The Poking Stick

7-yr-old: "What's this, Mum?"

Mum: "Oh, blimey! Oh! Er... It's a toy. But it's broken. I need to throw it away."

[Mum puts it in the bin]

7-yr-old: "A toy? What does it do? Can I see?"

Mum: "Oh, er, no. It's broken."

7-yr-old: "Is it for poking people?"

Mum: "Um... Yes. Yes, it's a poking toy. But it's broken. And it's only for grownups."

7-yr-old: "How does it work? Does it do tickling too? Can I have a look?"

Mum: "Oh dear, this bin's full. Actually they're all full. I need to empty the bins."

[Mum empties the bin, hiding the poking toy in the process]

...

7-yr-old: "We're making milkshakes."

Mum: "Oh, really?"

7-yr-old: "Yes, look. We're using your toy! Did you know it vibrates?"

Mum: "Oh dear."

7-yr-old: "Look!"

Mum: "Yes, I see. Er. Um. Now... You see, I was going to talk to you about this. The thing is..."

[whirr, whirr, splish, splish]

7-yr-old: "Yes?"

Mum: "You know how I have periods?"

7-yr-old: [silent] [all whirring has ceased]

Mum: "You know, once a month, when the lining of my womb, where babies grow..."

7-yr-old: [silence]

Mum: "It sheds. And sometimes I have to plug it up..."

---------

[that night]

Mum: "...so I told him it was some kind of vaginal stopper."

Dad: "Ha!"

Mum: "Do you think I went too far? Is that too close to the truth?"

Dad: "Or maybe just close enough."

---------

7-yr-old: "I found my mum's plug."

7-yr-old's friend's mum: "Oh, really? What kind of plug?"

7-yr-old: "Well, it's white and it keeps the blood in."

Mum: "Ah, I see."

Coco Rescue!

I'm traumatised. Tesco appear to have stopped stocking my favourite drink. Which presumably means not enough people are buying it. So I'm starting a campaign, because it's obvious people just haven't tried the stuff. Any discerning chocolate lover, having drunk Coco Direct, will find that hot chocolate is never the same again. Once you've experienced the incredibly-ever-so chocolateyness of Coco Direct, every other brand of hot chocolate - and I mean every single other brand - will be a terrible disappointment.

People keep yapping on about how wonderful Green and Black's drinking chocolate is. They shut up when I give them a cup of Coco Direct. The two are as different as a massive shiny clever thing and a tiny dull useless thing. Green & Blacks make great chocolate bars, but their drink tastes of nothing - NOTHING, I TELL YOU - compared to Coco Direct.

I don't work for them. To be honest I'm not a great fan of sales or marketing and all that guff, because the job of those peeps is normally to use every trick they can possibly think of to make you buy their product and spend pointless pennies, whether or not it's any good. But I'm not trying to make anybody money here. It's just really great stuff and the world needs to know, dammit.

Coco Direct happens to be a Fair Trade Be Nice To People kind of product, and that's very nice and pleasing and all that, but to be horribly honest my only motivation in going on about how great it is, is that it's FUCKING BRILLIANT and I get very annoyed when it's not available. It may possibly be slightly addictive, but so what. IT'S THE BEST ADDICTION EVER. My motives are entirely selfish: I could claim to be making the world a better place or giving you a beautiful gift, and indirectly I'm doing exactly that, but really I just WANT MY DRINK.

So I need everyone to buy it, cos that way it's more likely to remain something I can easily add to my larder without a big angst-fest about whether they'll go out of business and the product will disappear and I won't have my Best Quick Chocolate Fix any more.

Y'see, most chocolatey drinks (and yes, that includes Green and Blacks, and Twinings Luxury Chocolate Drink, and every other product I've ever tried, including the really expensive ones), have a shockingly low cocoa content. Coco Direct, on the other hand... When I've been up all night with the baby and I have Jobs To Do and Things To Think, do I drink coffee? Do I fuck. I drink Coco Direct. It gives the best buzz ever, it wakes you up, it tastes SUPER-YUMMY, it hits all your chocolate buttons AND it's warm and cosy and slurpy... it's liquid chocolate. It's amazing. And nothing else - NOTHING ELSE - touches it. Not even slightly.

This does confuse me, I admit. Why does nobody else recognise the value of liquid chocolate with a high cocoa content? Why are the others so bloody insipid? Why doesn't somebody make something similar and package it really expensively and charge a bloody fortune for it? I'd buy it. It's one of those weird mysteries.

But anyway I don't have to pay through the nose for a fancy box and a brilliant chocolate fix, cos I can buy Coco Direct and get everything I want AND be vaguely-sort-of helpful to cocoa-growing types on the other side of the world. Or I could, if Tesco started stocking it again.

Well all right, I have found someone else who stocks it - and in bulk, at that - so all is not lost. But I'm worried. There's a credit crunch on. People are going bust. What if Coco Direct ceases to exist? I shall be bereft! Tesco need to start stocking it again!

So here's the plan: Buy some. Club together and buy it in bulk, have chocolate-drinking parties. Drink it. Be amazed. Then try any other chocolatey-drinky thing you like and marvel at how utterly inferior it is. Be converted. Spread the word. Ring Tesco up and shout at them for not stocking the Best Drink In The Whole World Ever.

And then I will be happy.

Thank you.

PS

I found this blog where this woman posts the answers to each week's Take a Break puzzles. I object! I spent at least an hour working out the answers! That's cheating!

I'm not linking to it. It shouldn't be allowed.

Take a Break

I've developed an addiction to Take a Break magazine, or more specifically the puzzles therein.

They're all easy but mostly satisfying and you get to win stuff! Big stuff! Like, thousands of pounds and stuff!

But I'm already becoming dangerously obsessive, doing things like methodically reading through a list of 100 winners from a former issue, just so I could work out whether there were any duplicates (there weren't, but it didn't half make me cross-eyed, as did the Spot the Difference puzzle), and whether this meant you shouldn't enter for the smaller-but-more-plentiful prizes (e.g. 50 x £25 Next vouchers) because if you won one, they'd remove your name from the draws for the better items. According to their website, they draw the prizes "in value order." This is not helpful! Not unless they state whether that order is descending or ascending. They don't.

I even tried to win a holiday in Benidorm (on the grounds that it's in Spain, and we have a friend who lives in Spain, and she's always mithering us to go and visit her, although apparently Spain is a big country and Benidorm and Valencia are not close (who new?)), though I rejected one in Tenerife. But now I'm told that Tenerife is better than Benidorm, but I don't care anyway cos I have a child who would love me forever if I took him to Benidorm for a holiday, and I can think of worse things to do. But I probably won't win it anyway. You're allowed to send multiple entries, and millions of people read the bloody thing, so it's probably just my version of the lottery. Unless I enter multiple times... I could become a "comper" like Norris in Coronation St (whose going to break that poor girl Mary's heart now that Rita's heart has been broken and she therefore needs him - it's like a Terrible Heartbreak Spiral, and that's without even mentioning Ken and his boat-dwelling fancy woman (who is terribly alluring - I think I'd fall in love if I met someone who lived on a cute boat too; it's obviously a very effective seduction tool)).

Also, I watched Paul O'Grady the other week and he told Maxine Peake she ought to win Best Actress at the Baftas, and he did a little "Sorry June" aside, but then the other day he was going on about how June Brown wuz robbed cos she was by far and away the best candidate and obviously should have won. Those luvvies, they're so two-faced! I don't actually know who did win, I missed that bit.

Anyway this is what my life is like. You should either be jealous or sneering or both.

Utterly Frivolous

Because I fell down a hole and this is my attempt to climb out.


There was a young squirrel named X
Whose thighs were like shiny round eggs
She gave them a shake
Then tripped on a rake
And now she's got yolk on her legs.


If pennies were pinnies
And pinnies were pennies
Then bakers would walk with a clank.
But plentiful piggies
With coins in their middles
Would laugh as they skipped to the bank.
And that being so
If a sow had to go
For a date with a man making bread
She'd raise her head high
- not a word of a lie -
Knowing well that her piglets were fed.


I haven't got a bucket
Or a picket in my pocket
And I divvn't have a hope of making sense.
But at least I'll have a sprocket
And a pippet on a poppet
When I tip it on the Tipperary fence.


I feel a little better now.