Verbal High Fives

Staff announcement: I’m preggers, have a bun in the oven, am currently brewing a tiny human. I’ve been calling it T-Rex because we don’t know yet if it is a boy or a girl and for the longest time now it has looked decidedly like a baby reptilian cast member from Jurassic Park. (Don’t worry: mummy and daddy love you!) Being pregnant gets to you to consider the truly important questions in life such as ‘Why am I starving at 1:43am??’ Prepare to be jealous - I’m hungry like literally all the time. T-Rex is making my body behave like I am composed of an entire male teenage rugby team that must fuel up before the big game in 2 hour’s time. What else could explain why I’m eating every 2 hours and have been a vegetarian since 2017 but suddenly cannot stop watching videos of people cooking bacon on TikTok and fantasising about eating a Big Mac? I also don’t feel that “mood swings” accurately describe the emotional rollercoaster that is pregnancy - try “personality transplant”. I’ve never been...

Hey everybody. Dare I say ‘Happy’ New Year? We have survived the first 17 days of 2021 and completed the 14th Level of Jumanji - so verbal high fives to all of you because it hasn’t exactly been uneventful. My master plan for starting this year was to ease into 2021 real slow without making direct eye contact with it in the hopes that it wouldn’t attack... but Lockdown 3.0, widespread flooding in England and two new highly transmissible strains of Covid later, clearly that approach backfired. Meanwhile in America, Donald Trump is having a crack at dismantling democracy because things didn’t go his way at the polls so he began messing around with an item that could potentially destroy Capitol Hill, namely; Spotify (which he has since been banned from using). In December Trump began repeatedly bleating fake news via his social media channels which resulted in a PR media nightmare that no one could possibly have anticipated (unless, of course, that person had a higher level of political a...

I’ve always been a huge fan of Christmas. It’s my favourite time of the year. I love all the lights and decorations, the songs, the ‘goodwill to all men’ and how excited the kids get opening their presents. After all, the true joy of Christmas is giving (gifts, that is, not Covid!) After such a spectacularly rubbish year, what’s on your Christmas gift wish list this December? Are you hoping for the latest iPhone, a pair of shoes, a puppy, the vaccine and life insurance cover - because Christmas is to die for? We were all reminded by Boris this week that Christmas is trying to kill us. OK it was technically Coronavirus that is going to use Christmas to kill us but Boris’ message was clear:- The important thing for all of us to remember is to have fun on Christmas Day in a festive and potentially life-threatening manner.  But did you know that Christmas has been trying to kill us long before Covid came along? According to onlinefirstaid.com , around 80,000 people incur Christmas-rel...

Is there much in this world that is worse than a diet? Sure musicals, Donald Trump, traffic jams on the highway, anyone wearing lycra-based clothing garments in public for purely social activities, and Super Villain attacks are right up there on the list, but only Covid and a few other truly heinous things suck worse than a diet, right?  I only ask because I recently embarked on a new, let’s be generous and call it a “somewhat restrictive” diet in which you try to cut out most lectins from what you eat. As we all know, lectins are a type of really toxic carbohydrate-binding protein that exists in plants so they’re basically lurking in almost everything we eat and cause all kinds of havoc inside our bodies. This means I’ve had to cut out any vegetables that contain seeds, as well as all fruit, beans, soy, legumes, grains, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, cereal, dairy products made from cow’s milk, GMO foods, seeds, some nuts, sugar, pastries, and anything left that’s even remotely fun...

I visited Stonehenge for my birthday because nothing makes you feel more alive than looking at some immense, ancient mossy rocks that are arranged in a mind-blowing fashion, right? Seeing the Stonehenge World Heritage Site has been on my bucket list for ages so I figured, what with Covid seriously cramping our social lives at the moment, going to Stonehenge would be a fun Covid-approved experience that we could enjoy on my birthday - and by that I mean a safe outdoor-type activity in which my husband and I could spend vast quantities of time totally ignoring Stonehenge because we were worrying about whether or not we were controlling the virus by standing 2 meters apart from all the people surrounding us.   As soon as we parked the car and walked into the bustling Visitor’s Centre, my immediate thought was not, “Wow, let me get my camera to take a photo right now” – it was “Wow, let me get 10 more face masks and some gloves to wear right now” because it was heaving with people an...

Congratulations men, women and children; you have made it to May in The Worst-Case-Scenario Olympics that has been the year 2020! That means you have survived bush fires; multiple floods; the worldwide spread of the Covid-19 Pandemic; the implementation of Lockdown and being forced to spend a sanity-threatening amount of time cooped up at home with your loved ones, and Murder Hornets. And so I’m wondering - as I’m sure you are - what fresh dread awaits us next month in June (also known as the 6th level of Jumanji)?? Maybe it will come in the form of an asteroid, the loss of gravity, a new Teletubbies album, or sharknados .  Oh, you think shark-infested tornadoes converging on land to deliver seawater teeming with nature’s deadliest killers ready to dine on mankind sounds a tad far-fetched, huh? Well, you probably also thought that there would never come a time when humble items such as toilet paper and hand sanitizer would become more valuable than money, and then April ro...

I live on a university campus. The recent February floods cut off all of the university's main access roads to our town, leaving just a single country lane to serve as the only route onto campus for thousands of the students. This same lane has to be traversed by those of us who live on site but work elsewhere. We are the unfortunate souls who must routinely imperil our lives to travel like salmon against the flow of student traffic along this narrow country lane.  The posted speed limit for this lane is 20mph but the students tend to view this as more of an optional, casual suggestion rather than the law. They hurtle down that lane, flooring it as though they have just heard breaking news there is actually toilet paper back in stock at Aldi and they’re trying to get there before it all sells out. My main issue with them speeding on this lane is less about them breaking the law and more about them potentially breaking my face with their car. There are only two places in t...

Many people think that Christmas is a stressful time of the year and it is; what with black ice on the roads, unprecedented exposure to Carollers, the strain of gift shopping in a recession, and the alarming increase of grown adults dressed as Elves - replete with green tights and short shorts - appearing in our Shopping Centers. But the main problem with Christmas is not the challenge of wrapping Christmas presents successfully without getting your hamster/cat/Chihuahua stuck in the wrapping tape. The REAL problem with Christmas is raisins. Christmas is the time to survive on Goodwill To All Men. And raisins. In fact, the term “Merry Christmas” was originally taken from the term “Feliz Navidad” which is Spanish for “Who needs more raisins?” That’s because raisins, never content to just sit around in a dark cupboard at Christmas, feel the need to go out and infiltrate Festive snacks in some kind of world domination way.  For years now, most Christmas related foo...

Christmas can be a stressful time of year; what with gift shopping, long queues everywhere, and prolonged exposure to relatives and/or Brussels sprouts. So to bring a bit of merriment to the situation, we thought we’d go carol singing as a random act of Christmas kindness.  When planning to go Carol singing, one must consider The distance you want to travel on foot The probability of people actually opening their front doors to you If you should go for modern or more traditional carols And whether to undergo comprehensive voice box surgery weeks beforehand.  But the most important consideration of all is presentation. And by presentation, I mean festive jazz hands.  In the end, we decided to go Caroling at local retirement centres because w e believed the elderly would truly appreciate festive jazz hands. Plus t hey are the generation least likely to unleash vicious dogs on us if they think we’re rubbish. As we gathered in the retirement centre di...