Caravans, birthdays and Lilliputians.

I went away this weekend with family as it was Mums birthday and also a belated celebration for my nephews birthday. I'm not sure that they would want me to say how old they are, so let's just say that my nephew is in his early twenties and Mum in the late squillions (a squillion and eight to be precise). We were five adults and two dogs staying in a small caravan in the Blackdown Hills. As I've mentioned in previous blogs I love a caravan holiday and we had a really good time. The caravan was comfortable, modern and clean, if somewhat compact, but had a few strange design foibles.

The first is the fact that the living room led into a narrow corridor with one bedroom on the left, the other bedroom at the end and the bathroom on the right. The issue was that the hall was so narrow that only one person could walk along it at any one time and also all the doors opened into it. This meant that if someone was coming out of the bathroom you couldn't open the bedroom doors and if anyone was in the hall they were liable to get a black eye when a door opened unexpectedly into their face. This meant that everyone getting up, toileted and showered in the mornings was a bit of a logistical nightmare and likewise at bedtime. Not to mention the added complication of two excited dogs getting under feet.

The second quirk was in the dining area. Like many caravans the table was a rough triangle shape with bench seats on two sides and a stool on the other. The strange thing about this caravan was that the bench seats were too low for the table so that when seated your plate was rather nearer your chin than etiquette traditionally demanded. I guess the bonus of this was that there was less chance of spilling food down your front but it did feel like we were Lilliputians eating at a giants table.

Another slightly weird design feature was that the fridge was to the right of the kitchen, near the back door. Nothing too unusual about this, as like I said the caravan was small so we're not talking about it being a long walk from the kettle to the fridge when making a cup of tea, but for some strange reason the fridge door opened on the right hand side. This meant that there were two options to get the milk out of the fridge: option 1 (my preferred method) was to stand on the left hand side of the fridge, open its door and then lean over the door to reach inside and head butting the microwave oven in the process, option 2 was to open the back door, go down the 3 steps outside, turn around, open the fridge door and gain access to the milk that way. It would have been much simpler to hang the fridge door the other way, but that would have made it a bit boring and predictable I suppose.

The other oddity in this compact caravan was in the double bedroom, which my sister and brother-in-law shared. There was a large walk-in wardrobe, in fact it was such a spacious closet, it was almost a dressing room. When space was such a premium, so much so that there was not enough room for a dog to wag its tail without it hitting both sides of the walls in the hallway, let alone being enough space to swing the proverbial cat, why have such a large walk-in wardrobe? Why not instead use the space in the twin room which was so small only one person could stand up in there at a time, and the beds were so narrow it was impossible to turn over without knocking your elbows and knees on the wall. My sisters dog slept in the dressing room area and she probably had more room than the rest of us.

Luckily we all get on well so our snug accommodation did not put a damper on our weekend and we had a good time. Despite the fact that we got charged by a mad cow whilst on a walk, my nephew sunk up to his knees in a bog whilst wearing his new walking boots, the site swimming pool being so shallow that everyone scraped their knees whilst swimming and I even grazed my belly on the pool floor, my brother-in-law having a cough and cold and Billy dog being head butt by a sheep. Sometimes though being together is more important than little luxuries, like being able to see what's on your dinner plate, remembering to open the microwave before opening the fridge to avoid concussion or having to wait your turn to get up in the morning.

Envy, The Amazon and Linford Christie

I'm not a catholic so can't seek absolution for my sins in the confession box but I do feel the need to own up to one serious flaw, in the hope that you, my fellow blog readers, will forgive me.

You see I am guilty of one of the seven deadly sins, the sin of envy. I am not a generally envious person, I don't envy those who are richer, prettier or more successful than me. I don't envy those with better cars, bigger houses or the latest Apple products, but I do suffer from a very specific form of envy. Lunch box envy.

I'm not referring to the Linford Christie type lunchbox (get your minds out of the gutter please) rather the plastic container that fellow colleagues bring to work to sustain themselves through out the day. I suppose that it would be more accurate to say that I am envious of the contents of their lunch boxes rather than the tubs themselves, however I am still impressed by people who carry pretty insulated bags and pots to better display their goodies.

To save money I am making a concerted effort to always take a packed lunch in to work and most days I succeed. However I generally leave it too late to make anything interesting, and even if I have the time to make a nice lunch the contents of my fridge rarely cooperates. So I have to resort to slapping something uninspiring between a couple of slices of slightly dry bread. Last week to ring the changes I bought some tortilla wraps but forgot to get anything tasty to put in them, so ended up with having a rolled up wrap smeared in peanut butter then shoved in a sandwich bag along with a handful of wrinkly grapes.

Compare this then to the people who bring their matching picnic sets filled with meticulously chopped and diced salads, as lush looking as the amazon rainforest and containing tasty morsels, such as perfectly ripe avocado and crispy bacon, maybe feta, vine ripened tomatoes and black olives or grilled chicken and croutons. They then get their separate little container out and pour over the freshly prepared dressing, which always seems to perfectly match the salad, they have balsamic for the avocado, a vinaigrette for the feta salad and Caesar to dress the chicken. Next follows a premium brand yoghurt (in date) then a fruit salad which they eat with a fork. My boring lunch has gone before they have even poured the dressing over their mixed leaves and so I have to sit and enviously watch them tuck into their feast.

If I were to attempt to bring a salad one day it would probably contain rather sad, limp lettuce, some tomatoes (probably cherry tomatoes that would burst and squirt me with juice when I try to eat them), chopped pepper if I'm really lucky, mushy peas (it's all I had, the dish was too empty and I panicked) and tinned tuna. I don't have a little pot to put dressing in, so would add oil and vinegar in the morning which, by the time I ate my lunch, would have made the veg even slimmier and the whole lot would look and smell like the contents of a rock pool. I ask you, who is going to envy that?

Don't even get me started on people who bring leftovers for their lunch. People who smuggly heat up last night's lasagne, stew or curry, filling the office with a cacophony of savoury aromas that has me salivating onto my keyboard. Yes I cook extra in the evening, planning for there to be leftovers for lunch the next day, but invariably I've eaten it all before I've gone to bed.

In my present job you're not allowed to eat at your desk so everyone has their lunch in a little dining area and there is no escape from watching others eat their lunches and in turn feel eaten up by envy. Therefore when I was approached and offered another job last week, one of the reasons I accepted was in the hope that I won't feel quite so envious of my new colleagues lunch boxes. Yes you read correctly, I have once again handed in my notice and will start my third new job in the space of 4 months. Nearly 16 years in one job and now 3 jobs in 4 months, and all because of lunchbox envy (well maybe not all because of envy, but possibly a little iddy, biddy bit). Now I've got to go as I know that I have to scrape the mould off the cheese before I can make my cheese and tinned tomato sandwich, I wonder if I've got any bread?

Macaroni cheese, Pit Pads and gerkins.

When I was working full-time I tended to cook up a couple of days worth of dinners on a Sunday evening, now that I work part time I usually prepare meals for the rest of the week on Tuesday afternoon or evening. Yesterday I cooked up a big dish of macaroni cheese, except I didn't have macaroni so used penne and also added brocolli, cauliflower and, of course, runner beans (I'm a big fan of one pot meals) I kept 2 portions in the fridge and froze the other couple of meals. I know its not exactly haute cuisine but I enjoyed making it and the end results should taste good, except for a couple of minor hitches.

The first hiccup was Billy's fault. Billy is a typical terrier and obsessed with cats, chasing birds, trying to climb trees after squirrels and catching flies. I live in a first floor flat with a balcony and when I'm home Billy spends most of his time out on the balcony. There is railing around the edge of it but by lying as flat as possible Billy can get his head under the railing, onto the edge of the ledge so that he can watch the cats in the garden below. He spends hours out there, whimpering occasionally as the cats taunt him by parading up and down.

Well yesterday the pasta was cooking and the cheese sauce was just getting to that crucial stage where it is starting to boil and thicken. The stage where it needs constant stirring to stop it sticking to the base of the saucepan and getting lumpy, when I suddenly realised that I hadn't heard anything from Billy in a while.

I abandoned the sauce and going outside leant over the railing. Billy had somehow managed to get under the railing and was out on the ledge that runs along the front of the building, he was balanced at the end, three flats along from where I live. The ledge gets narrower as it goes along and where he was standing it wasn't wide enough for him to turn around to come back. Cats I know have nine lives and have been reported to fall off 20 storey buildings and walk away unscathed, you don't hear the same anecdotes about westies, so I was worried about what would happen if he fell the one storey. I grabbed some shoes and dashed around to the front of the building where I was able to stand on my downstairs neighbours garden wall and reach up and grab the dog. I swear, to get under the fence, he must have had to dislocate his shoulder blades and would need to take his back legs off at the hip, throw them over the rails and then reattach them, or he wouldn't have fit.

That crisis was averted but back inside my worst fears were realised. I had lumpy and slightly burnt cheese sauce.

The next issue with my Mac cheese wasn't my fault either, I don't think. If I was to blame anyone I would probably accuse Mabelline, the cosmetic company, of producing faulty goods.

 I was grating the cheese to go into my lumpy sauce and I suspect that you can guess what happened next. Often when grating things I manage to graze my knuckles, well yesterday instead of my knuckles I somehow managed to grate my finger nails. So not only did my cheese sauce have lumps of flour and flecks of burnt sauce in, it also now contained flakes of Coral Reef coloured nail varnish.

This got me thinking about a conversation I'd had the other evening when out for a meal with some ex-colleagues. We'd been talking about business ideas,and two friends who'd been made redundant at the same time as me, both reckoned that they had brilliant, new and life changing ideas for inventions. One was for Pit Pads, absobant pads you could stick to the underarm area of your clothes to stop you from getting damp patches when hot. The other idea was to invent edible string for tieing up bales of straw and hay for livestock. Both my colleagues were passionate about their ideas and were convinced that if they were produced they would make a fortune. Unfortunately when I looked online the next day I found that both were already being produced. At that point I decided that everything needed has already been invented, although I am prepared to concede that technology is still coming up with a few new ideas. The human race has been inventing and coming up with new products for centuries, so surely by now everything new and useful has already been made.

I had an amusing hour looking at some of these inventions and was especially impressed by the:

• Heated butter knife which solves the problem of not being able to spread butter straight from the fridge
• Slippers with lights built into the toes so that you don't have to turn the main lights on during nocturnal bathroom visits. On a similar theme you can also get fluorescent toilet paper.
• Dog umbrellas which fit into the dogs lead, to try and avoid that wet dog smell on rainy days.

Yesterday after my slightly problematic cooking experience I realised that there are still some vital inventions needed and not all of them related to macaroni cheese. The first that I'd like to suggest is grater proof nail polish, think about the gallons of cheese sauce this could save. Manufacturers of cosmetics make claims that their varnish will dry in 60 seconds, will strengthen and condition your nails, but for some reason none have come up with a polish that will with stand a cheese grater. My second idea is for dog food that becomes fluorescent when it exits the dog, this will make it much easier to pick up when the light is poor. Manys the time that I take Billy dog out in the early moning or late evening and I've had to resort to feeling around, hand in poo bag for a warm deposit. Finally someone needs to come up with a jar opener that works, I know that there are dozens on the market, my Mum and I probably have most of them between us, but they just don't work. I have a jar of pickled gerkins in my cupboard, unopened since about 1978, which I just can't get into. 

So any would be inventors out there who are stuck for inspiration please give these a go, and should you end up making a fortune from them remember who gave you the idea. Now anyone for macaroni cheese anyone?

Vultures, adders and adrenalin

So this has been a week full of danger and taking risks for my family.

The first perilous event happened on Sunday when Mum, Billy dog and I went for a walk around a local reservoir. It was a lovely day, the sun was shining and there was barely a breath of wind. We had walked about 3 quaters of the way around the lake and had filled our tub with blackberries, ready to make a crumble, when we met a group of people also walking a dog. They told us that they had seen a couple of adders out sunbathing and to be careful.

Adders are a type of viper that are native to Great Britain. They are venomous but only mildly so and do not present a threat to a healthy adult. However to a small Billy sized dog they can be fatal. Therefore for the final mile of the walk Billy had to be kept on a short lead and was not allowed to sniff around in the long grass which he likes to do. Mum and I spent the walk talking really loudly and stamping our feet to try and scare the snakes away. In fact we were stamping so much I think that we both gave ourselves shin flints, we created such a rumpous that we were probably in danger of attracting the snakes to us, as I imagine they thought a herd of elephants was on its way by.

Luckily we survived this threat but our family wasn't out of danger yet.

On Monday, my day off, I was having a coffee at home and decided to check Facebook. My niece and her husband are on holiday in France and to my horror my niece had posted a picture of herself and her husband, dressed in hard hats and overalls, standing next to a colourful paraglider. The comment she'd posted said,

"Just jumped off a mountain".

That was it! No mention of whether they had landed, why she'd decided that jumping off a mountain holding onto what is basically a kite was a good idea, or if they'd had lessons or anything.

I know that technically speaking her and her husband are adults, the fact that they are married kind of implies this, but how did we get to the point where she can make that sort of decision without consulting her parents, much less her Aunt. Yes she's an adult but it only seems 5 minutes ago since I pushed her on a swing; 10 minutes since she was a toddler and needed help to wipe her bottom when potty training, and it only seems 15 minutes since we were changing her nappy and exposing the multi coloured horrors within. Incidentally I'm sure her husbands nappies were just as bad, it's just I didn't know him then.

Now suddenly she's throwing that same arse over the edge of a mountain, without a thought to the care and attention that has gone into keeping her safe over the years. I can't imagine how both sets of parents felt as they pictured the bodies they protected from nappy rash bouncing down canyons, to be trodden on by mountain goats and pecked at by vultures. I'm not even exageratting, that could happen.

What really worries me is that paragliding might be another step along the slippery slope to becoming an adrenalin junkie. Kids start out on swings, urging parents and carers to push them higher and higher, so the addiction starts. Before you know it they are experimenting at funfairs, they ride their bikes too fast, but assure us they didn't inhale. Next they learn to ski and inform us they can handle it. They try a climbing wall, then climb a mountain, stating it's not a problem, they are just social adrenalin users. Then they jump off a mountain and tell us they can stop any time they want to. What's next, skydiving without a parachute into shark infested waters, whilst smeared in blood?

So I request that you stop this dangerous habit now. I suggest that you go cold turkey and cut all risk taking behaviours out of your lives. Maybe it would be sensible to never travel faster than 40 miles an hour, to never have your feet off the ground for longer than 11 seconds and to avoid activities that could involve injuries that require more medical treatment than a sticking plaster can provide. Yes this won't make you popular on motorways and will rule out flying, but there are still loads of fun things to do. There's walking, skipping or even bowling.

This week my niece jumps off a mountain and I walk along a snake infested path. She loves it and posts a picture on Facebook, I hate my adventure and can't wait to get to safety. I am not an adrenalin addict, she's becoming one. So this post is by way of being an intervention, let's stop this young couple ending up as vulture food all because they couldn't resist the allure of adrenalin.

Runner beans, triffids and bank holidays

This week I have mainly been eating runner beans. The wet summer we have had in Cornwall must have been really good for beans as there seems to be a glut of them at the moment. Someone brought a bag of them into work for us to help our selves to, so I took home a couple of meals worth. Then when I visited mum this weekend she also had loads. Over the past week I have had beans with roast beef, cottage pie, lasagne, minestrone soup and in my cous cous salad for lunch. I'm even starting to look like a bean, although admittedly a less green, not so skinny, more hairy and quite a bit larger version of one.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a bean as much as the next man/woman. I like all aspects of runner beans: I admire the vibrant plants that grow even taller than sunflowers, the triffids of the vegetable group; I love the crimson flowers that decorate the plants; I like the plants Latin name of Phaseolus Coccineus; I love eating them steamed, boiled and made into chutney and I enjoy searching among the lush foliage for the hidden beans, as I always feel a bit like a jungle explorer looking for treasure. But I am just starting to wonder if you can have too much of a good thing. I am eating them for every meal, yet still they seem to be taking over my fridge, there's hardly any room in there for milk, cheese or other veg, and I am having to drink warm wine as there's certainly no space in the fridge for cold plonk. I worry that one day I will come home to find that the beans have broken out of the fridge, taken over the kitchen and are planning their attack on the lounge.

Last night I went out for a pub meal for a friends birthday. I was looking forward to seeing my friends, but was also anticipating a beanless meal. Although we weren't served runner beans we did get their Gaelic cousin the French bean, so it wasn't really much of a change. Beans are taking over the world, brocolli doesn't stand a chance.

I love a collective noun (my favourites being a charm of goldfinches and an ascension of larks) and I wondered if there was a collective noun for runner beans. I checked on Wiktionary and the closest I could find was a "hill of beans, well I reckon that I have already eaten a mountain of them this week. I couldn't however find a collective noun specifically for runner beans so I'd like to suggest the following, see what you think;

• a Nike of runner beans
• a wigwam of runner beans
• a race or maybe a marathon of runner beans 
• or perhaps a fart of runner beans

A bit of audience participation would be good here, anyone got any other ideas?

In the brief moments between picking, preparing and eating beans, I have enjoyed the August bank holiday weekend, which incidentally I think should be renamed the Runner Bean bank holiday. I have seen some friends, had a barbeque, been for some good walks, bathed the dog and met up with my cousin and her family. But mostly this week, I've been eating beans.

So the answer to the age old question of " How many beans make five?" is probably about a trillion and not the traditional more conservative response of, a bean, a bean and a half, half a bean, and another two beans. Sorry this is a short post but I haven't got time write any more as I need to get ready for work and I haven't even chopped the beans to add to my porridge for breakfast yet...after all, waste not, want not.