Originally published by The Clifton Courier, September 29, 2021

I had some friends house sit for me over the weekend and I tellya what, there’s a lot to think about. 

I wanted create a comfortable, lovely experience for them. Part of this is because I’m a deeply empathetic person with a big heart… and part of this is because I want them to think good things about me – you know, that I’m caring, that I’m hospitable, that I have great taste and that I don’t live like a total grot. 

I like the idea of being the friend whose house is the preferred option when people need a place to crash. But in order to secure this position, I need to make sure I’m a good host – because I can’t trust that my personality alone will attract my needy friends. I’ve got to be professional in my approach. 

So I’m conducting a review. 

Things to improve on for next time:

Get matching towels – I’m not saying all my linen has to be part of a set. Sure, it’d be nice, but I don’t need to have everything match aesthetically. What I’m talking about here is having at least two towels of the same quality. Because when my mates stayed over, I only had two clean spare towels and one was much better than the other, quality-wise. And that makes things awkward because then they’d have had the discussion about who got the good towel and who got the one that looked like the kind of towel you’d use to dry a wet dog. I mean, obviously it’s preferable to have two good quality towels – which is what I’m aiming for. However, if they had two bad quality towels they would think I’m a grub, but at least there wouldn’t be any arguments between them. 

Provide an iron: I don’t own an iron. I have an ironing board and the water container part of an iron because I just kinda ended up with them, but no actual iron. But the presence of an ironing board suggested to my houseguest that I had an iron to go with it, so she went looking through the spare wardrobe in a fruitless search. And while she was looking, she discovered my overhead projector and then I had to explain to her why I had teaching equipment from the early 90s but not an iron. 

Things I think I got right:

Fresh sheets – Because no one wants to wake up covered in someone else’s mystery hair.

Encouraging them to use the mixer to bake as part of my welcome note – not only was this suggesting a fun activity, but it showed that I knew them well because I was aware they’d been watching a lot of The Great British Bake Off. That’s a personalised experience. And that made me look caring. It also provided a cover for the somewhat excessive amount of butter I keep on hand. I’m not a nutjob butter fiend, I just bought ample supplies on their behalf. That’s all. 

A full container of teabags – I was having a cup of tea the morning before I left and it dawned on me there was only one teabag remaining. I’m surprised I let it get that bad but, to be fair to myself, I’d had a string of 3:30am wakeups that week so I wasn’t all that alert by Saturday morning. I went for a quick run to the supermarket to replenish supplies and thought, while I was there, I should grab some bonus toilet paper. I was very glad I did that, because I didn’t realise I was down to the final rolls. So, really, it was a good thing I nearly let the tea run out.

Towel chocolates – I wanted to play up the whole naff hotel experience, so I artfully folded up a corner of each towel, placed it at the foot of the bed and tucked in a little treat. I didn’t need to put out little soaps as I’d already put a jumbo dispenser of body wash in the shower (a communal bar of soap probably wouldn’t get me a rave review) so I went with an individually wrapped chocolate. I’d briefly considered Lindt balls, but I actually don’t think they’re as great as they make themselves out to be and they’re that little bit exxier than the other options so I thought, in the context of my particular operation, that would have been trying too hard. Instead, I went with strawberry Freddos because they’re honest and down-to-earth. Like, you wouldn’t have a beer with a snooty, social-climbing Lindt ball, but geez you’d have a few laughs at the pub with Freddo Frog.

Hanging the galloping horse print I inherited from Grandma in guest room: Because I have excellent taste and I need them to know that. 

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, September 22, 2021

There are few things that tap into the ugliest depths of humanity quite like a buffet. 

While I like to tell myself that I am a decent and rational person motivated by goodwill, I am aware this is something of an act. 

I mean, deep down, we’re all animals with biological needs, powered by ancient evolutionary forces. We could kill with our bare hands. We could let out piercing, guttural howls. We could grind the bones of our enemies down to make our bread (which not only is quite graphic for a children’s story, it would make for a very unpleasant texture).  

But we don’t – and that’s not just because there’s no amount of butter that could make a slice of bone-based sourdough enjoyable.

It’s because we’re also creatures of the mind. This consciousness means we can rise above the savagery that earned us our throne in the animal kingdom and style ourselves with some semblance of civility. This means our character is not just who we are naturally, but also the people we actively try to be. And I personally find that very comforting, because while naturally I can be quite awful, I can train myself to be… less awful. And that extra effort counts for something (well, in my convenient-for-me opinion, anyway).

I mean, it requires a lot of internal effort to fashion myself into the semi-decent person I present myself as. It takes work to be patient and pleasant and understanding. It’s not something I naturally do on instinct; it’s something I have to actively cultivate. 

Most of the time, I’m able to maintain that veneer of decency and rationality until I get to the privacy of my own car/home/soundproof capsule that prevents other people from hearing my pent-up rants. But there are certain situations when years of psychological coaching and self-discipline become undone.

For me, that’s at a buffet.

I went to one on the weekend and was confronted by a side of myself that had not been unleashed for years thanks to a combination of the pandemic, the collapse of the Sizzler empire and society’s general suspicion of mass-produced foods that sit under heatlamps for hours.  

I had forgotten how ugly I could become in front of a salad bar. 

I walked into an arena of bain-maries and realised I was the master of my own destiny… and that I should not have that kind of power. 

Because without the restraints of single-serve portions dished out to me by someone else, I use that freedom to load up my plate with vast quantities of food that go far beyond my nutritional needs. And when I’m able to mix and match food items, I slop entirely different cuisines together in ungodly combinations that have no business being in the same building, let alone on the same plate. 

I always end up eating too much and, often, I don’t even enjoy the food that much. 

So I’m trying to understand why I do this.

The problem with buffets is not so much to do with the vast amount of choice because, when you think about it, there are often just as many choices in a line of bain-maries as there are on a menu. 

I think it’s the lack of consequences that undoes me. 

Because when you order something from a menu, you’re stuck with it. But if you put something on your plate at a buffet, you just can leave it sitting somewhere and a staff member will whisk it away. You don’t have to think about whether you’d actually enjoy the food, so you turn down the volume on the part of your brain in charge of critical thinking. And when you pair that with the fact you’ve paid to eat all you can eat, you feel a desperation to make the most of it. 

When you’re not used to this kind of freedom, it hypnotises you – and it doesn’t help that the clattering of knifes, forks and tongs is so loud that it drowns out your voice of reason.   

And like a shark who has picked up the sent of blood, your pupils dilate and you become a mindless eating machine. It turns into a gluttonous, hedonistic free-for-all and you don’t realise you’ve lost yourself until you’re contemplating your second run at the dessert bar. And then you look down in horror that the half-cleaned bones, the jelly cups and the dregs of clashing sauces in front of you. You think about how hard you’ve worked to morph yourself into a decent human and are appalled to learn that all it takes to undo all that work is an array of salads.  

Or is that just me?

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, September 15, 2021

I just had to throw a whole kilo of yoghurt in the bin. 

Now, before you go painting me as one of these big city, yoghurt wastin’ folk, hear me out. I’m not just frivolously buying yoghurt and then not eating it. I usually burn through the stuff. 

I mean, you can do so many things with plain Greek yoghurt. You can dollop it on nachos or dump stewed fruit on it for a dessert or drizzle it on most lamby-dishes or you chuck in a few herbs and use it as a salad dressing or use it to tenderise a chicken or, even though we’re getting past porridge weather, I will say that stirring in a glob of Greek yoghurt into a saucepan of porridge just before it’s ready will make for a creamy, creamy breakfast slop that I would heartily recommend. 

Plain Greek yoghurt is good stuff. And I usually throw so much of said good stuff down my gullet that buying just a single, one-kilo tub at a time seems quite restrained. 

But I recently bought a tub that wasn’t right. 

Like, if you were going by the use-by date, it’s still edible. But when I opened the tub, it looked very, very runny. Sometimes there’s a bit of whey that collects on the top, so I stuck my finger into the tub (this was my personal yoghurt tub, mind you, I’d like to make it very clear that I’m not jamming my hands into communal dairy products like some kind of maniac) to check if there was any yoghurty thickness underneath. 

But there was none. 

It was just a tub of chunky milk. 

And maybe it was still fine to eat – in terms of it not giving me food poisoning, anyway. I’m no expert and I didn’t run any scientific tests on it, so I can’t say for sure. But there’s something threatening about dairy that makes you not want to second-guess it. Like, you can take your chances on a lot of things, but dairy isn’t one of them.  

Maybe it wouldn’t have killed me, but the mouth feel of chunky milk would not have been pleasant. And maybe this makes me a bit of a diva, but I just don’t think the benefits of using up all that watery yoghurt juice were worth the gamble of spending an entire night with my head in the toilet. 

In the end, I made the decision not to eat the yoghurt. It’s called self-care. 

But what does one do with a whole kilo of dairy water? How is one supposed to dispose of such a cursed substance?

I’d have like to have sent it back down to the underworld (it clearly came from there because it obviously curdled in the ambient heat – the underworld is no place for dairy products) but you really shouldn’t be pouring such things down sinks. 

I don’t have a dog, so I couldn’t just leave it in a dogbowl and wait for the problem to take care of itself (but I just Googled whether dogs can have dairy products and one website told me that, actually, most adult dogs are lactose intolerant so it’s probably quite a good thing that I’m not in charge of keeping one of them alive).

I wasn’t just going to tip the yoghurt out in my garden, setting fire to it wouldn’t work and I had a feeling that starting a waterbomb fight with milky missiles would be an unsuccessful way of making friends with the people who live in my street.  

The only way to get rid of it was via the wheelie bin. 

But, I tell you what, I really don’t feel good about it.

It’s a waste of my hard-earned yoghurt money. It’s a waste of yoghurt. It’s a waste of all the time and resources that went into making that yoghurt. And the guilt about that wastage makes me sick to my stomach. 

Well, that and the thought of a litre of milk water sloshing around in a garbage truck, that is. 

Originally published by The Clifton Courier August 25, 2021

I recently lost a thong. 

That’s not to say I lost it in that I misplaced it. I know exactly where it is. It’s in the front passenger side of my car.

When I say I lost it, I mean, it’s gone in the proverbial sense. Its time has passed… as it no longer can be useful to me in the context of footwear, for the strap that went between my toes was ripped out of the sole and is beyond repair. 

It’s always a humbling experience, when a thong breaks. This was especially the case with me, because I was foolishly wearing it in the sand. I knew that was a recipe for discomfort, if not disaster, yet I did it anyway because my hands were full of fish, chips and ginger beer and I didn’t want to have to bend over, place my greasy bounty on the ground, remove said casual footwear, and figure out a way to carry everything. I thought I’d just plough through – it was only a short distance, I could make it work. 

But apparently I have quite a stompy gait, so when I planted my feet with each step, they sunk into the sand. Too much sand got between my foot and the sole, so when I yanked my foot up to take another step, the weight of the sand held the sole under and the power of my extremely strong, forceful stride ripped the strap from the sole. 

Who did I think I was, walking through sand with thongs on?! It was my own stupid fault. 

I was left with one fully-thonged foot and a flappy slap of rubber limply clinging to my ankle, dragging along the sand.  I looked ridiculous. And, when I had to go back to my parked car, I had to carry my thongs in my hand, completing my walk of shame for the whole world to see. 

I chucked the thongs in the passenger’s side and drove off.

And the thongs are still there. 

Because I can’t bring myself to throw them out. Not because they were a particularly sentimental pair of shoes. It’s not like they were that expensive. And replacing them would be an irritating trip into a surf/ski/skate shop, but there are plenty of other thongs in the sea. 

But it seems a bit rough to completely discard this pair when only one of the thongs is broken. The other one is completely fine. 

It’s not faulty. It didn’t do anything wrong. It didn’t ask for this. It just wanted to keep on going being a wearable pair of thongs and then everything blew up and now it’s all over. 

It seems unfair that, just because the other thong broke, its partner is destined for the bin before its time.

But I don’t think I’d be able to pair the existing left-foot and left-high-and-dry thong with a brand new one.

Because I could find a right thong easily enough, but it wouldn’t be the right thong. The left has seen wear and tear. It has been through things. It’s been worn to a point that it moulds slightly my foot. It’s got a lifetime of experience that, paired with a brand new thong, just wouldn’t feel right.

Ideally, this would be the kind of situation crowd sourcing and technology could assist with. There must be thousands of other people who have been through the same thing. Maybe they have a perfectly good thong just sitting in the bottom of their wardrobe, yearning to be worn again. 

If there was some kind of app that paired them with someone with the same foot size, the same style of thong and roughly the same wear and tear, two lost soles could come together to form a new partnership. 

I mean, the technology is there and the whole let’s-not-mess-up-the-planet-any-more-by-throwing-things-away-that-can-be-reused vibe is getting stronger lately, so surely it should be a thing. And, let’s not underestimate the power this could have in bringing people together; the friendships that could come out of having a left thong and a right thong! Call it fate, call it a powerful algorithm, but it could change things. Imagine two people putting their two surviving thongs together like Lindsay Lohan’s character and Lindsay Lohan’s other character in The Parent Trap putting together a the two ripped halves of their emotionally-immature, divorced parents’ wedding photo. It would be a beautiful moment. 

This really seems like a win-win-win situation. 

I guess the only problem would be negotiating the joint custody arrangement.