MEN! *rolls eyes*

2010-03-11, 11:46 p.m.

Two of the most irritating men in my life have conspired against me, dear readers!

First Shagnasty and then, a mere 21 years later, Slaveboy! Its almost too much to bear. They are clearly in cahoots and have taken steps to admonish me, in identical fashions, over the most trifling of transgressions.

My heinous crime?

To put ginger biscuits in a tin which also contains biscuits of a non-ginger variety.

At my mother�s house there is a large biscuit tin. In keeping with many English families of a certain socio-economic standing, it is a tin which once contained a Christmas selection of low-budget chocolates. Quality Street, Roses, that sort of thing. The mothers of quite a lot of my friends had ones very similar. Every week, my mother would buy two or three packets of biscuits � nothing too fancy, mind you. Some Digestives, Rich Teas or maybe those shortbready ones with the lines around the sides and the dots in the middle. Or maybe some Gingernuts. They�d all get tumbled into the big tin together, into a glorious biscuity meld . Half the fun of having a biscuit with our cup of tea in the evenings (the start of the 9 o clock news was my cue to put the kettle on) was the rummage about in the tin for one�s biscuity accompaniment of choice. Nobody minded the mixture, or the fact that all the Nice (and the rich tea fingers) would be broken, being particularly fragile specimens. Sometimes, if you were lucky, the rummaging would produce a true gem of a find � a Chocolate Digestive with only a little piece broken off perhaps, or a Custard Cream � missing its lid but made all the more fabulous by being half-and-half cream and biscuit, instead of the regular two thirds biscuit one third cream, that had lain undiscovered under the rubble of lesser biscuits since some long-forgotten special occasion. The visit of a grandmother, perhaps, or it being the weekend after payday. If I go to my mother�s house at the weekend, Treacle and Jooj will make tea, seemingly out of the goodness of their hearts. I know, though, the tea is really only an excuse to get the big ole tin out and rummage around for a little crispy, crunchy, dippable slab of heaven.

Many years ago, when I first found it necessary to uproot myself and travel the globe in pursuit of cock a man�.well, OK, I went to Reading but it was definitely in pursuit of a man�I dutifully set up home, making sure that not only did my coasters match my table mats and that the knife drawer contained one of those funny little hook-ended cheese knives that everyone has yet nobody uses�well, I certainty didn�t then. I was 19 and the �continental cheese selection� didn�t feature too highly on my dinner party menus, if Im honest (Shagnasty would only eat medium mature cheddar, anyways). Oh, and I certainly made sure that I ate my own bodyweight in Quality Street the preceding Christmas, so that I would have a decent tin in which to put my biscuits.

All was well. Shagnasty and I played house nicely until�SHOCK! HORROR! The shine was taken off my new-found domestic bliss in one fell swoop the fateful day that Shagnasty flipped off the lid of the tin, conveniently placed on the floor near his armchair for maximum dunking/minimum movement, glanced down and said,

�Euuurrgh! There�s gingers in here! Everything�ll be all gingery now!�
�But darling!� I squeaked �You LIKE gingers!�
�Harumph. Not in with everything else, I don�t. They spoil all the others�

Dear readers, this conversation went on (on and off) for around 17 years, with him refusing to eat any of the biscuits in the tin if a packet of gingernuts had been anywhere near them. About six months before we split up, I finally relented and bought a small tin in which to keep gingernuts � segregated from their non-gingery cousins � and biscuity apartheid reigned supreme.

When I was finally free of him, I chucked the little tin away and went back to a sublime biscuity free love state of affairs. L doesn�t care � he�s Bourbon Cream kinda guy but isn�t bothered if they come with a hint of more exotic shores. The kids don�t care � they just like biscuits. No harm done��.

Until yesterday.

Part of the remit for the training courses that I run, is that we provide refreshments. As I have a generous budget for this, I make sure the project biscuit tin is well stocked, mostly with the sort of expensive thickly chocolate coated ones that my family couldn�t afford when we were kids. The venue that we are currently using for our Monday courses provides their own biscuits and charges me for them. As I have paid for them, they are technically mine, so any that aren�t eaten go in the project tin at the end of the session and are taken back to the office or on to the next venue.

Slaveboy opened the tin, back at the office on Monday afternoon, and did actually recoil in disgust.

�OMIGODDDDDDD! Who put THEEEEEESE in here???� (his turn to squeak, obviously!)

As he is gay and not everyone in our office knows that, I could not yell �Oh, don�t be so fucking GAY! Just eat the damn things�, leaving the situation wide open for ranting to commence. He is cleverer than Shagnasty and Im not at all scared of him so, instead of being horrified that I had committed biscuit genocide, I listened with amusement to his protestations.

Putting gingers in a tin of mixed biscuits, it appears, turns the tin into �biscuit Chernobyl� � the taint lingers long after the tin had been divested of its contents and hosed down with Domestos. Ginger biscuits �have a half life longer than plutonium� and are �Wrong. On so many levels.�

Hahaha, sez me. You are just like my ex-husband.

�Well, he is clearly a man of substance and was right about you all along. You really ARE a useless little trollop whom he picked up from the gutter, and you really do have no more sense than a gibbering fool in an asylum.�

I was holding the tin lid at the time and it was only my threatening to smash it over his head so hard that he would be wearing a Quality Street themed bowler hat that made him stop.

The only other gent in our office ate all the biscuits, manfully troughing down the gingers AND those merely having a gingery hint about them. His wife�s a food Nazi and wont let him have biscuits. Shagnasty pronounced him �Brave. Beyond measure.� saluted and flapped his hands about in front of his face in a �mustn�t cry� kind of way.

I despair.

For the benefit of overseas readers, who may not have the Englishman�s long biscuit-eating heritage, a little clarification here. We�re not talking �cookies�. Those are an entirely different animal, being generally altogether chewier, naughtier concoctions. The English �biscuit� is crunchy and generally pretty plain � even the fancy ones are just plain ones with party frocks on (cf custard creams, bourbons, jammy dodgers, garibaldis). It can (and in some cases, should) be dipped in tea before eating. It is one of the staple foods (along with toast and instant noodles) of the discerning poor. Biscuits are also one of the few things on which one can get an Englishman, (regardless of his creed, colour, social standing or any other divisive criteria you may wish to dream up) to pontificate for hours. English people LOVE biscuits and there is no other proffering on earth more likely to elicit the response �ummm��ooooh, go on then�.

Oh, and a biscuit tin is NOT the same as a cookie jar, m�kay?

For more on the English and their romantic attachment to geometrically shaped pieces of hard-baked dough go HERE

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