Week 240: bottle of Flash

Monday 23 October 2023

• I’ve been practising Vernon Kay’s figure-of-8 mopping technique. Completely unfoundedly, I make up that Kay makes a meal out of doing a bit of mopping now and then, and thinks that’s his fair share of the domestic duties. More troublingly, Kay says he doesn’t trust floor cleaning liquid products – because he thinks they’re communist spies or something? – and instead recommends making your own by mixing bleach with some other ingredients. That’s bad advice, and if I didn’t know better I’d wonder if he was deliberately tricking his fans into asphyxiating themselves to death with chlorine or chloramine gas. Just buy a bottle of Flash.

  It says “🌱 with plant based ingredient” on the label of my floor cleaning product, as if that’s supposed to mean something to me. It’s weird: did it use to be made out of animals, and is the plant-based ingredient … palm oil???

• First mince pie of the season, and a locally sourced mince pie. From Suffolk, which explains why it was so bad, whether heated-up or room-temperature: the pastry was soft and limp and too thick, and the filling wasn’t good enough to compensate. Merry Christmas.

  I made an apple pie from scratch on Saturday. A small one, about the size of a big rat, two apples with the bruised bits removed–worth. I should not have decorated the lid with the leftover pastry, because it made it too thick. Next time: latticework.

• Cold- or flu-like symptoms for most of the week. Snot city. I had some chesty cough mixture left over from the last season, but the cough I had this time was more of a dry or tickly one so it didn’t help as much.

  Improbably I recovered, and the flooded railway lines dried out, in time for me to spend another <24 hours in Glasgow; that’s not boring enough to write about at any length here.

• (Last week the phrase “how many arseholes it takes to fill the Albert Hall” was staring me in the face and I didn’t think of it. Pathetic.)