Does asking for 'monkey's blood' on my ice-cream make me racist?

A friend of mine was recently berated by an ice-cream man for requesting 'monkey's blood' on his 99. 'That's offensive now, mate', he was told, 'you have to call it raspberry sauce'. There were no monkeys within earshot at the time, so who exactly was likely to get upset? I could understand if he'd been in Hartlepool at the time, where the locals are endearingly referred to as Monkeys.

Hartlepool is famous for allegedly executing a monkey during the Napoleonic Wars. According to legend, fishermen from Hartlepool watched a French warship founder off the coast, and the only survivor was a monkey, which was dressed in French military uniform, presumably to amuse the officers on the ship. The unsophisticated fishermen assumed that this must be what Frenchmen looked like, and after a brief trial, summarily executed the monkey. (ref: Wikipedia)

I'm more a chocolate sauce and chopped nuts kinda girl myself, but I remember the days of being sent out into the street, with a Tupperware bowl and 50p, to buy the family's pudding from Mr Softee. Sometimes my dad would tell me to ask for a squirt of 'beetle's blood' . Given that I had ( and still have) an aversion to all things anthropodic and haematologic, this ensured that he got my share of the ice-cream. He used to use a similar trick on my gullible young cousin, telling her that the raisins in McVities Shorties, were in fact dead flies. Oh, and the old 'Butterscotch Angel Delight contains curry powder' line was always a favourite. No wonder I was a faddy eater.

Anyway, back to the red sauce. To call it raspberry would, I feel, breach the Misrepresentation Act. That sticky stream of chemicals has probably never seen a soft fruit. Crushed up beetle bits is closer to the mark. Or so I thought until today................

Cochineal, the red food additive, is derived from insects although not from the shiny black beetles I had imagined:

the stuff we call cochineal is a chemical extract of carminic acid from the bodies of squished female scale insects.

The fact that they are 'scales' and therefore legless creatures, makes them slightly more palatable However, as the blood isn't technically from beetles, we are now left with one less name for the nation's favourite ice-cream topping.

Any suggestions?

An Apple a day

Thanks to Jamie, The Pompomist for bringing this to my attention.


http://www.thepompomist.com/magazine/2009/1/7/apple-introduces-the-new-macbook-wheel.html

Some ideas for my next holiday accommodation........

I love it that people source photos like this and share them with us all. Check out the kettle house - a definite inspiration for Fenella the Witch's gaff in Chorlton and the Wheelies!

50 Strange Buildings of the World

Stumbling upon Alphainventions

I'm turning into a bit of an internet geek. Not content with blogging my heart out into cyberspace, I began my quest to herd a few readers into the fold. Although my ramblings are serving their purpose as a means of creative therapy for me, it would be satisfying to think that my prose was being deliberated, cogitated and digested by someone else.

I ploughed my way through blogs and gadgets, googled my way to web sites on increasing traffic and pondered over help manuals. Naturally, I got distracted along the way but that all adds to the fun. It's amazing the things you can find on t'internet. When I work out how to turn off my pop-up blocker, I'll add some pics and links to my discoveries for you to peruse.

Eventually I Stumbled upon Alphainventions who have united my words with readers from around the globe. Their ways and means of doing it all sound a bit too technical for me, but I'm happy for that to remain one of life's little mysteries.

What's your type? According to the Keirsey Temperment Sorter, I'm an................

When I first took this test a few years ago, in the days when I still had delusions of being a career woman, my results outed me as an INTJ. These four letters are pretty good ones to have after your name if you're looking for a job at Nissan. Allegedly, these Japanese car makers look for this personality profile when employing new staff. Don't ask me why. Sales companies, however, prefer the E (extrovert) personalities to the I (introvert) types like me. My acronym was as different to my colleagues' as my sales technique. I felt quite silly sitting there, in the training room, a lonely I drowning in a sea of Es. Maybe that's when I began to question my vocation.

I managed to avoid making any decisions on the career front when Nature deemed that I was to indulge my maternal instincts for a while. After a break of 12 months from the pressure and money driven world of sales, I realised that I didn't miss it. Since making the decision not to go back, I've tried my hand at a few things. The last 10 years have provided me with a number of firsts and new experiences. My body has been stretched out of shape by babies and kept supple with yoga, it's balanced on skis, danced around (and fallen off) a pole, scaled a climbing wall and parascended over the Mediterranean but other than a few more lines and the occasional grey hair, I don't really look that different on the outside.

I've suspected for some time that things are different on the inside. I'd always assumed that by my late 20s, I had become who I was going to be. Not what........WHO. I thought I knew myself and that I wouldn't change, but the results of my most recent Keirsey test seem to suggest otherwise.

Cluttterbye. 'A tidy house a tidy mind' - ok, I'll do the housework just as soon as I've decluttered my mind.

Whoever said, 'a tidy house a tidy mind' may have had a point. I mouthed this mantra as I lay, belly down, dusting the wooden floor under the sofa with my hands. I retrieved a significant handful of fluff along with a random Pinky sized sock , some loose change, a AAA battery and a bull sized toenail clipping. Now I had a pocket full of clutter with a mind to match. Corner to corner, room to room, my pockets slowly filled up with miscellaneous objects. Fragments of bigger things lost and destroyed by little Things. My little Things. Pinky, Thing 1, who isn't actually that little at all, and his skin and blister, Thing 2. As I picked a Connect Four disc out of the fruit bowl, the mantra became a loud whisper.

Ferbreezing the curtains helped to take my thoughts away from the pending drudgery. You know I'm a sucker for smells. They're on a parr with music for having the ability to take me to another time and place. If I close my eyes and inhale the scent of fresh wildflower meadows, I can trick myself into believing this sweet smelling house must be tidy as well as clean. Pop a bit of Vivaldi onto the i-Pod and replace the Proctor and Gamble chemicals with Sanctuary linen spray and I could be in one of the suites at Lumley Castle. If I'd been there on a Monday morning, instead of chez Moo, I doubt I'd have been fretting over reuniting a piece of plastic with its yellow brothers and sisters.

I don't have a problem with cleaning. It's the tidying that has to be done first which causes me to procrastinate. So far this morning, I've made a bacon sandwich, smoked 2 cigarettes (one with each cup of tea), chatted on Facebook and pondered over this blog. Anything to avoid the dreaded housework. Perhaps I over exerted myself yesterday and feel I need to be rewarded for the trio of charity bags I managed to fill and drop off at Oxfam this morning. It's good to know that my daughter's clutter will be converted into something more useful. The clear floor in her bedroom is a bonus too. Now I'll be able to vacuum without running the risk of blocking up the Dyson with hair bands, Barbie shoes and pennies. One room down, only 10 more to go!

Pots (Mr Moo) keeps urging me to pay one of our old cleaners to come back and 'help me keep on top of things'. If I were just a teensy bit paranoid, I could take that as an insult to my housekeeping abilities. I usually rebuff these suggestions on the basis that I've never had much success in employing people to declutter and clean. A few years ago, when my business was thriving, I decided I could justify hiring a cleaner. Enter Fizz.

Larger than life with a mouth to match, she came armed with a pair of slippers and a 2 litre bottle of coke. She claimed to be gifted (she did appear to be a little....erm....special) and often pointed out my typical Gemini traits. Actually, I think she did read my mind once as I stashed her FULL FAT pop in the fridge because she started a monologue about how her large frame was the result of a gland problem. Nothing to do with the 6-packet of chocolate Hobnobs she polished off at my friend's house then? The fact that she'd taken them without asking was a little worrying, as was the way she used our CD/DVD collection as a free library and spent two out of the four hours I paid her for on our phone, sorting out her disability/spf/housing benefits. Maybe it was my fault for telling her I was laid back. A few months in, her chubby feet were so far under our table that it began to hinder her performance. Ironically though, it was then that she decided to announce a 20% increase in her hourly rate. Exit Fizz.

Enter Daphne. If you're imagining a french au-pair type or Scooby Doo's blonde friend, think again. Think more Mrs Doubtfire meets Deidre Barlow. A good all rounder and was game for occasional babysitting jobs too, however she insisted on spending most of her time ironing. Sadly, Daph couldn't master the steam function so I often resorted to doing the pile again, cursing her through gritted teeth. I think she preferred this task to all the ones I'd hinted at, politely asked her to do, then finally WRITTEN IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS ON A NOTE, which I placed under her wages. Despite several pleas, she would not do the windows or under the toilet seat. After a few months of good work (in between month long holidays of visiting her globally spread children) she too seemed to lose interest. I arrived home early from work a few times to find her long gone, or on her way out. Rather than challenging her, I started working from home while she was there so she wouldn't take advantage. During that time I realised why my house seemed clean. It was the smell. A quarter litre of bleach tickled around the loos with a toilet brush, Zoflora mixed with water and squirted from a plant mister, a cup full (I think she misread CAP full) of Pledge wooden floor cleaner in the mop bucket and Mr Sheen polish. I know he's meant to 'shine umpteen things clean', but not, surely, the dining room floor? Although, it did provide a great comedy moment when Pinky decided to rugby tackle Thing 2. The sock/polish combo produced a slide tackle John Terry would've been proud of. The table put up a strong defence, much to the intended target's delight. Anyway, soon after I found my key posted through the door. Another mind reader!

This term I'm taking on an extra day a week at work. I've come to the conclusion that increasing the amount of time I'm working to deadlines, rules and bells will make me more productive. Following a Year 8 history lesson with an autistic adolescent certainly makes me focus so much that I have to mentally sweep the clutter into the corners of my mind. Watching Hitler's abominations on the class TV helps me forget about the mini-warfare going on inside my own head.

I'll leave you with some wise words I saw recently on a cross stitch sampler:

"A tidy house is a sign of a wasted life"

Deja senti.

A recent episode of 'Brainiac', featuring an experiment to test the speed of smell, is the inspiration behind today's blog. If you've never seen this little TV gem, I'd urge you to watch it. Vic Reeves adds a healthy dose of 'Big Night Out' style humour, while co-presenter, Jon Tickle (ex Big Brother), explains the scientific theory. The show has been a source of inspiration for my children too, who run into the kitchen, when the end credits start to roll, and start mixing concoctions with cornflour or making 'volcanoes' out of vinegar and bicarb. The house ends up smelling like a back row chippy for days!

I conducted a little experiment of my own recently; on my son's Nike trainers. Rubbing bicarb into the shoes' inner linings, I was told by my friend (well versed in Kim and Aggies' trade secrets), would eradicate the aroma of ammonia. I'd blamed the putrid smell in my car on them, but the cause of that turned out to be 1lb of raw minced steak which had rolled under the passenger seat during the journey between butcher and fridge. It hid there quietly for 2 weeks, until it's odorant molecules began to murmur, then eventually shout out 'rotting animal!' Well, to be honest, I initially thought it was the trainers, but became convinced that a fish must have escaped its bucket the last time we drove home from a fishing trip. I blamed Pinky on both counts, and I was wrong. Rotten cow. Watchdog announced that Nike had conceded to selling trainers lined with a fabric prone to smelling of cat piss when damp. Not their words exactly, but you get the gist.

The smelly trainer situation remains unresolved as, to receive a replacement pair, I must show proof of purchase. Given that I have 4 months of bank statements, utility bills and tax returns strewn around benches and stuffed into drawers, just waiting to be filed, I fear we'll have to put up the smell of cat wee for a while longer. There is an upside to all of this. After the car mincident, I was forced to have it valeted. When it came back, I was greeted by the smell of Refreshers mixed with polish AND an envelope containing a card and £40 (from the mother-in-law) which had been rescued from a door pocket. Result.

I'm sure that if you'd choked on a Refresher as a child, the memory evoked by the smell of those fizzy sherbets would not be a sweet one. Just a whiff of Pernod takes me back to the night I decided to make my own cocktail of this sickly french pastis, orange cordial and cider (classy, I know). I'll spare you the consequences, suffice it to say that 20 years later, even a hint of aniseed can trick my gag reflex into action. Fried mushrooms, for reasons unknown, have a similar effect. My dad is afflicted with the same aversion to fungi, which he blames on a near 'death by mushroom soup' experience. I wonder if it's passed through the genes?


The jury's still out on whether or not my children have inherited my acute sense of smell, although they have used the sniff test to identify the owners of miscellaneous items of clothing, left at our house. Daniel's jumper had undertones of fried food and smoke, Andrew's t-shirt was a combination of Persil and Lenor Original and Joseph's reeked of eau de dog. My offspring also have the uncanny ability to sniff out my secret stash of chocolate.

I do wonder how my own home smells to other people. At the moment, visitors are greeted with wafts of Winter Spice which helps mask the slightly fishy smell emitted by the new leather sofa. I love the smell of leather - it reminds me of rummaging through bags, belts and purses in the back street shops of spanish towns - but smoked haddock is not so easy on the nose. When we come back from holiday and the house has had 2 weeks to reclaim its own smell, the woody scent is more discernible than ever. If I close my eyes, I can imagine the rooms as they were when we first fell in love with the house, 9 years ago. The smells of that era were baby wipes, nappy sacks, breast milk, danish oil, paint, wet plaster, new carpet and Perry Ellis 360 degrees.......happy smells that remind me of happy times.

For a brief time in the Moo household, the heartwarming aroma of freshly baked bread wafted around the kitchen. Back in the early noughties, I fancied myself as a bit of an Earth Mother, shopping for locally grown and reared ingredients to make healthy, balanced family meals, obsessively recycling, composting and taking pottery classes. The home-baking fad was short lived however, and the bread machine was relegated to the 'appliance mortuary', on a shelf shared with the electric juicer and deep fat fryer. These gadgets seem like a good idea at the time, but, quite honestly, the infrequency of their usage doesn't justify the amount of counter-top space they snaffle. Nowadays my bench tops are home to a mass of bills, statements, newsletters and a basil plant, whose fragrant leaves provide me with another happy smell.

Come to think of it, most of my happy smells involve food; Marshmallows, ginger, mandarin, cloves. Jo Malone, if you're reading this, I'd like to commission you to create a fragrance, containing all of the above, for me. A bottle of that for Christmas would make me one happy heifer!