The best days of your life...

The only way in which my school days were the best of my life is in the opportunity they afforded me for purchasing, storing and using stationery. I now have to feed this habit by obsessively dividing things into plastic folders and secretly dreaming of owning a filing cabinet.

Curiouser and curiouser

Well, on checking the oil today (which by the way, our car doesn't actually seem to use, but that's another matter), the Boy Wonder found a banana skin and a prawn cracker on top of the car battery. We have come up with several possible theories on how this could have happened, but basically none of them make sense except the idea that someone with access to the car and keys popped the bonnet and put them there, presumably for a prank.

We know it wasn't left there when it was shipped as we had to jump start it three times to get it out of the port, and it couldn't have been done without popping the bonnet from the inside as the clip isn't broken. But, if you had access to the keys (which several people would have done) and wanted to play a prank, why make it something so obscure and such a rubbish prank? Why a banana skin and a prawn cracker? Why leave them in the engine where they are quite unlikely to be found? And another few 'whys' just for good measure because everything about this is weird.

So, until we can find out what happened, this will be consigned to the 'inexplicably mystery' files, along with the unfeasibly massive bird poo we once found on the windscreen, the unexpected turning up on TV of two friends who we didn't know even knew each other and the time we met someone the Boy Wonder knew from childhood in a laundry room in Canada.  Let's hope that the quest for answers turns up something so we can close this case before it drives me mad.

Excuses

Today, after a frustrating and ultimately fruitless attempt to find a boot fair and purchase amazingly cheap vintage guitars, we ended up at a PTA craft fair of a school down the road. I was caught giving perhaps my most audacious excuse for failing to make a purchase: 'I'm tempted, but my knitted food collection is already out of hand, I can't buy any more.'

The saddest thing is that it is genuinely true...

Boy Wonder - in charge of bedtime

For some reason, I have always been really bad at going to bed, perhaps because I always had a bedtime when I was living with my parents due to their inability to sleep if someone is so much as considering consciousness elsewhere in the house. When I first moved out, the fact that I lived in one room meant that my bed was my main piece of furniture so it wasn't so noticeable that I would often fall asleep on top of the covers having drifted off whilst intending to be otherwise occupied. Since living with the Boy Wonder, I would estimate that around 80% of the time we have 'headed up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire' has been at his suggestion - I will quite happily lie around on the sofa, even to the point of falling asleep rather than actually committing to going to bed.

It's not as though our bedtime routine is particularly gruelling - we have a fish and a rabbit to feed, one door to lock and some lights to switch off. We aren't exactly neat freaks, so it's not like we do anything in the way of cleaning or tidying, but for some reason the idea of choosing to go to bed is completely alien to me - despite being 30, I still feel like one of those kids on 'You've Been Framed' who ends up falling asleep in their spaghetti hoops in spite of their attempts to stave off the overwhelming tiredness. I'm not sure whether it's come about because the Boy Wonder generally has no problem going to sleep, whereas I used to spend hours in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering whether I would make it out alive in the event of a fire (one of the weirder fears I had a child after a not-particularly graphic safety lecture at school). I still have a propensity to let my imagination run wild whenever I can't sleep, which may be why the concept of going to bed fills me with a childish determination to stave it off for as long as possible.

Stupidly enough, this applies even when I'm really tired - I can spend all day planning an early night, wishing I was in bed and looking forward to a nap, but when it actually comes down to going to bed, I will still find ways to put it off. I used to be surprised at how my productivity levels increased at the most inappropriate times, namely when it was getting late and bedtime was looming, but as I become more aware of the fact that I have slight issues surrounding going to bed I realised that this is just another way to put off the inevitable.

I also really like being in bed - once the decision is made, the jobs are done and the wooden hill has been breached, I have no problem with actually going to bed - it's just the instigation of the process which I find unpalatable and when left on my own I just don't do it. I will either sleep on the sofa, start doing jobs in the bedroom so that the decision is never made or just stay awake until the whole thing becomes moot at some point the next day.

My worry is that at some point, should our mid-term future go to plan, I will be in charge of our children's bedtimes, which in some senses should be fine (I don't care if other people want to go to bed, I just don't want to myself) but I do worry that one of our kids might be like me and when they tell me that they don't want to I will feel like a huge hypocrite. Fingers crossed then that they will take after the Boy Wonder and will be thrilled at the idea of going to bed, when and wherever the urge may strike him, otherwise our kids are going to end up watching a lot of weird films of the kind that are shown at 4 in the morning and probably scar toddlers for life.

Super Glue

In spite of (or subconsciously perhaps because of) the explicit and terrifying warnings on the outside of a tube of Super Glue, and in spite of the fact that I am independently aware that Super Glue was originally designed and used for gluing skin together, for some reason whenever I actually use Super Glue I managed to glue my fingers together. Admittedly, often I am gluing something which requires me to hold the two pieces together until the glue has at least begun to set, so it's not entirely surprising that it happens, but the fact that I consistently forget to check whether my fingers are becoming a part of the item that I am trying to fix is a cause of some consternation to me. Fortunately, I now have proper fingerprints again after last week's attempt to fix the stupid freezer drawers left me with suspiciously smooth patches on several of my fingertips...

Who decided that pine = clean

Am I unaware of some natural predilection of pine trees to clear up after themselves? Is it perhaps some ancient tradition that before we had the chemical means to remedy bad smells, readily available pine leaves/sap/bark was used to reduce odours? I have never actually smelt a pine tree specifically, but I'm pretty sure I have never smelt anything like pine scented air freshener or toilet cleaner whilst wandering through the woods, so I can only assume that the smell we now call 'pine' is an extrapolation on the smell of some part of a tree rather than an accurate representation of the natural smell of pine.

I wonder if the other trees are aware that, by virtue of their exclusion from the world of cleansing products, they all fail to measure up to the sweet aroma of pine. Do they all feel hard done-by? Do pine trees get together and make fun of oaks because nobody wants their toilet to smell like an oak tree? Maybe Christmas trees and pine trees get together to enjoy their privileged status of being exalted by the human race either as decoration or nasal adornment. Perhaps they are shunned by other trees for aiding and abetting man despite his noted antagonism towards their fellow trees, which would be a shame seeing as Christmas trees never seem to survive the optimistic new year 'planting in the garden' and pine trees presumably don't even get near the reproduced smell that bears their name, let alone any royalties or even preferential treatment on the back of it.

Having thought about this for way too long, I am now considering a time consuming and ultimately pointless project to reveal the origins of pine scented products, so I can only hope that something else crops up to distract me before I end up wasting my time and boring other people rigid with my tales from the pine project.

Cereal dreams

I have always loved cereal. When I was younger, I didn't even give any other breakfast food a look in, always preferring a bowl of cereal and on one memorable occasion eating 12 Weetabix in a row at the age of around 7. A couple of years ago, my doctor recommended that I stop eating breakfast (on the grounds that I was throwing it straight back up almost every morning), which I did despite having it ingrained in my consciousness that I was relinquishing the most important meal of the day.

However, our return from the country where eggs seem only to occur in threes combined with a new working regime means that I am now firmly back in the camp of breakfast and the last delivery of shopping I received fulfilled a dream I had been having since deciding to revert back to my well trusted cereal lifestyle - a wall of cereal. That's not a metaphor - I literally had a recurring dream over the course of around 5 nights in which I owned a seemingly limitless supply of all kinds of cereal. Given the uplifting nature of this dream, I decided to make it a reality and I now have that wall of cereal adorning the top of the fridge which makes me happy just to see it.

I am a little saddened that Grape Nuts have bowed under the pressure of the modern world of breakfast snacks and instead of a small opening in the cardboard on the side of the box, they have now fallen in line with an inner bag and top opening system, but they taste just how I remember them so I can overlook their transgression. The other bonus is that cereal is a good way to up my calcium intake - I have never been able to drink milk neat, but my reignited love of cereal might also be the thing that stops be from crumbling from the insides like an ancient scroll when I reach the golden age at which these things start to happen.

Little did I realise that a wall of cereal could make me so happy, but clearly I am either a lot deeper or a lot more shallow than I ever realised.