Things of wonder: everyone loves seeing a Great Tit Pic: © David Cole/Rex Features
I’m in a bit of a work-related no man’s land at the moment. I’m currently in the difficult transition period between work locations and finding it slightly difficult to adjust to the 9 to 5 again.
I’ve been a home-based worker for seven years, but due to some organisational restructuring, I’m now based in an office. With people! The cheek of it! How rude!
I was very good at working from home. I’ll have you know that I won “Homeworker of the Year” two years running. I had wee trophies and everything. I suspect all I did to deserve this prestigious plastic trophy was to stage a hilarious photo opportunity with me in pink jammies, curlers in hair, pretending to swig from a bottle of Blue Nun with my laptop on my knee and a mobile phone at my earhole. My colleagues presented me with a pinny with the photo printed on it. I wore it this very morning while icing cupcakes and was out of the house locking the door before I realised I was still wearing it.
Yes, I was icing cupcakes this morning. What of it? I’m the self-appointed office birthday cupcake maker. I’ve made a rod for my own stupid back. As luck would have it, the upside of working in this particular office is in fact the people. It’s like one long episode of Corrie. We laugh, we rant, we cry – sometimes we even do some work. Actually, allow me to correct that – I laugh, I rant and I cry. Everyone else is pretty level mood-wise and normal by comparison. Sort of.
Caroline has a big birthday this week, which I chose to celebrate by offering to make two dozen cupcakes. I decided to leave the actual application of the icing until this morning and swanned out of my kitchen at 8am having left my kitchen resembling a winter wonderland. Drifts of icing sugar lie atop every surface. After reading about that glacier restoration attempt yesterday I’m desperate to get home to clean it all up, lest the white surfaces generate a cold micro-climate in the kitchen and I end up sharing the house with polar bears and ummm… penguins, and they nick all my fish fingers when I’m at work.
It’s really hard to beat icing sugar into butter without releasing and inhaling clouds of powdery sugar. It reminds me of my childhood when I would eat spoonfuls of Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate out of the tin. I must have lost the knack of eating powdery products because when I do it now, I end up choking and sneezing brown powder out of every orifice. Funny that. It must be a skill you lose as you get older, like being able to swim underwater when you’re born; or being able to play outside for hours on end whilst holding in your wee, because you knew that if you went home, you’d be kept in.
We were chatting about nightingales over coffee break yesterday, apropos of nothing at all, and Paul happened to mention that he had a couple of Great Tits nesting in his garage. Never one to miss an opportunity, you can imagine my hilarious response. I professed that I too had gr…oh never mind, you can imagine the rest. Queen of the smutty double entendre, that’s me. Paul was disgusted at my coarseness, which made me cackle like a witch.
Thanks also to my learned work colleagues, I discovered a fabulous new word this week. Pamela heard it on the radio, and I now realise I’m a regular perpetrator of the mondegreen. I love new words, and the discovery of this one made my heart beat a little bit faster. The mondegreen (be still my pounding heart) is the mishearing of lyrics e.g. the famous Jimi Hendrix Purple Haze one - “excuse me while I kiss this guy”, which is actually “s’cuse me while I kiss the sky”. There’s a whole website devoted to these particular mondegreens, named after that very tune; www.kissthisguy.com.
The provenance of the word mondegreen (of course I HAD to Google it to find out…) is the mishearing of a Scottish ballad by the author Sylvia Wright, who misheard “They have slain the Earl of Moray, and laid him on the green” as “They have slain the Earl of Moray, and Lady Mondegreen”. I love that.
One of my many crimes against lyrics, and I blame my age, is singing “I’m a freak, I’m a widow-oh-oh” to Radiohead’s Creep. So there we have it: the mondegreen, a fabulous word of which I was hitherto unaware.
The final thing I learned from my colleagues this week is that you can now buy vinegar in a spray bottle. Imagine! Vinegar! In a spray! That’s truly fantastic. Ann has ordered me a bottle with her online shopping. I can now spray a fine mist of vinegar over my chips and egg. My life is complete.
