Blub, Beer, Bread.
2008-09-21, 5:00 p.m.
Another weekend almost over, girls and boys! Last night we went to Lee and Anne-Maries. Lee had bought a new film and wanted us to watch it with them.It was THIS FILM and it was bloody good! L and Lee blubbed all the way through it, of course, cos they are a pair of big ole pansies, but I�d like to think I may have clawed back a teeny bit of credibility in the cinematic appreciation stakes after my piss-poor showing in my last entry here. Oh, and while we�re on the subject, apologies (naturally) to anyone who thought they were going to get some pointers vis a vis wank fodder adult entertainment in that Top Ten o� mine.
Truth is, I just hadn�t thought of including any.
My bad.
Anyways, what I was going to say before I was so rudely interrupted by the thought of nekkid jiggling boobies, squelching noises and improbable scenarios which sure as hell never happened to ME while I was at the gym/getting a household repair done/going for an unspecified job interview at a palatial yet strangely empty mansion. I obviously move in the wrong circles.
Oh yeh. After we watched the film, and Lee and L had consumed enormous quantities of beer in the effort to offset the girly blubbing with a impressively macho alcohol quota, Anne Marie (who used to be married to an Italian bloke) opened up a shitload of extra beverages including Limoncello, some kind of almond flavoured sherry and a big bottle of Strega. L hadn�t had Strega before. It probably should have stayed as an �untried beverage� on his list o� drinks as, after about half a pint of the stuff, he was an incoherent, swaying, eyes-half-closed shadow of his former self.
I took him home. On the way home, he made several efforts at convincing me of his continuing ability to be able to shag me senseless as soon as we got to our house. This was, of course, in between staggering into bushes, suggesting we push each other home in an abandoned B & Q trolley we found in someone�s front garden and tripping over on the kerb (the momentum of his 6�5�, 14 stone drunk self propelled him some 30 yards from the original trip site with only one shoe on. I picked up the dislodged other shoe and carried on walking. By the time I caught up with him he had come to a halt and was looking confused. I handed him the shoe and walked on past).
By the time we reached the Palace of Many Sins, it was more than apparent that, *ahem* my night was over, so I went to bed, leaving him bumbling around downstairs. Five minutes after I got into bed, a �Tsst� from downstairs told me that he�d opened another can of beer.
His snoring woke me at 3.30 and I got out of bed and went into the spare room. Back to sleep til 9 when his snoring woke me again and I went back into our bedroom and started looking for some clothes. Making my way to his side of the bed, where the wardrobes are, I found that the carpet was sopping wet.
The top of L�s head was sticking out from under the duvet. On his forehead was an ugly gash with dried blood crusted around it.
�Why�s the carpet soaking wet and what did you do to your head?� I said.
He looked confused. �Wha�?� he mumbled.
I shook my head, got dressed and went to Lidls. When I got back he was still in bed, so I changed into my running clothes and, just as I was about to go out of the front door again, he surfaced, blundering onto the landing wearing only bedhair and a frown.
�Worked out what you did to your head yet?� I called, as he disappeared into the bathroom. There was a slight delay (presumably while he caught sight of himself in the mirror) and then he said �Uh. No.�
�Do something with that carpet before I get back, willya� I called, cheerfully, before jogging off down the front path.
An hour later and I got back home. L was sat on the front step with a cup of coffee. He had thoughtfully laid an island of kitchen towel over the sodden carpet. There was a patch of dried blood about the size of a saucer in our bed (not on the pillow � that would just be silly! No, this was right in the MIDDLE of the bed) and he still has no idea what might have happened to his head, or the bed OR the carpet..
I was laughing too much to be mad with him.
Anyone want to have a guess at what might have happened? There might be a prize for the most inventive (but it wont be a bottle of Strega, obviously).
Oh, and I promised to tell you about the kitchen thingy, didn�t I?! Tell you what, lets let him tell his own tale:
My name is L and I can do cooking. My wife, she�s lovely and she lets me go into the kitchen � not just to get beer, No! she even lets me do stuff in there too, and she tells me how to do it, like �load the fucking dishwasher� and �get the fucking washing outta the dryer� and �make me a cup of fucking coffee�. That�s a lot of fucking, aint it. I think sometimes she get a bit muddled up about what�s �fucking� and what�s �doing stuff in the kitchen�. Sometimes she even gets muddled up about what my name is cos she says �Jesus H Christ, can you not even make a piece of toast!?�, usually when I just burned myself or got crumbs everywhere or something. I don�t think Jesus actually made much toast, although, there�s lots of stuff in the bible about bread. And fish. Maybe he made tuna melt! Tuna melt for 5000. And a Mountain of Olives. I think that was it. That�s like my wife does when I gots all my friends in from the pub. Then they all go �Yum Yum Yum, you are fucking lovely� to my wife (and that�s a lot more fucking � like, 5000 lots!) and then she goes �Yeh, well, whatever� like she�s not bothered but I think she likes it really cos she goes all red-face and lets me kiss her.
I asked Barry and Jo to come and visit on Wednesday night. I like Barry and Jo. Barry works with people who�s heads are a bit messed up. He�s real patient when he talks to me.
My wife, she said �Aww fucking hell not Wednesday, Ive got shitloads on at work and I got to take Jooj to her drama class and pick her up again and then Ive got to�..� and she said a load of other things then but I�d mostly stopped listening. So I said �I will make supper for them�. She said �You fucking well can, then, cos Im not�, so that was OK, wasn�t it!
Anyways, once before I made a teeny bit of a mistake with some chickpeas so I kind of had to make sure I didn�t mess up again, otherwise I think I would be dead and that wouldn�t be very nice for me, or for my wife cos she would have nobody to hug her and squeeze her and play Mr Wobbly Hides His Helmet with her. So I just reminded her when she was going to work that I was making the supper and then she said �Jesus� again and drove off in her car, which made me think about maybe having some bread and wine in the evening for supper with Barry and Jo. Of course, you cant JUST have bread and wine for supper�.unless you ARE Jesus, I guess, but there was already loads of cheese left over from my wife�s birthday party so it was bread and wine AND CHEESE which sure sounds like supper to me. Speshly if there�s gherkins too! There was gherkins in the fridge so that was supper pretty much all made. Except there wasn�t any bread.
I phoned my wife up at work and said �Im making bread! How d�ya make it?� and she said Jesus again and was a bit huffy cos she was doing work things and then she hung up. But she phoned me back in a little bit and said �Have you got a pen?� and then waited while I went and got one and I could only hear her sighing a little bit. Then she told me all the things about how to make bread, which was �Working the Breadmaker� which was really easy and even an idiot could do it. And bread�s only got four things in it, which is yeast and flour and water and salt and I wrote down how many of each thing I�d need so I couldn�t get it wrong. And I think someone in my wife�s office must�ve brought a baby in or was telling a joke or something cos I could hear all these ladies voices going �Awww, he�s so sweet� and laughing quite a lot too.
Then I maked the bread.
First I had to wash up the bread pan cos *somebody* made bread roll dough in it and left it in the sink to be washed up.
(And the person who made the bread roll dough � which was my wife, obviously - made bread rolls with little snips on them so they looked like hedgehogs. They were Hedgehog Rolls! But they didn�t have any real hedgehog in them cos that would be cruel and we are not Pikey Hedgehog Eaters, or from the Isle of Wight which is the same thing)
So I washed up the bread pan and made a bit of a tut-tut noise to myself cos I have to do ALLLLLL the work round here. Then I made the bread and I measured everything really carefully, cos thats important if you don�t want to mess it up completely.
So. When my lovely wife got in from work, I was in my studio doing Important Music Work, which was dusting the sofa in case Barry and Jo wanted to come and see what I do when Im not doing cooking, and the breadmaker was nearly finished with the breadmaking.
When the breadmaker goes �beep beep beep� that means its all finished making the bread and you can lift the pan out. Except you have to have a cloth on your hand because it will be very hot and will make you go �Fucking Hell!� If you have an oven glove you can use that instead of a cloth. If you made a big hole in the oven glove when you were lifting the cover off the fire pit the other day*ahem*, you can just use a cloth.
So. When you take the pan out of the breadmaker, then you have a lovely loaf of home-made bread.
Only it doesn�t seem to have rised up very much, does it?
Maybe if I try to lift it out of the pan? It feels a bit icky and rubbery and boingy and not really�.ummmm�..BREAD-like, and WHAT�S ALL THIS STUFF UNDERNEATH?
*gasp* There�s all this flour left over at the bottom! And, even tho its really really hot, it isn�t cooked into bread at all!
Oh, yeh, I forgot to say. When you do the breadmaker parts, you MUST make sure that this bit is in the bottom of the pan
Cos that is the bit what stirs all the flour and yeast and everything around and makes it into dough so it can cook itself into bread. Make sure you don�t forget, now. Its VERY IMPORTANT. Otherwise there could be a disaster or a catastrophe or something else really really bad.
Anyway. Slice of bread, anyone?
Oh, go on! Its home-made!
My wife, she was very kind and she didn�t call me Jesus at all. She made a little smile which was a bit like one you would do if you�d just been crying and somebody tried to cheer you up. Then she stroked me on the arm. Then she went to Asda and got some different bread and Barry and Jo came and we had cheese and Asda bread and wine and it was very nice.
*sigh*