The Day I Became a PROPER Adult

July 19, 2021 Jayne1 Comment

The Day I Became a PROPER Adult The other day, I rang my Mum and said the following words:

“Mum. It’s official. I am a PROPER adult.”

One could argue that having two kids, a Husband, a job and various pets were a fairly good sign that I’ve been an adult for a while, or the fact that I’ve spent many a leisurely hour randomly browsing Rightmove or researching leak free shower cabins, but the event that propelled me into proper adulthood was dealing with my very first flying ant bloom.

When I was a kid, I remember “flying ant day” happening once a year at my grandparents house. Every year, sometime at the end of July, a massive swarm of ants and flying ants would emerge from behind their gas fire in their 1960’s terraced council house and all hell would break loose. Nan would be vaccuming them up and throwing ant powder down with a speed to rival someone from Krypton, while Grandad would be swatting any escapees with a slipper in a manner that made me wonder why he wasn’t competing at Wimbledon. It was as horrifying as it was hilarious, seeing my ageing grandparents dealing with the infestation and it’s something I’d never had to deal with myself…until now.

According to The National History Museum ” This annual swarming event usually occurs in July or August and coincides with a period of hot and humid weather. Winged ants appear at different times around the country and local weather conditions are critical for the coordination of swarming activity. Ants tend to fly earlier in urban areas than rural areas, probably because temperatures are generally warmer in urban environments, known as the urban heat island effect.”

There are a number of options for dealing with flying ant blooms which don’t involve using noxious chemicals which can be dangerous to pets and other wildlife. Here are a few of them:

Pour boiling water into the ant hill

Once you have located the ant hill, pour boiling water over it. This should kill most of the ants and detract other ones from coming back.

Attack ants with an artificial sweetener

Certain types of sweeteners are very toxic for ants. For example, if you mix in the sweetener with apple juice, it forms a viscous paste that the ants will carry back to the colony. Once consumed there, it will kill off a portion of their population.

Spray with dishwashing soap

One household item can tackle flying ants and that is dishwashing soap. The soap attaches to the bodies of the ants and dehydrates them. You can use a spray bottle and fill it with water and two to three squirts of dish soap, and then spray it at any flying ants you see.

Use sticky tape to catch them

If you place some food on the ground to attract the flying pests, you can place some sticky tape down with the sticky side up. Put the tape as close as possible to the food, and the ants will land on it. This will then trap the ants in place and stop them from flying anywhere else.

Obviously, if the ants are outside and aren’t bothering you, you can just leave them in peace, as I would much rather have done, but having ants crawling up my legs while I’m trying to work is just too much to bear!

Do you have any tips for dealing with becoming an adult or dealing flying ants?

Family · Humour

5 Current Trends Which are Definitely NOT For Me

September 8, 2016September 8, 2016 Jayne15 Comments

Looking around at the fashion that’s in the shops and on people I see in the streets, you could be forgiven for thinking that we’d woken up in the early nineties, and don’t get me wrong, there are things about that which I LOVE. Plaid shirts, Dr. Martens, double buns and ripped jeans are all SO welcome in my wardrobe but there are a few things which have made a resurgence which really are not for 2016-me. Here’s a run down of the things which 32 year old me would love to get involved with but just simply cannot:

Chokers

I won’t lie; when I saw kids wearing chokers again, I was a little bit excited. I used to LOVE my tattoo choker (you remember those stretchy plastic swirly ones?) and had it in black AND rainbow colours, and I even had a velvet choker which I made myself for special occasions. “Awesome!”, 32 year old me, thought. “Lets get a choker”.

Then, Sausage made me one out of loom bands and I realised that my jowls hang down over the front of it, making it look like I have a tourniquet around my neck and my head is a swollen balloon of flesh floating above, which is just about as far from a good look as I could possibly have imagined, and is exactly why chokers will not be making a regular appearance in my wardrobe.

Crop Tops

crop top

Not actually me…but probably not far off of what I’d look like in a crop top.

I mean…do I really need to elaborate here? I barely wore crop tops when they were in fashion 20 years ago but now, after two c-sections and, let’s face it, an adulthood of gluttony, crop tops are something that only other people wear. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen women of my age and even older wearing them, rocking the whole ‘high waited skirt/crop top’ thing and looking pretty classy, but even the TOP of my tummy is a mass of stretchmarks and therefore a NO SHOW AREA.

Underwear as Outerwear

miss-hannigan

Ah, I remember the good old days when silk nighties became fashionable and every dress on the market looked like lingerie. In fact, I actually owned one myself, which was probably wildly inappropriate because I was about 13 at the time but still had D-cup boobs, so I probably looked like a tiny prostitute. Apparently, silk slips have made a come back, but the best chance of me embracing this trend is when I nip to McDonalds drive-thru at 11.30pm when I’ve got a severe McNugget jones and don’t want to change out of my slippers. Silk nighties – NO. UGG slippers – YES.

Tiaras

just-no

So, according to some mush who works for Yves Saint Laurent, we’re all supposed to be wearing tiaras with everything this season, a la Courtney Love with her smeared lipstick. I can assure you, if I started wearing a tiara on the school run and round Aldi, my family would seriously start looking into having me sectioned.

Dungarees

bella-dungarees

See, this one makes me sad. I would LOVE to rock a set of dungarees and I think they look lush on other people. I, however, am not built for dungarees. Carrying as much weight around my centre mass and having as large a bust as I do would absolutely guarantee that I would look less Kate Bosworth and more Bella from the Tweenies…

Do you have any current trends that you’d love to wear but just have to steer clear of? I’d love to hear about them so do leave me a comment below!

Family · Humour

8 Ways We Know it’s Almost The Holidays

July 11, 2016 Jayne16 Comments

school holidays I don’t know about you, but we are SO ready for it to be the summer holidays. Sausage has really enjoyed Year 3 and loves her current teacher but she’s definitely in need of a long break from the 32-mile-a-day school runs and if I’m honest, so am I! We, like most families, start September with very high standards of polished shoes, new stationery and a strict timetable but by this time of the school year things have well and truly slipped so I thought I’d give you an amusing insight into how we know it’s almost the end of the year:

Your super-strict “we MUST be out of the door at 8am SHARP!” becomes “meh, it’s 8.10…we’ve got a few minutes before we absolutely HAVE to leave…”.
At the beginning of the year, snazzy new school shoes have lights in them…only one of those lights now works and you have absolutely ZERO intention of working out how to fix the broken one.
Socks which were once white (and kept that way through weekly soaking in a whitening solution) are now distinctly grey…or pink…and will be staying that way until they get binned in two weeks.
Pristine book bags are now replaced with random rucksacks…or on a very bad day, a Bag for Life because the other bags have been shoved somewhere during a tidying frenzy and can no longer be located.
Healthy packed lunches and bottles of filtered water are now hastily bought dinner tickets and a bottle of pre-made Vimto from the corner shop.
Creative homework, which was lovingly crafted at the beginning of term is now largely forgotten, or done in a five minute panic on a Sunday evening.
Uniform, which was once immaculate, is now looking a little worse for wear with inkspots on shirts and summer dresses which are a little on the small side…but you’re definitely not going to replace it before September!
There’s a massive chart on your wall where you tick off the days until the summer holidays and it’s literally the most exciting thing you do all day.

I’m sure there are other surefire signs of how much we’re DONE with this school year. What are yours? Leave me a comment below, I’d love to hear them!

Anger · Humour · Kids

The Continued Emasculation of Daddy Pig

June 27, 2016 Jayne17 Comments

The Continued Emasculation of Daddy Pig

Having two kids with a 5 and and half year age gap means that I’m suffering enjoying a lot of the same programmes a second time around, and BB is at that age where EVERYTHING must be Peppa Pig (save for a couple of times a week when she takes a brief foray into Topsy and Tim, her previous programme du jour). This means that, during the week, Peppa is usually on in the backgroud for much of the late morning/early afternoon period while I work and do housework and BB mills around doing what it is that toddlers do (picking her nose and sticking stickers on my furniture, mostly).

Watching the same episodes of Peppa over and over again means that you notice certain things and one of those things is what I like to call “The Emasculation of Daddy Pig”. See, there seems to be a running theme in Peppa; Daddy is a bit useless and is fair game for mockery. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a bit of banter (HASHTAG BANTZ), but he seems to really get the rough end of the deal, and it’s got to a point where it’s verging on misandry. Jokes are made about Daddy Pig that no-one would DARE make about Mummy Pig because it would have people getting into an Everyday Sexism frenzy…so, let’s take a look at what those episodes might look like…

Mummy’s Fat Tummy

Everyone decides (after years of mockery) that Mummy Pig needs to get off of her fat arse and lose some weight, so Daddy Pig forces her to do exercise videos and go on bike rides (on a bike which is dangerously small for her). Everyone is waiting at home to take the piss out of how unfit she is.

Mummy Fucks Up The DIY

Daddy Pig has an important meeting to go to, so he asks Mummy Pig to hang a painting. Of course, Mummy is a hapless fuckwit and manages to knock a whole load of plaster off of the wall. She’s terrified that Daddy Pig will have a shit-fit at her when he gets home so she quickly re-renders the wall before he gets there. Once he gets home, he takes over because he’s obviously so much more capable than her and puts the painting up with a single flick of a hammer.

Mummy’s a Greedy Bitch

The whole family visits the supermarket to buy lots of healthy things off of their list. When they get to the checkout, they realise that Mummy Pig has put a chocolate cake on the conveyor belt and although they all agree that Mummy is a greedy, ‘naughty’ bastard, they all let her have it anyway (despite the fact that she’s clearly the main breadwinner and as such can buy whatever the fuck she wants).

Mummy Pig Doesn’t Speak French

Peppa gets a phone call from her French pen-pal and despite claiming she can speak French, Mummy Pig isn’t able to communicate with Delphine and, in fact, doesn’t even recognise that she’s speaking a foreign language in the first place, declaring it all to be “nonsense” and revealing herself to be a braggart who lacks any form of common sense or intelligence.

Now, I’m just going to put this out there; if ANY of these episodes were real and this kind of mockery, fat-shaming and stereotypical sexist bullshit was aimed at Mummy Pig, there would be OUTRAGE. But, because Daddy Pig is only a man, it’s okay to disregard his feelings and bully him on a daily basis, because don’t be silly, men don’t have feelings!

The worst part is, Peppa Pig was created and is written by TWO MEN! That leads me to one of two conclusions – either Mark Baker and Neville Astley are weird, self-hating males who think it’s okay to deride their own gender OR they think that they’re somehow appealing to the common housewife who obviously hates men. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with either conclusion, if I’m honest. I want my girls to grow up knowing A) everyone has different strengths, regardless of their gender and B) bullying people based on archaic, clichéd notions is just wrong.

I’d love to know what you think about this. Am I reading far too much into Peppa bloody Pig and need to seriously get a life? Or is this something which gets on your teats as much as it does mine? Leave me a comment below.

Humour

British Comedies – My Top 5

February 25, 2016 JayneLeave a comment

We’re huge fans of all kinds of comedy, here in the MTW house, but British comedy is in a different league and there are so many shows that we’ve loved, some of which span decades. Comedy is a great source of stress relief for me; nothing takes away the stresses of the day better than sitting down to watch something that’s so funny, I can’t help but laugh. Mayfair Granite have asked me to share some of my favourite British comedies with you, so here they are:

The Young Ones

Some of my earliest memories are of watching taped episodes of The Young Ones when I was even smaller than Sausage but the humour definitely had an effect on me as I was growing up (perhaps I can blame my slightly anarchic leanings on Rik?!). The characters are so perfectly ludicrous and it also introduced me to bands like Motorhead and Madness, forming a lifelong love of both.

The Good Life

The Good Life, if you haven’t already seen it, was a mid-70’s comedy about a Surbiton couple who decided to get out of the rat-race and become self-sufficient by farming their own land, growing fruit and veg and keeping various livestock (including Geraldine the goat!), much to the disgust of their close friends and perennially middle-class neighbours. The Good Life is one of those shows that’s a bit like a security blanket for me, I can watch it over and over again and always feel happy when I watch it.

Alan Partridge

I know a lot of people can’t watch Alan Partridge purely because of the extremely high cringe-factor, and I must admit to watching through my fingers sometimes (“Lynne. The brass dimmer switches, the granite worktops and your eight thousand pounds a year are all paid for by Eurovision thong contest, boob olympics and a wet Christmas.”) but it’s genuinely one of the funniest shows of all time and well worth trying to watch if you haven’t already.

Pulling

Pulling was a mid-noughties show about three women who live in Penge, one of whom had just recently jilted her fiance at the alter. The characters are hilariously outrageous (Tanya is my absolute favourite) and the whole show is just brilliantly written. Sharon Horgan, who you’ll probably recognise from the more recent show Catastrophe, is perfect as Donna and the cameos by Paul Kaye are some of the funniest parts of both series’.

Only Fools and Horses

You can’t talk about British Comedy without mentioning Only Fools and Horses. This show is loved by 90 year olds and nine year olds alike (I once overheard Sausage and one of her cousins “playing” a game of OFAH, but no-one wanted to be Cassandra!!). I think the reason this show worked so well was because we genuinely cared about the characters (the episode where Uncle Albert runs away from home still gets me in the feels every time…) and it’s so cleverly written that even slightly adult humour is included in a way that the kids are still oblivious to.

There are SO many more I could write about individually, but I don’t want to bore you, so if you haven’t already, may I also recommend that you watch Red Dwarf, Peep Show, Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd, Black Adder, Ideal….there are just too many to name! What’s your favourite British comedy?