Christmas pudding

I find that in life, people are generally divided into two categories: those who love Christmas, and women.

Men fah la la all over the place, and talk about how lovely it is to get the family back together.  Women have to choose tree decorations for a China-produced hunk of green plastic, send Christmas cards to people they don't really like, or even know (apologies to all those who received a Christmas card from me), and choose presents for an ever-expanding list of acquaintances and their offspring.  Oh, and hold down a full-time job, and in many cases, very often do the bulk of the childcare.  Joy to the world.

Well, fair dos to Mr Nunn, who does indeed do most of the cooking, chez Nunn, but all the same, the Nunn family is firmly split down the gender divide with those who love Christmas (Mr Nunn and Master Nunn) and those who hate it (Mrs Nunn and yours truly).

Of course it's lovely to see the family again... for about twenty-five minutes, before you revert to the behaviours displayed when you were 14.  And then of course, the shops before Christmas are rammed and no-one in their right mind would go for a poddle.  And everything's shut on Christmas Day.  The weather's usually shocking and no-one can face the often mooted, and seldom carried out "going for a walk".  Before you know it, you've spent 72 hours trapped in a house with six other people, feeling a bit like Anne Frank, only with more turkey and fewer Nazis.  By the end of it, you've probably developed Stockholm Syndrome.

However, a new Nunn family tradition was started this year - one which I hope will go on indefinitely.  Someone, and I'm not saying who, brought along some rather special brownies, which made the day a lot funnier than it would otherwise have been.  You've seen nothing until you've seen your pensioner parents off their faces, giggling at the TV remote.

Of course the side effect was that time slowed down and the day seemed to last even longer than usual.  You win some, you lose some.

Mulled whine

Over the last year or so, I've somehow found myself enjoying cooking.  Oh yes, of course the mid-week meal when you don't get in until 8 p.m. can still be something of a slog, but I've found myself in my spare time at weekends scouring the web for recipes, loving my Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, and being amazed that actually, I can produce something that tastes half-decent.  Who knew that having the right ingredients in the right quantities was so important?

So today, I made some Christmassy cookies, then noticed I had two-thirds of a bottle of red wine left over from a stew I made last week.  "Mulled wine!" I thought, fishing out a mulled wine kit that's been sitting in my cupboard for a few weeks  "That will go perfectly with my super-Christmassy cookies.  I am SO Martha Stewart / Nigella / Lorraine Pascale."  (I didn't want to be Delia.  Perhaps it's the haircut.)

"Aha," I thought.  "I shall use my slow cooker for this."  I bought quite an expensive slow cooker about a year ago.  It's one of those fancy ones that has about ninety different functions and promises it can bake you a cake whilst making your soup.  Basically, I'm desperate to use it at pretty much any opportunity.

"A mulled wine kit," you might ask.  "Surely you can make your own mulled wine from scratch?"  Well, you know what, I probably could.  But what kind of person, I ask you, has star anise just sitting in their pantry?  Not me.  I thought I was doing well with home-made vanilla sugar.

The cookies turned out well.  The wine... well, it looks like the lowest setting on my slow cooker is a teeny bit powerful for mulled wine.  After twenty minutes it turned out I'd made a red wine reduction with the consistency of treacle.  Two sips of it gave me a migraine that's lasted for about an hour so far.  The rest of it went down the sink.  I had to fish out all the spices and cinnamon sticks and shit and throw them in the bin.

My kitchen bin now smells like Santa has thrown up in it.

You win some, you lose some.

(Bad) language and literature

Many people consider university days to be the best days of their life.  Whilst I was lucky to meet good friends, and had fairly decent accommodation, life has definitely got better since not surviving on Tesco Value pasta, going to nightclubs where the toilets would regularly overflow (actually, make that "going to nightclubs", full stop) and moving to a city that isn't entirely comprised of hills.

Add into the mix that for my three years at Bristol it rained twice; once for one year, and then a second time for another two years.  A lot of students end up with Fresher's Flu; I actually started to grow mildew.  It wasn't until I'd lived in London for a good six months that I felt myself drying out.  This is only partly a joke.  In my third year, I went to the doctor as my ears felt like they needed to pop all the time.  I wondered if they were blocked and needed to be syringed.  The doctor told me that after flu and contraceptive enquiries, ear problems were the most common ailment they saw; the air in Bristol was so damp it actually buggered up people's sinuses.  The problem went away as soon as I left the city.

Anyway, I was clearing out my PC's hard drive recently, and stumbled once again across the folders of essays I'd written at university.  All of them were carefully referenced, with full bibliographies.  Some of my tutors had set incredibly baffling essay titles, presumably to make themselves feel better about their own intellects.  Favourites include:

• Acting is antithetical to romance
• "'The nobility of poetry, says Wallace Stevens, 'is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.' It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality." (Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Reason)
• 'It makes little sense to define "ethnicity as such", since it refers not to a thing-in-itself but to a relationship: ethnicity is typically based on a contrast.' (Werner Sollors)

And my all-time favourite nonsense intellectual wibble (described in a previous Plog):

• ‘The romances explore what it means to be a subject: an agent of the self, within the state, seeking for satisfaction.  And so the epitomic figures are the ones denied their place at the centre, not only the rogues, slaves, fishers, and vagabonds, but the itinerant princes, and, crucially, the exiled women.’ (Palfrey) Discuss with reference to Jonson and/or Shakespeare. 

If that makes any sense to you at all, I would be delighted to hear from you.  I remember reading it out to myself seven or eight times in a row, thinking, "Surely this is an Emperor's New Clothes type of thing.  Surely we're supposed to go back to the tutor and tell him that this is a fuckload of bollocks."  Turns out not.  You live and learn.

Despite writing the essay, I still have absolutely no idea what "an agent of the self" means.  Still, I got a 2:1.

Which may explain, by the time we got to the third year, I'd really rather had enough of it all.  I'd had enough of the fact my ear wouldn't pop.  I'd had enough of walking uphill no matter which direction you went.  I'd had enough of the fact that my clothes wouldn't dry out, ever.  I'd had enough of agents of the self, of fishers and vagabonds and of fucking Seamus fucking Heaney.

And so I wrote my dissertation on Philip Larkin.  Specifically on Philip Larkin and swearing.  Last I heard, I still had the Bristol University record for using the world "cunt" 32 times.

Though apparently I shouldn't have said it to the head of department, whilst handing the essay in.  You live and learn.

Mini drama

TheBloke (TM) is no stranger to the comedy voice.  Usually delivered in a falsetto, he will frequently adopt a Mexican / French / Italian accent (that's not three different accents, by the way, it's just impossible to pin a location on the voice) and say something silly.

So be it.

Anyway, a while back we were at a friend's wedding, staying in a hotel.  We'd both woken up early, had breakfast, had a potter around the city, and as the wedding wasn't until late afternoon, we had a bit of time.  As South Africa were playing rugby that day, TheBloke (TM) repaired to the hotel bar to watch sport, and I retired to our room and thought I'd chill out for a while.

After taking a bath I felt a bit sleepy, so snuggled down under the duvet.  I dozed for a while.  Suddenly, I heard a knock at the door.  I jumped, then remembered; we'd only been given one hotel key.  TheBloke (TM) needed to be let back in.  As I was starkers though, I thought I'd better do a quick check before opening the door.

"Who is it?" I trilled.

"Ees Minibar!" said TheBloke (TM) in one of his hilarious voices.

I laughed (out of pity, probably) and went to the door and opened it to let him in.

It wasn't TheBloke (TM).  It was the Mexican / French / Italian man the hotel employed to restock the minibar.  Who was looking, quite incredulously - though it has to be said, not entirely disapprovingly, at my tits.

I shut the door again, possibly not quickly enough to avoid quite an awkward moment.

And then hit the minibar.

(Not so) epic fails

Being something of an "A" type personality, combined with a school education that basically meant if you hadn't been awarded a doctorate by the time you were 14, you were an underachiever, I've always been fairly driven.

However, there have been times in my life when I haven't quite reached my own high standards.  Presenting:

Laura's Big List of Failures (in no particular order)

1. My fifth form mock GCSE Chemistry exam.  There were 40 questions.  I had period pains.  I have never liked Chemistry.  I remember staring at the wall for a lot of the exam,.  When I got the results, I got 37.5.  I was chuffed.  Perhaps, deep down, I was a genius after all.  It wasn't marked out of 40.  I got 37.5%.  Honourable mentions also for the History mock A-level paper where I misspelled "Cranmer" all the way through (and had him executed for Catholicism), Maths homework where I got 0/10 and the French prose, for which I was awarded a princely -18/25.  Yes.  A negative number.  And French was one of my stronger subjects.  I told you the school was tough.

2.  My first driving test... was marked by an ex-Police examiner.  I got 32 minor faults.

3. My second driving test... was on A-level results day. Although it was a year before my own results day, a lot of friends were in town.  One of them waved at me during the test.  I didn't wave back, but took my eyes off the road for long enough to edge what was deemed to be "too close" to the car in front, earning me a failure and a big "D" for "Dangerous" on my exam paper.  The shame.

4.  Meaning to tell the attractive bloke I worked with (who was looking for a new flat) that I had a spare room.  I meant to say, "There's a space in my two-double bed flat," or "There's a room in my flat," or "I have a flat share available," or something along those lines. What I actually said was, "There's space in my double bed if you don't mind sharing."

5.  My Grade 3 violin exam.  I guess I was about 12, and to be honest, I didn't know it was possible to fail an Associated Board music exam.  I thought they were there just to rinse parents of cash, and if you turned up with approximately the right instrument, you were good to go.  Turns out you're supposed to practise and shit.  Who knew?