Bowling with MILFs

Last night I dreamt I was participating in what could only be described as a “7-in-a-bed Lesbian Sex Romp” with members of the WI.

That’s what comes of spending the evening Bowling with MILFs.

Er… that was too much information, wasn’t it?

Oh well.

Four impossible things before breakfast

For reasons which escape me completely now, I undertook to provide four entries for the WI Show tomorrow.

I’m not usually nervous about, well, about anything very much, though I do get inarticulate around people who are either famous or powerful because fame and power always seems to be in slightly poor taste, and the prospect of global warming makes me fidget. However, this time I am nervous.

I’ve made some vanilla shortbread based partly on the Sainted Delia’s recipe and partly on the fact I had some vanilla sugar in the cupboard. It looks … adequate. It’s shortbread. It smells nice. But this is the WI for goodness’ sake! There are up to 4 marks for External Appearance (colour, shape, uniformity) another four for Internal Condition (depth of crust, texture, distribution of ingredients) and 12 for Flavour and Aroma. You drop a mark for every aspect of flavour which is missing. 8-9 is “average”. 5 is “not acceptable” and the notes warn sternly that “if it is not acceptable, the exhibit will NOT be marked”. So now you know.

I over-reached myself with the mask, and it is - if I say so myself - extremely disappointing. I wanted this sexy-dangerous thing in dark green velvet, but it just looks like the green man’s come out of the closet. It’s an entry, but one cannot say more than that.

I’ve only ever taken one action photo in my life. You’ve seen my photos. I tend towards scenery shot asymmetrically with strong angles and contrasts. My “action” photo is no exception. It looks like a soviet propaganda poster.

My only real WIfely skill is knitting but there I am a one-trick pony. I knit impossible scarves. They are moebius strips cast on in the middle and worked out to the edge. This is a skill I feel smug about. It’s clever.

Now all I need are a pair of moebius mules to go with them.

Still, they’ll all be set up by 10.45 tomorrow and I can come home and do nothing but please myself all weekend. And I am looking forward to that.

Category Errors #2 - Ann Widdecombe

Ok, not a category error as such, but a mental derailment all the same.

There I was, chatting away at the WI Christmas party with another member. It turns out that she’d had a pub about 20 miles from where I used to live. It further turns out she used to work for the local MP running his constituency office. It further further turns out she is a raving, raging, spittle-frothing tory.

We had a slightly one-sided conversation about Wonderful Tories She Had Met. “Michael Hestletine, he’s a very interesting man”. “That Boris Johnson, everyone under-estimates him”. Even, “Jeffrey Archer did a lot of good” and “Margaret Thatcher, what a lovely lady”.

I made suitably non-committal replies. I was brought up nicely. I have good manners.

Then she said

“Ann Widdecombe, I’m a big fan. She talks such sense in the Daily Express every Wednesday”.

(The Daily Express thinks that Prince Philip took out a contract on the Princess of Wales, so we are not talking about evidence-based news-reporting, really).

Now it may be that there is much that is great and good about Ann Widdecombe, but unfortunately friends of mine used her name as a safe word during what the Daily Express would probably call “kinky sex sessions” and this struck me as being a rather good idea. You see, unless you are Paul Merton (who is a twisty so-and-so if ever there was one) you cannot think about Ann Widdecombe and sex at the same time. Or not in a good way, anyway.

Try it.

It cannot be done.

Not without feeling enormous physical and mental discomfort.

On the other hand if you have summoned the spirit of la Widdecombe to rescue you from pleasure past bearing, then she is inextricably bound up in your mind with kinky sex. Not a pleasant image I grant you, but that is rather the point.

So there you are. Not actually a category error. But while “rabid Tories I have known” might be a suitable subject for a chat at the WI, “choosing and using a good safeword for bondage games” isn’t really.

Or not at the one I go to, anyway.

Laughter the best medicine - available on prescription only

Bloglily produced the rather chilling statistic the other day, that children laugh thousands of times a day, but adults manage to laugh only 14 times.

So, plagiarist that I am, I conducted my own laughter audit.

8.00-9.00 - driving to work, listening to Sir Terry et al on Radio 2 - several giggles but no laugh out loud guffaws.

9.00-10.30 - da nada.

10.30-10.45 - some general purpose wise-cracking at work - I can’t remember the details, but the mood was jovial. It took me three months to get that team to lighten up.

10.45-3.20 - da nada.

3.20-3.30 - more wise-cracking - I do like working with bright, sarcastic, clever peeps.

3.30-5.45 - da nada.

5.45-6.00 - my boss claims that someone else was “agressive” in a meeting. Think pot. Think kettle. Think Aphra saying so. Think boss looking sheepish. Not guffaws, but gentle ribbing.

6.00-6.30 - driving home listening to the news. No laughs there.

6.30-7.00 - driving back from work, listening to the evening “funny”on Radio 4 - one smiley moment, but no actual, you know, laughy stuff.

7.00-7.30 - talking to a girlfriend on the phone, lots of goss and giggles - she thought she’d pulled a tennis coach, so she booked herself in for a complete de-fuzz, but then the bugger stood her up. Or “sobered up” as her best friend put it.

7.30 - text from the one I like to get texts from - private but laugh out loud funny.

7.30-10.00 - Christmas cooking demo at the WI- do you know the scene in “Catch 22″ where the entire hall of enlisted men starts moaning at the sight of the Colonel’s tottie? - well there was an unanimous moan of hungry appreciation from an entire hall of middle aged ladies as the demonstrator folded melted chocolate into whipped cream to make a torte, which gave me a private silent giggle. Chocolate and cream aside, (and that is a hard phrase to type), there were l moments of individual and shared laughter at the WI too.

10.00-10.05 - talking to friend who’s visiting tonight and tomorrow, including a couple of laughy moments about why he was late setting off (he was tarting around on IM, trying to pull - I’d put him in touch with the girlfriend from earlier in the evening, but she’s got her eye on the tennis coach’s second service) and the fact that he is doomed to get lost on the moors a la “American Werewolf”.

11.00-01.30 - with said friend, (I don’t ususally entertain this late, but I wasn’t going to stand up the WI, and he’s coming to the theatre with us tomorrow night). Lots of laughter. He’s a clever and witty bloke. Favourite anecdote was one he told about his mother’s hyper-flexive cat. He picked it up, folded it nose to tail and showed it to a friend who was mildly impressed and said, “Very good, can you make it into a bird”.

So no rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-my-ass off episodes, but not bad for a weekday. But it would be much duller without the sarcastic buggers I work with.

Big Brother and the W.I.

I went to the WI last night. I’m not sure what the equivalent of the WI is in other cultures. I go because I like to belong to an organisation which slow-handclapped Tony Blair and one where middle aged women get naked for charity. The point about the Womens’ Institute, I guess, is that an organisation based on the solid virtues of rural life, feminine handicrafts and baking is an unlikely hotbed of such subversive activism. The other reasons are that I finally feel old enough, it is a pleasant way of meeting local people, and I like and respect middle aged and elderly rural women.

WI meetings are surprisingly formal. They start when the secretary reads the minutes of the previous meeting, and then there is a lot of business such as announcements about wine-tasting trips to local vineyards, pub quizzes and afternoon teas at other WIs. This all takes half an hour or so, maybe a little bit more. Then there is the entertainment for the evening. An Improving Talk. Last month we had a talk and a demonstration of stained glass making. This month the talk was entitled something like “musical memories”.

I found it boring, amusing, pleasant and rather sweet in more or less equal quantities. The speaker looked like Fester Addams, but had a palindromic wig which looked the same from the front and the back, and I spent a lot of the evening worrying that it would tip forward over his nose. He was in his 60s I’d have guessed, and he played us big band records from the turn of the previous century to the mid 1940s. Some of them were real toe-tappers, but of course we sat decorously, our hands in our laps. There was a soft murmur of talk through the records. It was an evening of gentle innocence. He struck me as a good man.

After the talk we ate cakes, drank tea and gossip, and I offered my help at the village gala next month, and then I made my escape. Virtuous womanhood can only go so far. When I got home, I settled down to watch Big Brother. I know that it is trite to draw a comparison between the honesty of our good-hearted and unpolished speaker and the cynical manipulations of Endemol who select shallow and vulnerable people, provoke them to mean-spiritedness and violence, place them in moral and ethical dilemmas, and prompt them into degrading themselves for money. It may be a trite comparison, but it is one I am going to draw nonetheless.

Every aspect of our life is full of actual or metaphorical E-numbers. We no longer like the honest and almost naive taste of reality, and instead prefer Reality TV.