So you generally read my posts a day or so after I’ve written them, for a couple of reasons, Firstly I’m left with a horror – after it happened once – that I will sit down at my keyboard, flex my fingers and then completely fail to receive any words down the pipe from my head to my fingertips. Fortunately it hasn’t happened beyond that one time, and whilst I acknowledge that some posts are better than others, generally I can hit the 500 word quota I set myself without too much of a problem…I often canter into another of couple of hundred if I’m really in the mood to chat.
The second reason is that I like to reflect on what I’ve written…I am the queen of tweaks, a word here, a bit of punctuation there. Often I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that’s not right so I’ll pop the post back in the oven to bake for a little bit longer and then serve it to you the following day after I’m satisfied that it’s done as well as it’s ever going to be. Even an armchair psychologist could identify my in-your-face ‘be perfect’ driver eh? Yessir, that’s me all over.
So whilst the likelihood is that you’re reading this on Monday, or maybe even Tuesday, in my world right here right now, it’s Sunday morning. And I love Sunday mornings…pottering around the kitchen in PJs shadowed by Charlie the dog – ever hopeful of food – rather than the Monday to Friday up-shower-dress-out rush job. It’s the one morning in my week where I really think about what I fancy for breakfast, and have time to enjoy what I choose.
So, after careful thought I decided today I would have a small tin of tuna (3 points) mixed with some low fat soft cheese (2 points) sprinkled with Aromat and spread over a couple of salty crackers (2 points) with a cup of tea. It’s going well right up to the point where I take the crackers out of the little cellophane packet, and one of them is broken. When I say broken, I don’t just mean it’s in two pieces…two pieces I could manage. If whoever baked the cracker had put it in a mortar and pulverised it with a pestle before tipping it carefully into the packet made for two it would have struggled to be in more pieces than it was. The two-cracker packet was in fact one cracker and some big crumbs.
Food rage! It was the last packet in the box. My cheese and tuna combo was mixed and waiting in the dish ready to be spread carefully on two crackers. And I’m looking at one cracker and a pile of mush. How much do you hate it when that happens…? I ended up tipping the bits into the tuna and cheese mix and spreading the whole lot onto my one remaining cracker. Now I know that logically I’d eaten the same amount of food…except I hadn’t. I felt cheated. I felt like I’d had one cracker. The asshole’s opening gambit was to eat four, we’d agreed on two and now I’d ended up with one plus crumbs. This is not my happy face…
I have a friend who insists on eating broken food, you know she’ll even root through the cookie jar to find one with a corner knocked off. Her skinny girl theory is that she gets to eat the cookie but every missing corner is a few calories less and it all mounts up. My fat-girl wiring sees me lining up all the cookies so I can pick the biggest, or the one with someone else’s corner stuck to mine, so I can maximise the cookie experience but still say I’ve only had one.
Except I never do have just one, obviously. But that aside, comparing the two mindsets is a big fat clue in itself as to why she’s a skinny string bean and I’m not. If I’m going to think like a skinny girl, maybe I should lay off the corners too, right..?
