Softy Butter Pants or I am sorry I am always so serious

Who invented non-butter spreads, or margarine as we Brits call it, and why?

Butter is a delicious gift from cows, to say thank you for hundreds of years of slaughter and mistreatment. It makes everything taste better, literally everything: you could spread it on 3 day old monkey turd and eat it and it would still taste better than any low fat spread on the market. Anything with the word ‘butter’ in it is good: butterscotch, apple butter, toffee butter, butternut cups, and whipped butter, brandy butter!!! The only exception to this rule are things masquerading as butter, taking the name of butter in vain; such as, ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’ and ‘tastes like butter’ and ‘Wow, I totally thought it was butter.’ These products are the devils polyunsaturates and should be burned at the stake: do not be fooled! If I ever win the lottery, I will buy the factories that produce this tasteless, oxymoronic paste and rename these products ‘I bet you wish I was butter’, ‘Jesus, I’m so depressed I’m not butter’, and ‘If you think this tastes like butter you have a phantom taste disorder.’

 

I have an alter ego called Softy Butter-pants: it’s the name I call myself when I am being loving and sweet. Sometimes I use it when the kids are trying to fool me about something: ‘Pull the other one, who do you think I am- Softy Butter-pants?’

I know my ABCs too!

In response to lovely, lovely myspokenheart’s post here: <ahref=”http://myspokenheart.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/now-i-know-my-abcs/comment-page-1/#comment-1454″></a&gt;, find below my abc!

A – angry (generally about politics!)
B – boring (when angry about politics)
C – cake/chocolate/chips/crisps/cheese- comfort food
D – delegate (I am bossy and like to do this)
E – ellipsis…I love those dots
F- frabjous (a much neglected word I like)
G – greedy (see C)
H – happy (unless angry- see A/B)
I – interesting (unless A/B)
J – jelly (it’s the only word I could think of)
K – kimono ( I like all things Japanese)
L – LOVE
M – me (someone I am glad to be most of the time)
N – NO! A word I need to get better at saying
O – open
P- peace
Q- quirky
R – reading (I EAT books)
S – secrets
T- tintinnabulation (because it sounds funny and doesn’t look like a real word)
U – uvula (see above)
V – very (everything I do I do with passion)
W – when will this ever end?!
X – xyst (I like trees)
y- YOU ( without you I would be alone)
z – zzzzzzzzzzzzz (I love to sleep)

For shame- I am shallow!

A recent conversation with a friend about the fact that I needed to get a better paid job ended up with me quoting from Karl Marx’s manifesto. ‘Ha ha’ she laughed, ‘as though earning shit money signifies your commitment to socialism: you are the only person I know who can dress up her lack of confidence as an ideological position!’ I was deeply offended.  The point is, I know who Karl Marx is. I am quite well educated and have at least, unlike a lot of people I know (see friend mentioned above) got an ‘ideological position’. I am probably a Marxist (pause for laughter), possibly a Humanist (pause for cringing) and almost certainly a Feminist (pause for booing). That said, (pause for shame) the three little words I long to hear are: (no not those!) ‘You look gorgeous/pretty/lovely…(today/in that top/dress/naked- which strictly speaking means that the phrase is more than three words long, but that was just the gist, context is important). I hate admitting this and I know that this makes  me a horribly shallow twit but I can’t help it. I also can’t help but wonder how my life might have turned out differently if I hadn’t been so susceptible to this type of flattery. I remember bouncing up and down on top of a terribly unsuitable man whom I had already decided was destined to be nothing more than a one night stand when he opened his mouth and uttered the words ‘you are so fucking gorgeous’. Three months later, despite having to silence the sane voices in my head by humming loudly at all times, I was still boffing him and I think you can guess why. Despite behaving like an utter shit most of the time, he was very free with his compliments. (A similar sort of selective hearing thing happens when you marry if your partner can cook: try telling your friends that ‘Bob made a fantastic curry last night after he finished molesting the kids’ and I guarantee they will only hear the first bit and lament his lack of fraternal siblings whom they could date, or fix up a single friend with!) It’s truly pathetic and I know it is but I still feel chuffed when a dribbling, myopic builder with a fat gut and half his ass on display whistles at me. What has caused this terrible need for reassurance? Well, try spending the entirety of your school days being a total geek. I was never fashionable or fanciable, and my teenage years were spent hiding behind a gigantic scarf my granny knitted and secretly pretending I was Sarah from The French Lieutenants Woman. I wanted to be a doomed and unconventional beauty to distract myself from the hordes of nasty teenage girls with six inch nails and pencil skirts who followed me around, chanting that my virginity would be a life long condition. Add to the mix the shame and social exclusion engendered by cultishly religious parents and a smattering of inappropriate interest from a much older next door neighbour during my early teens and voila! Here I am years later still disarmed by the simplest of compliments. The woman I see in the mirror, who frankly ranges from dishevelled to lovely, depending on the effort I put in, is always superseded by a gawky teenager who once shaved off her eyebrows because she hated her face so much. I guess I still don’t think I’m much to look it, but if you tell me I am, you could probably mug me afterwards and I’d go home smiling.

At last I have a diagnosis!

Symptoms may include unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger, feelings of powerlessness, fear, apathy, boredom, cultural decay, identity crisis, loss of free speech, incarceration, suicidal and/or revolutionary thoughts, death.

I don’t care if all cliches have some truth in them: I hate them.

If I feel down, please don’t try to comfort me with cliches: I may have to inflict violence upon you and I am a pacifist. I particularly hate the saying ‘If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ If the idiot who came up with this nonsense can think of no worse calamity to illustrate his or her point than being given lemons, as far as I’m concerned, their limited life experience does not qualify them to offer words of wisdom. I have never been given lemons by anyone and if I was given lemons, I don’t imagine that I would be overly concerned, or spend hours wondering what to do with them.

If life gives you lemons then you can make lemonade, lemon cake, lemon curd, lemon marmalade, lemon roulade, lemon tea….it’s not fucking rocket science. But what if life gives you an enormous bucket of steaming horse piss? Environmentally friendly bio-diesel? Beer?

Homemade lemonade drinkers note: life’s tough moments require wisdom. Cliches suck because they offer obvious answers to banal questions. Only people who think that being given lemons constitutes a life crisis have time to make homemade lemonade: the rest of us have to go to work and that’s just for starters.

Things I wish I’d known at 18…

Reading Birthdays, goodbyes, and hope made me think about my oldest child’s 18th birthday celebrations a few weeks ago: it’s hard to believe I now have a child who is legally an adult. Quite apart from the fact that I know damn well she isn’t, and that I wasn’t either at 18, it made me feel shockingly old and a little bit wise (which makes the old bit bearable)…

On her birthday, we had a big meal out with about 20 odd friends and family (both meanings of the word ‘odd’!) and I passed around lots of photos of her though the years and a journal I had bought, which invited guests to leave her a comment: I suggested that if they were over 25, they left something along the lines of ‘something I wish I’d known at 18 but didn’t’. Shockingly, or perhaps very British-ly (good grief, we might have to talk about something deeper than the weather!) only one person wrote something warm and wise, so, I’m going to run with this here, and hope that you’ll join in. I’m going to leave my top 3 ‘things I wish I’d known’: please, don’t be shy (or British) let me know yours too…if they’re really good, I’ll have them laminated and send you a copy by carrier pigeon 😉 I’m expecting something spectacular from Rule of Stupid involving badgers, spiderman and a length of twine.

1) THE INNER SELF

Putting a safety pin through your nose, crimping your hair and wearing an old man’s herringbone overcoat does not make you cool. You look like you fell into your grand-dad’s wardrobe after sticking your finger in a plug socket. You will not want to look like this forever, no matter what you think now- your mum was right when she laughed at you and told you that one day you’d wear pencil skirts to the office. I know this was not the reaction you wanted but don’t take it to heart. Oh, and take the safety pin out asap. One day it will really annoy you that you have a hole in the side of your nose which will never go away. In all seriousness, stop worrying about being cool i.e. how you appear to other people, and start thinking about who you want to be for yourself. Grow your insides and the rest will follow.

2. WORK

Just because you can sing, doesn’t mean one day someone will give you a recording contract. This goes for any talent you may have. The only difference between a dream and a reality is hard work. You have to actively seek the things you want and take risks to get them. Lighting a joint and pretending you are Prince’s backing singer will not get you a gig in a working man’s club let alone the Albert Hall.

3. LOVE

Love is a way of behaving not a word. If someone says they love you and then sleeps with your best friend, they don’t. If someones says they love you, you don’t have to say it back, sleep with them, forgive them for sleeping with your best friend or lend them a tenner. You will know when you truly love someone because you will stop worrying about yourself and your feelings and start putting them first: it won’t matter who loves who more and you won’t want to sleep with their best friend to get them back for sleeping with yours. Love is not the same as hurt: in fact, it’s the opposite. Ah, fuck it: just accept the fact that love probably won’t come in to it for the next decade and bad sex will have to do.

Well, that’s me done. Feel free to add to the list and if I ever have a time machine, that laminated list will come in really handy…