst they themselves bundle up in puffa jackets from The North Face, thermal gloves and an industrial whistle.  Our school was no different.  Mrs Bakerhurst and Miss Simpleton were our two torturers, and they loved absolutely nothing more than shouting, "Come on girls!  Go! Go! Go! Go!", whether you were on your way to the torture field (hockey pitch) or standing in the showers.

Autumn and winter I hated.  I have always hated the cold.  For some reason our winter sports kit was actually designed to be colder than our summer sports kit (which inexplicably allowed us to wear tracksuit bottoms for certain activities).  No such joy for winter.  An Aertex shirt (with initials embroidered in house colours), a tiny little skirt and grey, baggy gym knickers.  The skirt was entirely pointless, as it flapped open.  A pervert's dream.  With autumn and winter came netball and hockey.  I loathed netball.  I hated hockey even more.  Arming aggressive girls in puberty with wooden sticks didn't seem like the smartest tactic.  But then being smart isn't usually one of the required, or even desirable, skills on the job spec for a PE teacher.

Spring and Summer were just as bad - athletics (running in circles), hurdles (jumping over a series of small fences - there's a skill I'll need in later life), throwing spears, throwing cannonballs, jumping in sand.  Complete pissing waste of time.

The worst was cross-country.

Oh yes, we had a torture field (hockey pitch) but this wasn't enough for the PE teachers.  They decided it was time for us to do cross-country in the actual countryside.  One problem with this: our school was in the town centre.  Luckily this didn't stop Mrs Bakerhurst or Miss Simpleton.

Recap: we were fourteen.  We were all girls.  We were wearing white Aertex shirts and grey gym knickers, with a pair of trainers.  Literally nothing else.

And we were made to run through the town centre.  It was a circuit of about a mile, and within the scenic cross-country route we went by McDonalds, Argos, Dorothy Perkins, Next, the Post Office, Greggs, WH Smiths and Tesco.  It was also market day, so the town was especially busy.

We were fourteen.  Did the PE teachers supervise us on this trip, running alongside us, shouting out encouragement?  Did they buggery.  They were too busy smoking a fag behind the bike sheds, probably.

Now, I've never been any good at any sport, but my stamina has always been particularly bad.  Imagine this if you will - 25 teenage girls jogging through a busy town centre basically wearing underwear.  One of them is flagging and is well at the back of the crowd, ready to be picked off by the local paedo like a lion takes down the weakest gazelle.  It was surely only a matter of time before the Benny Hill music started playing.

Thankfully I made it back to the school un-raped. But if I ever have children, before they even enter the educational system, I will dedicate a large part of my time to writing a letter excusing them from every single PE lesson they may ever have to do.  In fourteen years of enforced PE, the only thing I learned was: Avoid PE - Avoid PaEdos.

Shower of abuse

As long-time readers are doubtless aware, this is my 886th post.  I expect you wonder from time to time, "How do you keep your content and anecdotes so fresh and relevant?"  Well, thank you for asking.  The answer is that I have a secret weapon.

Mr and Mrs Nunn.

Whenever I feel writers' block encroaching, it's time to go and visit the parents.  This will undoubtedly provide me with at least three new anecdotes to take away and amuse you with.  I know everyone thinks their own parents are mad, but mine actually are.  Mrs Nunn is quick of temper but quick to forget about it.  Mr Nunn is slow to anger, but very easy to wind up, as he likes everything to be perfect.  You could argue that I shouldn't be winding my pensioner parents up, but honestly, do you want to read a Plog or not?

So, before I went to visit them recently, I was talking to Mr Nunn about the shower.  When TheBloke (TM) and I had been there last, the shower had kept us delightfully awake by randomly dumping cold water on us in the middle of the shower.  Mr Nunn was - of course - devastated about this.

"So," I said to Mr Nunn on the phone, the day before I was due to travel, "have you got that bastard shower fixed yet?"

"Yes!" said Mr Nunn.  "We've had a brand new shower put it, and it's lovely, so you will be able to have a lovely, hot shower when you come to visit."

So up the M1 I toddled.  (The word "toddle" is to throw Mrs Nunn off the scent as she gets angry if I drive above 60 mph.)

The next morning I decided to have a shower.  My parents have one of those electrical showers with a pull cord.  I pulled the cord.  It wouldn't pull.  I wondered if it might be a bit stiff, being new, so I tugged it a little bit harder.  Still no joy.  I didn't want to break it, so I went to fetch Mrs Nunn.  Mrs Nunn couldn't pull it either.  She went to fetch Mr Nunn.  Mr Nunn couldn't pull it.  So far this was a bit like the story of the Enormous Turnip.

In my world, at this point we'd call a professional in.  Not in Mr Nunn's world.  He likes to fix things.  Within two and a half minutes, he was tinkering with the box on the ceiling, despite my protestations that actually, I think I'd rather have a bath anyway.

Ten minutes later I had a bath.  Mr Nunn went away muttering.

Later that day, I went to visit Erica and Dean, who have recently had a brand new baby.  Brand new babies are brilliant because you can put them in fancy dress and they instantly look fantastic.  As Dean pointed out, they can dress their daughter in a teddy bear outfit, as a dinosaur or as a pumpkin and people say how sweet she looks.  If he went to work dressed like that, he'd be sectioned.

When I got back to my parents' house, Mrs Nunn told me that Mr Nunn was trying to mend the shower.  She made a cup of tea for me.  I said to her, "Did you know the wi-fi is down?"

Mrs Nunn said, "Yes, Mr Nunn has turned the power off so he can tinker with the shower."

I said, "So how did you manage to boil the kettle then?"

Mrs Nunn looked perplexed.

Mr Nunn came downstairs and said, right, just need to put the power back on.  He reached to the fuse box, flipped the switch and there was a massive bang.

Mrs Nunn instantly started screaming.  Not out of fear, but at Mr Nunn.

"For fuck's sake!  I fucking told you not to fucking touch the fucking electrics.  I've had e-fucking-nough of this.  Seriously.  STOP fucking around with it before you fucking kill your fucking self!"

Such a torrent of swear words and volume.  It was quite terrifying.  How was Mrs Nunn going to follow this sentence?  A request for divorce?  A fist-fight?  Not quite.

"Oh look," she said, looking through the window, her tone of voice changing faster than a politician's argument following an opinion poll, "the petunias are out."

My parents are mad.

Heart of darkness

So, for my birthday this year, TheBloke (TM) took me to a restaurant called Dans Le Noir.  This is a restaurant where you are seated completely in the dark and have to guess what you're eating.  My first thought was, "Fucking A!  I don't have to dress up, wear make-up or make any effort whatsoever.  Best birthday ever."

It backfired a bit when TheBloke (TM) turned up naked.

Not really.  It was a bit chilly for that.  One of the many benefits of an autumn birthday.

So, we turned up at the restaurant, which was in the Clerkenwell/Farringdon area of London that I've always found a bit odd.  It doesn't seem to have found its identity.  It's part marketing agency, part law firm, part finance, part charity sector, and to be honest, it needs to pull its little socks up a bit and decide what it wants to be.

On the way there, we found a cocktail bar doing two mojitos for £6.95.  Big fat bargain!  And a jolly good mojito it was too.

So we trotted off to Dans Le Noir, and - unfortunately - they'd lost our booking.  No worries, and yay for a Monday birthday as it meant that they were able to accommodate us.  We had to put everything we owned in a locker.  Not literally everything we owned.  We didn't have to come back home first, pick up Monty Cat, the Wii, the Mini and our sofa.  Just our bags, phones, watches, and anything that could emit light.

At this point we were introduced to Trevor, our blind waiter.  And there's a sentence I never thought I'd type.  I mean, who's called Trevor?  All the staff at Dans Le Noir are blind.  Well, all the waiting staff are blind anyway.  I imagine it might be a bit hard (though not impossible) to be a chef blind.  And probably a bit of a fire hazard.

Trevor led us conga-style into the restaurant and ensured we were seated safely at our table.  It was dark.  I knew it was going to be dark.  But I didn't realise just how dark.  I assumed that after ten minutes or so your eyes would get used to the dark and be able to pick out shapes.  Nope.  Even after an hour and a half, I still couldn't even see my hand in front of my face.  This might have been because my hand wasn't in front of my face as I was so busy cramming my face with yummy food.  I gave up on cutlery after about twelve seconds.  It slowed me down.  This is a life lesson I might take away with me, and try to implement in non-dark restaurants too.

Amusingly Dans Le Noir made you pour your own water from massive decanters.  I put an elbow in a water puddle not of my own making (at least I hope it was water) at least once.

Instead of having individual tables, we were seated at long bench-style tables.  I guess this is to stop you knocking stuff off the edge of the table incessantly.  However, we were sat unfortunately close to our neighbours, and I definitely groped the Mexican lady sitting next to me at least twice.  She got me back once though, so I think we're almost equal on the lawsuit.  It was probably funnier for TheBloke (TM) who could just hear, "Oh, sorry, was that your..? Oops."  Turns out it was indeed her oops.

The food was very good in general though it was a really weird experience not to know exactly what you were eating - or indeed how big the portions were.  It was hard to know if I felt full or not when I couldn't see how much I'd eaten.  Some of the meat was a bit fatty, and I feel tricked that they made me eat black pudding as that's never something I'd touch under the cold light of day.  Having said that, it didn't taste as bad as I thought it would.

When Trevor finally led us blinking into the light, we both felt quite dizzy for a few seconds.  Then we were taken through the menu of what we'd actually eaten.  We'd got most of it right, save for a few surprises of things we probably wouldn't have guessed, such as venison and celeriac.

So the big question?  How old am I?  Well, I've got to that age where I either graciously refuse to answer such an impertinent question... or else I just lie.  Suffice to say that if MTV were making a TV programme about my birthday, it would not just be Super Sweet but rather Super Super Sweet Sweet.

Perhaps TheBloke (TM) took me to a pitch black restaurant so he didn't have to look at my massive wrinkles.  Oh yes, we had a lovely evening at a fairly exclusive restaurant that he'd planned in advance for ages, but clearly his motives were all about my haggard sagging face.  I'm going to have words with him tonight.  The twat.

Odds on

There has never been any doubt that academically my talents rest more with the arts than the sciences.  This, I suspect, was highlighted by this post where I pretty much failed to understand gravity.

Confession time: despite working in banking for the best part of the last ten years, I am also truly terrible at maths.  (For the Americans, that's "maths" plural because schools over here generally make you do more than one sum before letting you off, as "math" might suggest.)

Oh, don't get me wrong, I successfully limped through the National Curriculum and gained an adequate "B" at GCSE (my lowest GCSE grade and my highest GCSE achievement), but I was never going to enjoy a job where I had to do anything more complex than work out the occasional percentage.

Which brings me to my Question Of The Month.

• If you add two even numbers together, you get an even number (e.g. 4+4=8, 16+2=18 etc.)
• If you add two odd numbers together, you get an even number (e.g. 3+3=6, 19+5=24 etc.)
• If you add an odd and an even number together, you get an odd number (e.g. 5+2=7, 9+6=15 etc.)

Out of these three possible combinations, two of them result in the output of an even number.

Shouldn't this mean there are twice as many even numbers as there are odd?

I asked TheBloke (TM) about this, and he just looked at me, raised a ginger eyebrow and said, "You're an idiot."

I am beginning to think this is what he says when he doesn't know the answer to something.

Top table

In the 1970s and early 80s there were a series of public information films aimed at children.  These were cartoons with a cat, Charley, who would regularly warn children about the dangers of playing with matches, going off with strangers and playing by the river.  The tone suggests they were aimed at very young children, who perhaps were given more freedom to play outside than the 6 year-olds today.

So far, so good.

And I think we can all agree that today's young children would never be allowed to play in the street unsupervised, because of Evil Paedophiles (despite the fact that abduction / incident rates haven't gone up at all since the 1950s - it's just a hot topic for the media so it gets more publicity).  We don't need to give children these messages as they're so rarely without a teacher or parent to supervise them.  So in some ways today's children are more over-protected.

Until you see this:

The title of this video is "Charley says 'Tables are Dangerous'".

Let's just recap on that one.  Tables.  Tables are dangerous.  Tables.  How big a problem was this that the government decided to make a public information film about it?  Was it the leading cause of injury amongst 5 year-olds in 1976?  Was the NHS overstretched because of hospital admissions owing to table-related frivolity?

Whilst the children of the 70s were allowed to play outdoors by themselves, at least the noughties' children aren't stupid enough to be injured by flatpack furniture.

Honestly, Charley, if you genuinely manage to get hurt by a table, I think we can all agree that's natural selection taking place right there.  Please don't pass your rubbish hurt-by-a-table genes along.

With a bit of luck Charlie's had his bollocks lopped off anyway.  You can see that one in "Charley says 'Neutering hurts!'"

I'm all ears

There are many bits of advice I was given as a child that I have chosen to ignore as an adult.  My grandma was extremely insistent that sitting on wet grass would give you a kidney infection.  To this day, I have never yet heard the NHS issue such a warning in autumn or in spring, nor have I had a kidney infection from the occasional soggy picnic.

Grandma had quite a few similar rules that must never be broken.  These included ensuring you applied camphor and amber (what on earth is amber?) to your chest if you had a cold but you must wash it off the next morning, or you would definitely get a chest infection and probably die.

Going outdoors with wet hair would also lead to pneumonia, and again probably death.

However, serving whipped cream a full five years past its expiry date, greened with age and mould was apparently "nothing to worry about, eat it up".

This one always perplexed me, though to be fair to Grandma, I don't think it was one of hers:  "Make sure you wash behind your ears."

Now, I'm going to ask for an amnesty here.  Let's be honest with each other.  Do any of you, any of you wash behind your ears?  I'll start: I don't.  I never have.  In my 31 and 11/12 years on this planet, I genuinely don't think I have ever washed behind my ears.  Having said that, I'm not sure how they would get dirty anyway.  It's not as if they go out at night trolling the streets of London by themselves.  Besides which, a good shampoo every day would surely dislodge any excessive ear dirt.

But at the back of my mind is a little niggle.  What if everyone else DOES wash behind their ears?  And what if I've just exposed myself as a dirty-eared whore?

It's hard being me sometimes.