Flushing the evidence away…

Is it just me – or do other people get embarrassed when they have to use the ‘facilities’ at someone else’s house – especially when it proves almost impossible to get rid of the evidence? I was in this situation today, at a party in Bournville.

The party seemed successful, although it was a shame the rain couldn’t have held off a little longer. Everyone took an item of food – and I would say 95% of the guests took a pudding or a cake! There was an interesting range of puddings, but all involved wheat, and there were a couple of quiches and a couple of pork pies. So, I had some cucumber sticks and a couple of mushrooms – followed by a selection of things dipped in my wonderful chocolate fountain. Strawberries, meringues, dates, fudge and marshmallows.

I was amazed at how easy this thing was to set up! It also seemed quite popular as well. I overheard many favourable comments, and all was well. The chocolate I got off the internet was fantastic. No complaints there are all. Brilliant!

However (and there is always a “however” isn’t there?) – because I didn’t want to rely solely on chocolate that may not have arrived on time, I took the precaution of buying some Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and some vegetable oil – this was my backup plan in case the other didn’t arrive, and I thought it could be used to top up the fountain if necessary.

This was not a problem. I found a “recipe” on t’internet that worked very well and, not knowing how soon I would need to top up the fountain, (having never used one before), I melted some of the CDM in the microwave, mixed it with the oil – tasted it to make sure it didn’t taste horrible (it tasted wonderful) – and left it in the microwave ready to reheat as required.

Well – it was ages before we needed it. In fact, we were thinking about leaving and – not knowing how long the party would go on for – I thought I’d do a quick top up before we left.

Now, it’s always difficult, I think, using someone else’s kitchen equipment, and the microwave there is very different from mine. For a start, mine is 22 years old, VERY easy to use and the size of a barn. This one had all these fancy buttons on and if you pressed one of the buttons once, it gave you a minute. So, I pressed the button once, and then carried on talking…

Chocolate is weird stuff, isn’t it? When it’s cold it is stiff, and when it is hot it is runny – up to a point. Cross that point, and you get “stiff” again. But not just “stiff”. When we took the jug of chocolate out of the microwave, the chocolate was melted perfectly – apart from this evil smoking volcano sitting in the middle of a chocolate lake (it was a big jug).

Bugger!!

What do you do when you are in someone else’s kitchen and have a jug of smoking lump of chocolate? (Other than silently panic?) Well, we fished it out with a spoon (and, rather like an iceberg, it was much bigger than we expected) but we didn’t want to risk putting it in the kitchen bin in case it melted it!! We took the “lump” outside – still smoking. We considered the dustbin, but then I had a flash of inspiration.

“Flush it down the loo.” I suggested to Mark (I was stirring the remaining chocolate and tasting it to make sure it didn’t taste burnt - it was fine).

So he dropped it, like some vile volcanic turd, into the (outdoor) bog, leaving a few tell tale drops of chocolate on the seat, and the most awful chocolatey skid marks inside. He flushed…. but the stubborn chocolate “turd” remained.

BUGGER!!!

I flushed… it seemed to disappear, but when the flushing subsided, I could see the thing, teasingly peeping out at me. I flushed for longer – with the ‘longer flush’ option (quite an upmarket outside loo, it has to be said!)

Satisfied it had gone – or at least gone far enough away to not be seen, we went back inside. I was still stirring the remaining chocolate. Someone saw me come in and asked if I had melted the chocolate outside. I explained that I was merely stirring it outside (goodness knows where they thought I’d melted it – it’s not like it was sunny or anything) – in retrospect I should have just said “yes” and let them wonder where, or how!

So, fountain topped up, flowing well and tasting perfect, I thought I should at least attempt to clear away the drips and skid marks before I left! I KNOW it was chocolate, but I didn’t want anyone thinking it was pooh – and, more to the point, that I may have been responsible – but, I think, even more than that, I didn’t really want anyone else to KNOW it was chocolate! The drips on the seat were easy enough to wipe off, it was the skid marks that were the problem! They’d had 3 lots of cold water flowing over them by now – the chocolate smear was well and truly set and welded to the loo. At this point, a few sheets of bog-roll in hand, and hand down the bog, I was thinking – ‘I do hope that this IS chocolate and not something that was there previously!’ Anyway, most of it came off, eventually, and I guess the cleaner will have to do the rest!

So, next time you are visiting someone, using their loo, worrying about producing an “unflushable” – just think – it could be worse!

PS – Oh I have just remembered! After topping up the fountain, there was a little bit of melted chocolate left in the jug – when I say “a little bit” it was more than I was prepared to pour down the sink (in case it blocked it) and I needed to wash the jug to bring it home. So I drank it. Yes. You heard right. I DRANK IT. Just as I was finishing it, this bloke walked into the kitchen – looked at me (in disgust) as if I’d drunk a litre of the stuff – saying (in a sarcastic tone) “Sweet tooth?” I didn’t bother to reply, I just thought, ‘Yes and full of sodding holes…’

Confused and amused...

I wanted some tights that would make me appear thinner. I found the control ones, but was a bit mystified re the sizing. They had light control – no point me having them, I really need something substantial. Medium control – maybe? But then there were “bodyshaper” – what does this mean? Are they the ones that feel like they are made of iron? If so – that is what I want. But they didn’t have any extra-large, they had medium – but to be honest, if I was ‘medium’ I wouldn’t need them!

I caught the husband doing something weird this morning! He was in the kitchen with the radio on, and he obviously didn’t know I was standing right behind him, when the song on the radio started with a bit of a fanfare type of note – he swung his left arm out, somewhat dramatically like a deranged conductor – almost hitting me in the face (which might have been funny in itself – although I am glad this didn’t happen – largely due to my evasive action!)

Now – this is the amusing bit – embarrassed, he tried to cover it up with a cough. Now, that’s never going to work, is it? It might – sort of – work with a fart, but not with a dramatic arm movement. It sort of reminded me of some programme from years ago, where Robert Lindsay played the part of an absolute git, but with some kind of unexpected arm movement problem – but I can’t think what it was called. It’s going to be a strange one to research, really – but I will have to find out as it will annoy me that I can’t remember.

Also slightly worrying as well that the husband might be developing some weird compulsion.

He has spent the morning chopping down flowers that haven’t finished flowering, thus producing a rather uniform green garden – not quite what I had planned for mid-summer, but like he said: “I don’t want to put the green bin out empty.” (Who does?!!)

And on the subject of bins, the kitchen bin battle rages on, as it has done for years. If I haven’t mentioned this before, my idea of a kitchen bin is something you put a bin liner in, you then fill this up with rubbish, then you remove it, tie it up, and pop it in the wheelie bin outside. His idea of a bin is something that you put a bin liner in, but you must not at any point fill that bin liner! If I put something “big” in it (and as you may have already guessed, my idea of big is not quite the same as his), he goes through and removes the offending item and puts it in the bin outside. We may as well just have a bin outside!

Kate had a pizza for her tea and part of the packaging was a thin polystyrene disc. It wasn’t the biggest pizza in the world, and I put this disc in the bin – it had barely dropped inside when he had the lid off and removed it! It was “too big”, apparently, nothing else would fit in the bin. Well, firstly – it’s about 2 mm thick, and the bin is as big as you can get for a kitchen bin. And anyway – say I did happen to put something in that filled the bin – surely that is when the bin gets emptied?

It all seems so simple to me, and I just don’t understand why he has to complicate it, why he feels the need to go through the rubbish and check everything I throw away, or even how he finds the time. Is it some sort of OCD? Or is it some “man” thing? Do all men do this? (Or have some got a life!!)

Still – I shouldn’t really complain. He provided the rest of the household with comedy moment of the week - and the biggest laugh since he accidentally and unknowingly got soot all over his face and then went to sleep watching TV. That was one of those occasions when I thought I would burst from trying not to laugh! There was a programme on TV last week, which I wasn’t really watching, as I was cooking the tea. Anyway, when I went back in the lounge they were explaining that the shark they’d been discussing wasn’t able to kill and eat a person, due to the size of the stuff it could swallow, then they went on to say it was vegetarian – and that it only ate plankton. Now I am not entirely sure what plankton is – whether it’s some kind of plant related thing (in which case, it probably is a vegetarian shark) but on the other hand, for all I know plankton could be some small creature. All I said was, “So, what IS plankton?”

“Well”, he explained, “they are little orgasms”.

It took a couple of seconds for my brain to process what he’d said, and I made the mistake of looking at Jenni. When you know you shouldn’t laugh, you should really make a supreme effort NOT to look at another person – because nothing is funnier than seeing someone else struggling not to laugh – except, perhaps, someone accidentally saying “orgasms”. The only way we could deal with it was to talk of mildly amusing things, to give us an excuse to laugh – but when you are trying NOT to laugh, it is difficult to talk properly without sounding strange. I still don’t know if he realised and decided not to draw attention to it by correcting himself, or if he really didn’t realise what he’d said (in which case he must have thought we had gone a bit weird), or more worryingly, does he think that is what they are called?