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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Festive feast

Well, Happy belated Christmas to all Ploggers.  As an atheist, it seems a bit strange to celebrate Christmas (particularly the Christ bit, though I'm OK with the mas part).  But it seems churlish to wish people happy holidays or seasons greetings.  So I'm re-Christening (or re-atheisting) Christmas.  Well, re-designating its meaning anyway.  From now on, Christmas shall mean "time of year when you get loads of time off work and decide - usually - to go and spend it with your family, until you can't take any more, then you go home and eat too much chocolate and are sometimes a bit sick".

Anyway, Christmas at the Nunn household was very nice.  Mr Nunn and my grandma did the bulk of the yummy cooking.  There was tobogganing, there was Monopoly (you are reading a Plog written by the 2010 reigning Monopoly champion, finally cracking Erica's winning streak), there were mince pies and there were hilarious Mrs Nunn moments.  My favourite was when she was talking about going into a bar in Turkey because it "had free wiffy".

"Wiffy?"

"Yes, wiffy.  I wanted to use the internet."  Ah.  Wi-fi.  Or wiffy as it shall for evermore be known in our house.

Anyway, because I've barely left the house for the last week, I thought you might like to see some of my latest baking projects.  You probably don't, but hey, my Plog, my content.  Rasp.

 Doughnuts.  Pre-cooking

 Bread and butter pudding


 Chicken pie - with homemade pastry

Best brownies ever.  A bit underdone in this photo, but much better once they'd been in the oven.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Delivering excellence

In my working life of ten years or so, I've had a variety of excellent managers and colleagues.  People who have mentored and supported me, people who have challenged and pushed me, people whom - a decade later - I'm still in touch with.  This mini-army of women and men have nurtured and shaped me.  I am grateful.

And then there was Cedric.  Now, don't get me wrong, amongst the talented bunch I just wrote about, there were of course a smattering of inepts and tossers.  But not like Cedric.  Cedric was special.  He made twattish behaviour an art form.  If there were BAFTAs for twattishness (TWAFTAs) then Cedric would have won his category every year.  ("And the winner in the Short Fat Twat category is...")

Going back several years, I had been in my new job for two weeks.  It was Cedric's first day.  Although he wasn't my line manager, clearly someone had forgotten to tell him this.  "Team!  Meeting room!  Now!", boomed Cedric's dulcit tones.

In we filed.  He already had PowerPoint up on the screen.  We took a seat.  What followed was hilarious; a 45-minute presentation called Who is Cedric Brown?  As the first slide came up, blank apart from the question "Who is Cedric Brown?", I already had my own answer prepared.  It consisted of the indefinite article and a four letter word rhyming with "shunt".

The rest of the 45-minute presentation consisted of Cedric outlining his career to date (estate agent, university, twat) and me alternatively stifling vomit and uncontrollable giggles.  It was at this point Cedric decided to outline his strategy for the year ahead.  He picked up a red marker pen and strode purposefully towards the flipchart.  Well, he tried to stride purposefully but he had fat little legs, so he looked more like a trotting Shetland pony.  Cedric turned his back on the group and wrote up his three priorities for the year ahead.  He turned back to face the group and what followed will stay with me forever.

"These are my three priorities for next year."  He pointed at priority one: "Deliver."  He then pointed at the next two priorities.  "Deliver.  Deliver."  He paused and looked round.  "Deliver, Deliver, Deliver."  Anyone who disagrees with me..." he paused again dramatically, walked over to the meeting room door and opened it.  "Anyone who disagrees with me can get out now.  Go on.  Get out.  Get out of my team."

No-one moved, though my shoulders were shaking from the unintentional David Brent impression.  "You're on my team, you're on my side, we're going to DELIVER, DELIVER, DELIVER!"  He paused, looked smugly around the room and said, "Any questions?"

I looked around.  I considered my ability to deliver.  Three times.  I raised my hand.  "Are we going to be working for the Royal Mail?"  The tension broke.  Everyone laughed.  Apart from Cedric.

And that was actually one of the more positive interactions I had with him within an 18-month period.  Which is why he's secured my vote in this year's TWAFTAs - for the lifetime achievement award.  I believe the prize is falling under a Jubilee Line train*.  Fingers crossed he wins.

* In case you think I'm being harsh, his hobbies listed on his presentation to us included kicking puppies, misogyny and morris dancing.  Probably.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Germ warfare

Ploggers, Ploggers, where have I been?  I've been up to London to visit the Queen.

Well, not really.  Actually I've been alternatively sweating, sneezing, vomiting and many other revolting bodily functions that all come with winter flu.  It's been a few years since I've had "proper" flu, and God, it's rubbish.  On the plus side, I've lost 7lb in four days.  On the minus side, I now look so pale, I could use Tippex as concealer.

I had such plans for this weekend.  I was going to make some homemade mince pies, wrap all my Christmas presents, meet a friend for a drink in town... but basically I was relegated to the sofa, wrapped in a Slanket and had a tissue shoved up each nostril.  I made little snuffly noises whenever I needed TheBloke (TM) to bring me more liquids (mostly because I was expelling them pretty much constantly from all but one or two orifices).

TheBloke (TM) has been a fantastic nurse - has made me morsels of food when I've felt ready to eat something, has walked through a blizzard to get me Lucozade and ginger ale... and also has the cunning of a plague doctor, as he has somehow done all of this without coming into physical contact with me since I first said, "I feel a bit sniffly".  We're still sleeping in separate rooms at the moment, but if his new pyjamas look something like this, I may get a bit suspicious.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Encyclopedic knowledge

"Well," Mrs Nunn declared confidently, "I'm boycotting Amazon."

She paused and looked round for our approval.

"I'm boycotting them because of the whole Wikipedia thing.'

Excellent.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

It's all in the wrist

Well, what a lovely weekend.  Surrounded by school friends though always makes me reminisce about school days.  So here is a vignette for you, from Loughborough High School for Girls, 1995.

On Wednesdays during assembly time there would always be a staff meeting.  For the pupils this meant that prefects, rather than your form teacher, would take the register, and, crucially, the deputy head rather than the headmistress would lead assembly.

The headmistress, Miss Harvatt, was a formidable lady who drove high standards of academia through a mixture of fear and... actually it was mostly fear.  Brilliant at her job, and driven beyond belief, the staff seemed scared of her; the pupils were terrified of her.  Whilst 100% of pupils received 9 GCSEs at grades A* to C (mostly A*), 100 % of pupils had also crossed her in the corridor at some point with the greatest imaginable schoolgirl crime: having the itchy, grey knee-high socks pushed down to the ankles, so as to appear slightly less swotty.  This was something of an achievement when you were dressed head to toe in the same shade of grey.

Wherever Miss Harvatt travelled, the corridors would echo with her war cry of, “Socks!”.  As someone who was perpetually cold, with socks generally pulled up as much as possible, I was only “socked” once; however, it was memorable.  I will say this: it’s very hard to pull up your socks whilst carrying a school bag, a gym kit, a hockey stick, a violin and a cookery basket.

Anyway, I digress.  Wednesday assemblies were the deputy head’s domain.  Very much the White Rabbit to Miss Harvatt’s Red Queen, Miss Steel scampered around mostly looking tentative.  She was a pleasant lady, organised, good at timetabling, but didn’t nearly have the authority of the head.  Her shining moments of the year were Prizegiving and the Carol Services – anything where she could make the whole school stand up, sit down, file in and file out with a wave of her hand.  I see her wearing white traffic warden gloves, but my mind may have invented that detail.

Schoolgirls being cruel, Miss Steel was mostly famous for her speech impediment.  She had a soft “R” (making her the White Wabbit, I guess), and for some reason, tortured the word “foyer” out of all recognition.  Believe it or not, I don’t recall the school actually having a foyer, yet somehow she seemed to say “ferwoway” at least once per week as 500 girls tried (“twied”) not to titter.

1995 was a hot sommer.  As a sporty institution (apparently – although the closest I ever got to a sporting activity was hide and seek in the library – where generally I was hiding from the PE teachers where were trying to make me throw, hit, run towards or run away from something).

Loughborough High School for Girls’ tennis team had been doing very well.  (“Twuly vewy well indeed.”).  Miss Steel congratulated them on one memorable Wednesday morning.

“Congwatulations to the Under 18 tennis team who won the final wound of tennis this weekend in Wichmond, beating Wutland and a vewy stwong team fwom Weading.”  She paused and beamed out at the 500 girls.

“I am vewy pweased to announce that our school is now the top wanking girls’ school in the countwy.”

Twue story.  Happy days.