Sunday, April 09, 2006
A to Z in Sixty (Part 3)
I’ve just been attacked by Ps - in the kitchen, out driving or trying to write something else, they just kept popping into my head.
Parlour, parsley sauce, parsimony (sauce without the parsley), priests, perverts, (sorry, same thing), pastry (what you eat), pasty (what you look if you eat too many), petunia (posh pink), pixel, pixie (a baby one), peter (the great and out), pontification (the making of a pope) GO AWAY.
plagiarise (you shouldn’t), penury (what you live in if you do), pimp, pomp, pompous; platitudes (don’t like ‘em), potatoes (love ‘em), pets (don’t want ‘em),
ENOUGH
I’m better now – here’s the perfectly sensible one that I wrote before all that started.
Porridge – My Dad ruined it for me. No, not by forcing me to eat it, but by making it inseparable in my mind from a yukky story he liked to tell. He was brought up in an orphanage around 1908 and, having often gone hungry, couldn’t stand to see us kids turn our noses up at anything. When we did, he would drag out his stories of boys fighting over apple cores and such like, but his favourite, guaranteed to produce revulsion (though not the desired gratitude for whatever we’d just turned down), was about one of the boys in the orphanage who found the porridge particularly vile one day, so scooped it into his sock. He was discovered of course and made to turn it out and eat it.
Prohibition – So you think it’s long gone? Try going to Nantucket, where a notice on the ferry warned us that only one alcoholic drink per customer was permitted and on the island itself, our restaurant delivered us from temptation with the same rule.
Quicksand – So all those old films showing terrified victims being sucked to their death in it are rubbish, according to one of those myth busting programmes. Apparently, not only is quicksand rarely more than a few feet deep, but because it’s denser than the human body, you’d float in it and furthermore, you’d have to make a deliberate effort to sink below the surface, as you’re much more buoyant in quicksand than in water and the sand's higher density would gradually push you upward. Of course I believe it and would be quite happy to demonstrate the correct way to get out of it without panicking one little bit.
Royalty – After it was reported that Prince Harry celebrated his passing out parade at Sandhurst by going to a lap dancing club, some wag commented that it must be the first time that a man had been seen stuffing pictures of his grandmother down a girl’s G-string.
Speed-Dating – The only speed thing I knew was speed-writing – a course advertised on the underground, where you whiled away your journey working out the message written in it. But if the dating sort had been available earlier, it could have saved me a lot of evenings sitting through weird dates, like the blind one set up by my ‘friend’ with her work colleague who began the unloading of his emotional baggage by telling me how his wife had undressed at the top of the stairs and screamed “what’s wrong with my body”, and then continued with his experiences with prostitutes; or the man who’d just bought a sewing machine so he could convert his long sleeved shirts into short sleeved ones. So, with this new speed-dating, you spend about five minutes with someone (easily long enough to tell if you fancy them enough to want more) and then, no excuses, no embarrassment - it’s the rule – you move on. Not very romantic? Yeah, well you can’t have everything. Actually, my husband’s just reminded me that we did have a sort of speed-dating – it was called ballroom dancing. A look, a twirl round the dance floor and then back for more if you wanted the chance to walk her home afterwards – not such a good deal for the girl as it wasn’t really the done thing for her to do the asking. So this speed-dating thing is just the modern, minimalist version.
Parlour, parsley sauce, parsimony (sauce without the parsley), priests, perverts, (sorry, same thing), pastry (what you eat), pasty (what you look if you eat too many), petunia (posh pink), pixel, pixie (a baby one), peter (the great and out), pontification (the making of a pope) GO AWAY.
plagiarise (you shouldn’t), penury (what you live in if you do), pimp, pomp, pompous; platitudes (don’t like ‘em), potatoes (love ‘em), pets (don’t want ‘em),
ENOUGH
I’m better now – here’s the perfectly sensible one that I wrote before all that started.
Porridge – My Dad ruined it for me. No, not by forcing me to eat it, but by making it inseparable in my mind from a yukky story he liked to tell. He was brought up in an orphanage around 1908 and, having often gone hungry, couldn’t stand to see us kids turn our noses up at anything. When we did, he would drag out his stories of boys fighting over apple cores and such like, but his favourite, guaranteed to produce revulsion (though not the desired gratitude for whatever we’d just turned down), was about one of the boys in the orphanage who found the porridge particularly vile one day, so scooped it into his sock. He was discovered of course and made to turn it out and eat it.
Prohibition – So you think it’s long gone? Try going to Nantucket, where a notice on the ferry warned us that only one alcoholic drink per customer was permitted and on the island itself, our restaurant delivered us from temptation with the same rule.
Quicksand – So all those old films showing terrified victims being sucked to their death in it are rubbish, according to one of those myth busting programmes. Apparently, not only is quicksand rarely more than a few feet deep, but because it’s denser than the human body, you’d float in it and furthermore, you’d have to make a deliberate effort to sink below the surface, as you’re much more buoyant in quicksand than in water and the sand's higher density would gradually push you upward. Of course I believe it and would be quite happy to demonstrate the correct way to get out of it without panicking one little bit.
Royalty – After it was reported that Prince Harry celebrated his passing out parade at Sandhurst by going to a lap dancing club, some wag commented that it must be the first time that a man had been seen stuffing pictures of his grandmother down a girl’s G-string.
Speed-Dating – The only speed thing I knew was speed-writing – a course advertised on the underground, where you whiled away your journey working out the message written in it. But if the dating sort had been available earlier, it could have saved me a lot of evenings sitting through weird dates, like the blind one set up by my ‘friend’ with her work colleague who began the unloading of his emotional baggage by telling me how his wife had undressed at the top of the stairs and screamed “what’s wrong with my body”, and then continued with his experiences with prostitutes; or the man who’d just bought a sewing machine so he could convert his long sleeved shirts into short sleeved ones. So, with this new speed-dating, you spend about five minutes with someone (easily long enough to tell if you fancy them enough to want more) and then, no excuses, no embarrassment - it’s the rule – you move on. Not very romantic? Yeah, well you can’t have everything. Actually, my husband’s just reminded me that we did have a sort of speed-dating – it was called ballroom dancing. A look, a twirl round the dance floor and then back for more if you wanted the chance to walk her home afterwards – not such a good deal for the girl as it wasn’t really the done thing for her to do the asking. So this speed-dating thing is just the modern, minimalist version.
