Many years ago, In the dinner hall at my high school, I remember posters that recommended you eat cheese after a meal if you couldn’t brush your teeth. It neutralised the acids in your mouth it said.
I know that it meant hard cheeses like Cheddar, but in my mind this is what I always imagined that it meant.
Brush your teeth with cheese!
Last month, while clearing out Mum’s flat I came across this tatty old thing, the kitchen sink (model 1.024) from my younger sister’s old Caroline’s Home doll’s house.
You know the saying “everything but the kitchen sink”, that means “nearly everything one can reasonably imagine; many different things, often to the point of excess or redundancy”? Lots of people used to say that about my late Mum’s handbag. She kept a lot of things in it.
“Blimey! Rosalie, you have everything in there except the kitchen sink,” they’d laugh.
And my mum would rummage at the bottom of her handback and proudly produce this old thing.
“Actually,” she would counter, “I do have the kitchen sink in here.”
But it served a purpose other than just a comic retort. Behind the tiny cupboard doors, which over time broke and were repeatedly taped together with masking tape, Mum kept three ten pence pieces—the right amount of money to get her into most public toilets in an emergency.
That’s the kind of practicality that I admired about my mum.
This week I’ve started a project to restore a very precious gift, from a very precious period of my life, my Moulinex blender lamp.
In the autumn of 1996, I moved into Flat 3, Lansdowne Centre, Law Street, Bermondsey. At the time I thought this would be a sojourn before moving in with a friend but I settled in quickly and it remains today one of the best places I’ve ever lived.
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It all began with a weird conversation one bedtime between my son Isaac (6) and me. Somehow—I can’t remember the route—the conversation settled on fantasising about a creature called a ‘snail monkey’.
Isaac then asked me to create a website for him to share the news with the world.
How could I possibly say no?
So here it is: snailmonkey.wordpress.com.
It turns out, that we weren’t the first to think about this. Check out our first blog post called Maybe there is such a thing…
Just how many people does it take to play a guitar? Five apparently. Walk off the Earth show you exactly how.