Smelly

Well, I had the good fortune to be invited to my neighbours' house for home-made pizza...what a delight!! Of course, the dog, TT, had to be in attendance but I left her outside as most Italians disapprove of animals in the house. So there we were, all dutifully assembled around the table tucking in. The grandmother, unfortunately, has suffered from a form of alzheimers for years and often has aggressive outbursts if, for example, she sees you reaching for another slice of pizza. Ehh, I wondered, would she like that piece, should I leave it for her? Is she concerned at my foreign accent? Do you laugh along? Try to include her in the conversation? I related a recent, what I thought, funny story to the family and caught her really glaring at me. Hmmm, not saying that everyone should laugh at my jokes, but, hey.... Anyway, getting sidetracked, there we were chomping away benignly at this wonderful spread when suddenly there was this AWWWWWFUL smell that filled the room. Uhhh, I thought, are they digging up the local graveyard to remove the bodies....uhhhh.... then I caught sight of TT, my dog, jumping up at the window, head appearing, then disappearing....jumping up...head appearing...then disappearing... The head of the table said frostily.....I think your dog has rolled in something. The vision is all too clear for me. You can be out walking with the dog and suddenly it finds something black and evil in the road so what is its immediate reponse...I think I'll roll in it. Clearly this is what the dog had done so the house was filled with the smell of rotting flesh. What does one do in these circumstances? Gloss over it, comment on the weather, incur the wrath of the grandmother and reach for another piece of pizza...? I opted to go out to investigate and doing so found TT outside, black down one side, aboslutely reeking of some unspeakable substance. 'You bring shame upon the family!' I barked to which she barked back. Of course she wouldn't just go away as I implored, begged, asked politely and not so politely. The father of the house came out and began tetchily to slice up the watermelon. I errr...I'm ever so sorry, I started....before fading out and beating a hasty restreat inside. My kind hosts were grim faced and had stopped eating, unsurprisingly. I sat down and commented breezily (wishing in fact there was a breeze) 'Lovely pizza!'. Suddenly I heard a yelp and the smell (i.e. the dog) began to distance itself. Clearly the father had delivered it a clear and unmistakeable message with the toe of his shoe. I waited for someone to produce an air freshener but none was forthcoming. Maybe they're out of it, I thought. By now, the grandmother was cackling. Clearly she took the opposite mood of everyone else depending on the circumstances. Hmm, I won't expect an immediate re-invitation in the near future......

Ambush

My dog, TT, I must admit, has been spoilt rotten. She demands attention and affection at every opportunity and gets quite upset if you ignore her. And so it is, when I get home and park my car, she is instantly outside waiting for me to open the door. The moment I do so, she leaps in and jumps around frantically, barking and howling, sits in your lap in the driver’s seat and refuses to let you out. You have to wait about 10 minutes for her to calm down before you can push her out and then get out yourself. Attempts to alight by the passenger door are foiled because she knows all the tricks. Now her friend, a large Alsatian from down the road has twigged this game and also tries to get in the car after her. The first time he tried to follow her in, there was pandemonium. My phone had just started ringing which I answered and absent-mindedly opened the door at the same time. I was besieged by what seemed like a pack of over-excited canines, barking and howling. I was literally trampled under-foot (or under-paw) and had to fight my way out whilst at the same time trying to hold a ‘calm’ conversation with a potential employer. I think next time, I may try to exit rapidly by the boot. Ahhh, the lengths one goes to for a quiet life.

It takes two to tango

Well, my mother is in town at the moment, having flown over from the UK for a couple of weeks. I thought I would take her along to the last night of the dance classes to show off my new moves (the fact that these moves are still relatively uncoordinated is something we can gloss over for now). A particularly cheery waltz trilled out at some point and my mother said ‘hey, let’s have a dance to this one!’. Smugly, I thought, yes, I’ll show the rest of them, knowing that my mother was bound to be good at dancing – well, she’s over 60, isn’t she, surely a pre-requisite for knowing the steps; it’s just that generation after all (vague concept). I was also relieved because my regular partner had started learning how to dance from zero at the cost of my injured toes and bumped knees. For the past 6 months, I had been marched and steered and driven and knocked and bumped around the hall by a debutante who should have had ‘L’ plates firmly attached to his back to warn others of his impending presence, ‘L’ of course standing for ‘laugh’ as in (in good cockney fashion) ‘you’re ‘aving a laugh, ent yer?’ We stood up, my mother a good foot shorter than I am (and I’m by no means tall) and started to ‘dance’. My first impression was, oh God, she can’t dance but by then, there was no way I could make her stop short of clutching at my chest and feigning a sudden (but passing) heart attack. Her moves were all staccato as if she had really bad indigestion combined with uncontrollable epilepsy. Even labelling her moves ‘contemporary tango’ wouldn’t have excused this diabolical interpretation of this classic and graceful dance. She grinned contentedly, her bouffant hairdo whirling round in rhapsodical delight. I wanted for this moment to be finished and forgotten but the music continued. I caught sight of my fellow dancers steering clear of the out of control duo. The dance instructor looked unhappy. At long last, the waltz came to an end. ‘There, I’ve taught you how to dance a real waltz!’ my mother proclaimed triumphantly trotting off to chat amiably to one of the bemused spectators. Yes, I can honestly say I’ve made a memorable impression in that group.

Thumbs up?

Well, it was the last night of the dance classes recently and everyone brought along a home-made dish. As I only make one dish well, it had to be ‘the crumble’ but this time I thought I would do some custard as well. The dancers were already familiar with the crumble set up as I had brought one in before but they peered suspiciously at the seemingly gloopy yellow mixture duly proferred for their sampling. Is it savoury? someone asked edging away from it endeavouring to keep a safe distance. What are the ingredients? another one asked to which I was unable to answer. Err, just powder and milk, which really, if you think about it, isn’t a particularly satisfactory answer. Do you drink it… and so on went the questions from the confused melee assembled before me. I dolloped each crumble portion with a good helping of the prize custard and handed it out to the reticent diners and waited. They munched and crunched and slurped and chewed with the result that. opinions were divided. A few went back just for a helping of more custard while others separated out the crumble from the custard, leaving the latter forlornly on the side of the plate with a definite thumbs down. Next time I think I will bring in a toad-in-the-hole but won’t translate literally the name of the dish before they try it as I wouldn’t want to put them off.

Mind you queues

Well, yesterday I had the pleasure of going on a coach trip to Umbria with my fellow villagers. The appointment was for 4am (zzzzZZZZZZ) but incredibly everyone was there on time. As the doors of the coach glided open, there was a sudden scrum to get on. All remnants of civility were violently pushed aside as everyone desperately tried to get on the coach as if it were the last form of transport to leave an imminently doomed earth. I've never understood the urgency in such situations, after all, the coach isn't going to leave if everyone isn't on board. Children were screaming, as was one old woman whose arm had got stuck inside but whose body remained hanging limply outside. A manic jostle of elbows, bulky food bags and eclipse-inducing rears competed frantically to reach their final destination, i.e. their seat on the coach. Not one to draw on stereotypes (!), I waited patiently on the pavement, pulling out a Bill Bryson paperback which I then proceeded to read, until the pandemonium burnt itself out and the crying had stopped. I then calmly and in an unencumbered manner, got on the coach and sat down. To say the least, the atmosphere in the coach was somewhat charged... and the journey hadn't even started....

Not quite...

In a recent lesson, I was teaching the various forms of accommodation that exist, eg semi-detached house, flat, mansion and we came to the word bungalow. One of my students piped up 'Oh yes, that's where Saddam Hussein was hiding out, wasn't it'. Visions of the former dictator padding out in his comfy slippers and towelling dressing gown in the morning to collect the paper left on the porch of his flower clad bungalow filled my mind. A far cry from the dishevelled figure we all remember being dragged out of the hole in the ground he was hiding in. I tried to correct her but she was insistent. "Don't you mean 'bunker'", I suggested. She stopped suddenly, realising that in fact this was the word she had been confusing bungalow with. "Er yes" she replied meekly but we all had a good laugh about it anyway.

Over priced, underwhelmed

I had the privilege of being invited along to a cosmetics do the other day which is basically a group of women who meet in someone's house and then a sort of Avon representative turns up with a bag of goodies and samples. I turned up all hot and sweaty looking rather flushed after a half an hour tramp through the Abruzzan countryside to reach the farm where the event was being held. The table was already laden with 4 different types of home-made cakes and pastries which I immediately set about feasting on - this of course for me being the highlight of the event. 'Have another piece' they insisted 'OK', I agreed without too much persuasion, wolfing down another cake. Wiping the cream from round my mouth, the cosmetics woman entered. I immediately noticed she had bad skin. 'Hmm' I thought, a bit like a bald man trying to sell hair growth formulas or a chiropodist with in-growing toenails. She bustled about, displaying her wares on the table, exotically named jars of brightly coloured liquids, tubes of regeneration, anti-wrinkle and gravity-defying lotions and a range of almost fluorescent cosmetics that wouldn't have looked out of place in a clown's dressing room. I wasn't impressed. She prepared her creams and pounced on the first victim. 'This is the skin purifier' she announced, vigorously rubbing some granular green concoction into this pensioner's face, pulling her skin left, right and centre. Now go and wash it off, she ordered, pushing the poor woman into the bathroom and slamming the door. 'This is a skin tonic', she announced, as a red liquid oozed between her fingers. She slapped it on her next victim, a portly woman, whose face was already red with the exertion of eating the cakes. 'There now, how does that feel?' she enquired without waiting for an answer. The victim nodded approvingly, clearly too nervous to say 'I don't feel any different'. She then grabbed a very plain, mousy coloured haired girl and began to apply various types of make-up, easily eclipsing Picasso in terms of boldness and brush strokes. The girl sat grinning, clearly enjoying the attention. Clearly she hadn't looked in the mirror yet. The rest of us (apart from me) ummmed and ahhhhed in approval, amazed at the transformation before us - from one extreme to the other. Now you! she pointed at me, seizing a jar of ominously orange paste. This is to make you look suntanned. I frowned, already lightly tanned from a few days working in the garden. I started to protest but she was already at work and I could see the end of my nose turning a ruddy brown colour. Did I really want to look like Victoria Beckam - greasy and orange? She stepped back for all to admire her work. We looked at each other, the heavily made up girl, the porky (by now) very red woman, me looking like a farmer's wife and the pensioner, now returned from the bathroom with bloodshot eyes and a nasty rash breaking through on her chin. We looked like characters from the Twighlight Zone, either that or Billy Smart's circus. As we dabbed away at our war paint, quick as a flash, she produced her order book. Elena, she barked, what will you have..... and so it went on, all the participants pressurised into forking out a fortune on rubbish products at highly inflated prices but clearly too embarrassed to say 'no thanks'.... until it came to me. 'And you, Julia?' she beamed falsely. Wiping the last of the grime from my face, I replied casually 'No thanks'. She stuck out her bottom lip... 'Don't you like the products?' she insisted. 'They're interesting....' I chose my words carefully, 'but I already have my own range (Superdrug specials - 2 for 1 offers) and they work just fine for me'. At that point, someone piped up 'Yes, in fact, Julia DOES have really good skin. What product do you use?'. I thought it best not to detract too much from the seller's own range so gave a vague answer and then checked my watch in an exaggerated fashion. 'Ooooh, got to dash now but this has been just GREAT!' and reaching for another slice of cake which I promptly stuffed into my mouth, waved enthusiasatically and headed for the door. I caught sight of 'Mrs Avon' scowling at me, probably worried I was going to go into competition with her by selling realistically priced products instead. Hmmm, wonder if they do tupperware parties round here...?