Smell Pictures

Big news, guys. Richard E. Grant has released a scent.

Not like a skunk. Don’t worry; there will be no talk of glands here. No, I’m talking about the world of CELEBRITY FRAGRANCE. Think White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor, Paris Hilton’s Fairy Dust, Intimately Beckham courtesy of David, and the intriguingly-named Unforgiveable Woman from Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs.

Richard E.’s eau de parfum is called Jack (as in Union), contains marijuana and, in his own words, is ‘unisexy’ and ‘lickably more-ish’. Jack has been 50 months in the making and will have cost Grant (one imagines) an awful lot of money. ‘Launching [his] signature in scent’ has been a lifelong dream and he is, quite rightly, inordinately proud of it. Smelling things is his absolute favourite.

Which got me to thinking. Smells are pretty incredible. And with that, I shall launch into a few musings about smells. Enjoy.

1. Of course, there are your classics. Everyone knows the giddy childhood excitement and prospect of a 6-week summer holiday that comes flooding back at the slightest whiff of suncream or just-mown grass. And estate agents the world over love that the aroma of fresh coffee or bread practically make people reach for a cheque-book. Smell equals sell, people!

2. New stuff. Mainly cars or carpets. And it’s fine that I can’t afford to buy new cars and carpets all the time (in fact, I’ve never bought a new car or a carpet), because the good people at Magic Tree (or Little Trees if you’re American and Wunder-baum if you’re German) make New Car Scent. Well done them.

I’m not on board with all of the Magic Tree flavours, mind you. Why I would want my car to smell of a Margarita or a Piña Colada is beyond me. And some of the names piss me off – Peachy Peach? Silly Citrus? Vanillaroma? Ugh. I don’t even know what some of them could possibly smell of – Strength? Black Ice? Powder?

And those people who have 3 or 4 different Magic Trees merrily swinging away on the rear-view mirror all at the same time. What kind of multi-fragranced devilry are they messing with?

3. Rain. I’m not entirely sure why or how it smells, but it does, and it’s great. Before, during, after; drizzle, thunderstorm, torrential; slight variations on a theme, but all scentastic. I read once it’s something to do with ions in the air, so it’s basically chemistry and therefore FACT.

4. Nostalgia. It’s amazing that certain smells can transport you to the past. As Richard E. Grant says, it’s because ‘smell is the shortest synaptic leap in the brain to our memory’. Yes.

For example, if I smell Tommy Girl, I am immediately back in the gym at high school doing my French GCSE exam (‘Oh my god, what is recycling in French? Oh my god, who even cares?’ – It’s le recyclage, if you’re interested). And Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue takes me right back to Washington DC, the 2006 World Cup, a lot of hotdogs and Bud Lite, and going to Tai Shan the Panda’s first birthday party (but that’s a story for another time).

5. Innovation. I spent the weekend with my parents recently, and thoroughly enjoyed the new Spanish plug-in air freshener my Dad had purchased. It was quite simply one of the most beautiful scents I have ever encountered. The fragrance was Moonlit Serenity. I don’t know what regular serenity smelled like, but the guys at the Spanish air freshener factory did absolutely the right thing by adding some moonlight.

6. Parks and Recreation. The names people give their perfumes are fascinating. They're so damn aspirational. You’ve got Pure Brilliance by Celine Dion. Minajesty by Nicki Minaj (like what she did there?). Mariah Carey has given us Lollipop Bling. And Britney Spears is the queen of this game: she’s got Fantasy, Circus Fantasy, Island Fantasy, Midnight Fantasy, Hidden Fantasy and Fantasy Twist. Quite literally fantastic.

One of my favourite things about Parks and Recreation (and there are many) is famous fragrance-maker character Dennis Feinstein. His creations are marvellous; highlights include Coma, Itch, Thickening, Spasm and Butterface. I’m hoping to get Richard E. Grant involved in making one of these a reality for his follow-up fragrance.

Prosecco Thursday

 

Last night my friend Daisy and I created Prosecco Thursday. It’s like a normal Thursday, but you add Prosecco to it. And in our case, due to a long-winded saga involving an unredeemed cocktail class voucher, most of it was FREE. A ridiculous amount of Prosecco and an inordinate amount of nachos for a tenner? Sign me up.

And that’s sort of as far as we imagined the evening would go. Fancy drinks, bit of a catch-up in the dim lighting, and tall bar chairs that are quite hard to sit on.

Until, that is, we became aware of an innocent-looking microphone stand nearby. We were witnessing the preamble to an OPEN MIC NIGHT. We were so close to said preamble, in fact, that I was basically sitting in the performance area.

Now Daisy bloody loves live music. Especially if it’s men with guitars; she has a theory that there’s a scientific link between men’s ability to play guitar and women’s desire to have sex with them. Through the evening, she became increasingly rhapsodic, swaying along and proclaiming how youthful she felt. At one point, she said the word 'gnarly'.

I’m a bit more wary of the whole live music thing; I like the idea of it, but the reality is often tricky to navigate. I get preoccupied with ridiculous problems: Are you allowed to talk if someone’s singing? When should you go to the toilet? If anyone really tanks it, should we all do loud appreciative clapping to pretend we didn’t notice the musical car-crash? Or will that be really obvious pity clapping and make it even more awkward?

Now I can’t begin to imagine how brave you have to be to get up there in front of people and sing your heart out, and I have the utmost respect for all the singers and players who performed last night. They were great, and I had a lovely time.

Here are a few of my personal highlights:

~ One performer seemed to be called Fat Panda (excellent name). His performance style involved some very intense jerky movements, rather like he needed a wee. In fact, if you’re familiar with Jeff Goldblum’s cameo in Friends, as a director who makes Joey act when really needing a wee, you’re pretty much there.

~ One of the boy performers clearly really loved one of the girl performers. Daisy and I know this because he spent an actual 5 minutes holding the microphone, offering it to her, pointing it at her face and adjusting it for her. Er, hello? Freudian much?

~ Two hilarious middle-aged women proceeded to get incredibly drunk, incredibly quickly. They propped up the bar, did floaty weavy folky dancing to all the music, and fawned tearfully over the singers. “I loved it. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in my whole entire life. [Hic].”

~ On a serious note, John Atkinson did some lovely tunes, and you should listen to some of his stuff straight away. John Ainsworth was also excellent, despite an early finish due to a bad throat. He got more noises out of a guitar at the same time than I’ve ever heard before. And our unanimous favourite of the evening was Sobi. Her singing was simply enchanting. Check her out immediately. In fact, when we mentioned how much we had liked her to the compère / guy-in-charge, he uttered the immortal words, ‘See, didn’t I tell you. She’s a chicken-dinner. She’s an all-day-breakfast with extra bacon. Return of the Jedi.’ You heard the man.

~ Said guy-in-charge had initially promised Daisy and I a man who would play a bazooka. Somewhat perturbed by this, I ventured cautiously, ‘A kazoo?’ No, he was adamant, ‘A bazooka. You know what that is?’ Of course, we nodded sagely, not wanting to appear deficient in the latest open-mic lingo. Later, a performer took to the stage-area with a questionable-looking guitar, and it’s the first time I’ve ever turned to someone, raised my eyebrows questioningly, and asked ‘Balalaika?’ NB. I’ve just googled ‘bazooka musical instrument’ and apparently it’s some kind of insane trombone affair. We definitely did not see one last night.

~ My favourite thing about the evening was listening to how people introduce their songs. You expect the usual ‘This is a song about someone who broke my heart’ or ‘This song was inspired by my summer living with shepherds in Northern Italy.’ Not so last night. Here is genuinely what moved these artists to create:

• “Here’s a song about watching American TV.”
• "This is a song about being in a storm somewhere.” (This actually moved Daisy to heckle in the hope of finding out exactly where the storm was. Sadly, it’s still a mystery).
• "This is a song I wrote about working in a café stroke restaurant.” Amazing.

The venue was Cord in Manchester, and apparently we’re going again next week. See you there? It’ll be gnarly. With extra bacon. Revenge of the Sith. Or words to that effect…

Games on Phones

Happy New Year, all. I hope you had some lovely festive times, and enjoyed seeing 2013 off or seeing 2014 in, or maybe even both. I thought I would start the year with an insightful and fascinating rundown of apps for games you can play on your phone. You’re welcome.

1. Dots. This is my friend Daisy’s latest game of choice. Like all good games, the concept is alarmingly simple. Your screen is filled with different coloured dots, and all you need to do is link dots of the same colour. For exciting big scores, make squares with them. It’s worrying that I can while away an hour doing this, and yet I’m apparently unable to get a score above 200.

2. Candy Crush Saga. I think by now everyone’s been through the Candy Crush tunnel, yes? The hatred of the cubes with little black nets on them, the dread of having to do a high-score speed round, the sadness when you reach a ‘get the fruit and nuts to the bottom’ level, the sheer joy of finally passing a level you’ve been stuck on for a literal actual month. My affair with Candy Crush happened in the Spring of 2013; every second of my train commute, and a good deal of my working day was spent feverishly swapping the candy around or desperately waiting for time to pass so I could earn another life. Disturbingly like some kind of crack addiction. Eventually, I had to go cold turkey and delete the app completely. Life is just too short.

3. Candy Crush Knock-Offs. It seems everyone’s trying to get on the Candy Crush success bandwagon. And to be honest, fair play to them. Jelly Splash looks exactly the same to me, except the creators have cleverly set it apart by giving the coloured blobs eyes. Genius. And now there’s a new game, the Papa Pear Saga. Again, the concept seems identical, except this time we’re apparently ‘bouncing around a wonderfully wacky world of fruity pegs’. Excellent. My main problem with this one is that Papa is a green ball in a helmet; he’s clearly not a pear. Oh, and for a long time I thought it was called Pop-A-Pair Saga, which, to be honest, might have been better.

4. The Simpsons Tapped Out. This one is my favourite. I’ve never actually played it, but it sounds mental. Essentially, you build Springfield and then you run it, a bit like God or some kind of dictator. You start off with Homer and gradually find more characters, and you make money by building things like the Power Plant and the Kwik-e-Mart and then sending people to work in them. Cletus Spuckler the Redneck also seems to play a major role.

The best part is the updates. So while your phone will beep to inform you that you’ve been tagged on Facebook or that something newsworthy and important is happening in the world of real life, you’ll also be getting things like:

“Cletus has finished brewing moonshine.”

“Homer has just finished a 12-hour shift at the power plant.”

“Sideshow Bob has been spotted in the area.”

“Cletus has helped Brandine give birth to another Spuckler.”

And my personal favourite:

“Apu has finished relaxing in the Brown House.”

Now I just need someone to invent an app that will let me relive my favourite Amiga Commodore 64 game Bubble Bobble, and my life will be complete. You know the one; you had to build bubble towers so the little dragons could reach the top of the screen. Genius.

PS. I sort of thought the title of this blog sounded a bit like Game of Thrones and was ergo mildly amusing. Then I thought it sounded a bit like the 1981 Duran Duran smash-hit Girls on Film and was therefore definitely mildly amusing.

I now feel it doesn’t actually sound enough like either to be mildly amusing and is therefore basically just shit. However, after all this thinking, I can’t be arsed to think of a better title. Bet you’re glad you read to the end, aren’t you?

Croatia: Spellbinding. Intoxicating. Hysteria-inducing.

In September, I went on holiday with my friend Daisy. It was a fun trip, so I thought you might like to hear the highlights. I’ve been trying to write the opening paragraph. My notes read as follows:

Punched in neck. Larry Grayson. Wine under fluorescent strip-lighting. Leaky shampoo.

Hmm. I’m suddenly concerned that the trip might have been more traumatic than I recall. Especially given that all this happened before the plane took off.

The plan had been simple. Take backpacks to show everyone how young and intrepid we are. Get to the airport nice and early to smugly enjoy over-priced pre-holiday we-deserve-this drinks.

The reality had not quite lived up to this. During their affectionate farewell at the train station, Daisy’s boyfriend somehow punched her in the neck. The check-in man had inexplicably felt the need to say, ‘Shut that door,’ a reference both Daisy and I were mortified to be old enough to recognise. The ridiculous queues at both Security and the Terminal 2 bar were so upsetting we ended up knocking back vile white wine under the oppressive glare of canteen lighting at the airport equivalent of a truck-stop. And the less said about the toiletry explosion in my luggage the better.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings to our adventure. Positively rocky, you might say. Don’t worry; it picks up later on.

We started with a few days on Korčula, a beautifully picturesque island off the Dalmatian coast, followed by a 3-night sojourn in Dubrovnik. Let’s start with Korčula. First, the history. Marco Polo might have come from there. Well, he definitely visited once, and there is a family named Polo who have lived there for years. And apparently, that's proof enough.

And now the culture. Korčula Old Town is a mini-Dubrovnik. We wandered the narrow streets, marvelling at the stunning buildings of butter-coloured stone. We swam in the clear calm waters of the Adriatic. One evening, we climbed up an erstwhile wartime lookout tower that now serves great cocktails. Oh, and then Daisy fell off a commemorative cannon.

The next day we got caught in an almighty downpour over lunch. Naturally, we did what any self-respecting Brits would do, pretended it wasn’t raining and carried on eating. It’s a shame we didn’t notice our guidebook swimming in a nearby puddle. The pristine guidebook Daisy had been lent by a kindly old professor colleague. I can only imagine his pained wince when she returned it to him.

And then on to Dubrovnik. Ah, Dubrovnik. If you haven’t been, go. It’s great. There is seafood. There were peacocks. Ice-creams are apparently bigger there than anywhere else. In the evenings, live music plays in the square, inspiring couples to spontaneously begin dancing. One night we were taking a turn around the port and were delighted to hear some kind of male-voice choir taking advantage of the acoustics inside an old stone bastion to sing Croatian folk songs. We rounded the corner to find the a capella group was made up of youths in hoodies, bewitching an audience of middle-aged tourists. A magical moment.

And that’s the thing. Croatia was full of incredible enchanting moments. We were sipping prosecco one afternoon at a bar ingeniously carved into the rocky walls of the city, taking in the sunset and watching dolphins plashing in the sea below. Daisy was so overwhelmed she proposed to me. Well someone should, she said. It feels like the thing to do.

It was an idyllic week, albeit one that occasionally seemed to be masquerading as a farcical comedy of errors. I leave you with the final episode of our adventure. We called on the owner of our rented apartment to return the key. A mysterious character, she seemed to spend her days chain-smoking, incessantly laundering towels and buying up Smurfs 2 merchandise for her grandchildren. Unexpectedly, she invited us in to try a cake she had made.

Ooh, what kind? asked Daisy, politely. You will see, she muttered darkly. And see we did. It was rum cake. Or Rhum Cake, as I prefer to imagine it spelled in Croatian. And more rum than cake, if you ask me. British to the end, Daisy and I both studiously powered our way through the rum-soaked confection that resembled flammable custard more than anything else. And then happily tripped off to catch the bus to the airport, slightly drunk and inadvertently interrupting someone’s wedding photographs on the way. Sounds about right.

Work Do or Work Don't?

I’m starting a new work thing next week, and so it was quite nice yesterday to receive a couple of emails from my new boss and another soon-to-be colleague confirming a meeting this Friday.

Great, I thought, they seem to be a nicely organised and efficient outfit, and these emails strike a thoroughly friendly and convivial tone. I’m looking forward to working with them. They seem like lovely people.

So far so positive.

I then checked my phone a while later, and was surprised to see a calendar invitation from a woman I have never heard of, with the vague and innocuous-sounding title ‘Dinner and Drinks’. That’s odd, I thought, probably a mistake.

And then it started.

A barrage of messages relating to said calendar invitation from what seemed like thousands of strangers. Who are these people? I shouted in my head. Why do they want me to have dinner with them?

Eventually, I figured it out. This was the arranging of a Work Do. I had been invited to a Work Do. Next Thursday. For a job I haven’t even started yet.

How did this make me feel, I hear you ask. Keen to get my social butterfly on and make some new friends? Sure, a bit. Slightly worried that this level of advanced planning was a tad over-zealous and looked suspiciously like organised fun? Yes, certainly. Struck with a weird sense of impending doom and deja vu? Most definitely.

For this isn’t the first time that this situation has arisen. This exact scenario occurred in 2003, and it did not go well. Curiouser and curiouser, I hear you observe, intrigued.

Back in my first real job, when I was a young whippersnapper fresh out of university, I worked in the cut-throat world of academic bookselling. And on Day One of this exciting employment, it transpired that the ridiculously early Regional Christmas Do was coming up that Thursday, and two people were mysteriously unable to attend at the last minute, and would me and the other new kid Kris like to come along?

Kris, lucky bastard, had a prior engagement, but I foolishly accepted the offer. Indeed, I was quite looking forward to it. Isn’t it funny that sometimes you can be so wrong?

The whole thing was a mad nightmare.

It took place at a pub in Nottingham which has a real barge and part of the canal running through it like some kind of water feature. In my experience, open water inside public places filled with drunk people is a whole list of accidents waiting to happen. Several poor staff-members spent the whole night patiently steering said drunk people away from the barge. Apart from the one who seemed to be running a book on which inebriate would be the first to fall in.

The Do itself turned out to be one of those awful all-inclusive affairs, where several companies each book a table, and you get your seasonal festive dinner and an evening’s ‘entertainment’ (for this, read crap crackers, crap DJ and crap dancing). Although, it was quite fun to bond with 2 of my colleagues (both named Sarah), as we slagged off the other companies’ dance-floor activities and took advantage of the open bar.

I learned an eye-opening amount about my new colleagues that night. There was the unfortunate lady who had cycled 20 miles to get there in the pissing rain, because her partner Colin, a mean crazy hoarder, had gone back on his promise (made 3 months before) to give her a lift.

Then there was the muppet Trainee Manager, your basic knobhead whose personality was a rubbish combination of sinfully boring and inordinately bossy. It’s true; the next week, he insisted we spend an entire afternoon adjusting poster positions until he considered them satisfactorily perpendicular.

And then there was Julie.

I had spent a pleasant afternoon with Julie earlier in the week, labelling sale-stock and building vast pyramids of cheap art books, during the course of which I learned quite a bit about her holiday home in the Dordogne, her grown-up sons, and the best place to get a manicure in Nottingham. She seemed a lovely woman, who worked a few afternoons a week primarily to fund her trips to the nail-salons of the East Midlands.

And yet she chose to spend this evening drinking her own bodyweight in Sauvignon Blanc and getting impressively, uproariously, shitfaced.

She went to the Men’s toilets. Several times. And told us all about it. Every time.

She accosted our Manager, backed him up against a wall, and then railed at him for 40 minutes about how he was basically the worst manager in the history of the world and was solely responsible for running the company into the ground, prodding him forcefully in the shoulder all the while.

And then she cornered mild-mannered, ex-RAF pilot Toby, the strapping 25-year-old delivery driver, and tried to take him home with her.

Like I said, impressively shitfaced.

Eventually, Toby apparently poured her into a cab and, we assumed, she went home.

But that was the last that anyone ever saw of her. She evidently came round the next morning, could remember enough of the night before to be completely mortified, and couldn’t bear to see any of us ever again. We were quietly informed in the next week’s staff briefing that Julie had decided not to pursue her career in part-time bookselling.

So, you see, this ‘Dinner and Drinks’ that I’ve been invited to next Thursday, seemingly a friendly and happy little get-together, is fraught with dangerous possibility.

I’ve tentatively accepted, but if a barge is even remotely involved, I’m leaving.

Big Apples & Paella

Today is my half-birthday. Happy Half Birthday to Me! Woo HOO. I can practically hear Kool and the Gang, inviting me to celebrate and asking what my pleasure is.

Another half a year older. Let us celebrate and observe this important occasion immediately. See you in the pub in 20 minutes? (Actually, by the time I get this published, it was probably yesterday. So we’ll rain-check on the pub idea).

I’m sure you’re all thinking ‘What? Is she completely barmy? Who the hell even knows when their half birthday is?’ Permission to approach the bench and defend myself.

The only reason I know that today is my half-birthday is because today also happens to be my best University friend’s actual birthday. Even more coincidentally, today is also my best Canadian friend’s three-quarter birthday. Which in my head is a fascinating situation completely worth of note. See, simple.

Anyway, back to my blog. So it’s my half-birthday. Making me 31 and a half precisely. Which, in true Carrie Bradshaw-style, got me to thinking…

I was having dinner a few weeks ago, and people started asking some classic dinner-party questions. You know the kind of thing…If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be? If you had to have sex with an animal, which one would you choose?All pretty standard.

Then someone asked, Where will you be when you’re 40? And my answer was both immediate and instinctive. Oh, I said airily, I’ll be a writer and I’ll be living in New York. And then we all agreed to celebrate my 40th birthday in my amazing Brooklyn Heights loft apartment when I will make an excellent paella. (Making excellent paella being one of the other goals I will have achieved by the time I’m 40).

Super. Life plan all in order. I’ll start sourcing saffron and arborio rice immediately.

But this morning it occurred to me that it’s not the paella thing that I should be focusing on. It’s the writer thing. You see, I’ve always just assumed that the writer thing will come through at some point. I just need to let it emerge chrysalis-like, as and when it’s ready. But with only 8.5 years to go, it might be time to artificially inseminate some cheetah DNA into the caterpillar, and get this bad boy off the starting-blocks asap.

Because other than this blog, there’s not a great deal of my writing that has met the gaze of the public. I have numerous apps and notebooks to record inspiration as it hits, and a multitude of folders on my laptop with research and the beginnings of chapters. But nothing concrete. Nothing published. Nothing finished.

So here it is. I figure if I commit details of a few projects to the blogosphere, it will encourage me to find the wherewithal and follow-through to finish the damn things. And once they’re all complete, fingers crossed I’ll be across the pond, attempting to find the best saffron and chorizo suppliers that the East Village has to offer.

Without further ado, here is a list of my current novelistic projects, to be wrapped up and completed by 2021. Eek.

NB: The following descriptions may seem a bit cryptic; this is purely to ensure no-one steals or rips off my amazing and innovative ideas.

1. The one about the Victorian circus.

2. The one about the wine-expert amateur detective. Also featuring monks and charlatan physicians.

3. The one about the car-wash attendant in Bradford.

4. The one about Woodstock. And an old woman with no teeth.

To be featured in Bestseller listings 8.5 years hence. Watch this space.

Kicking It Old Skool

Yes, of course I love my iPhone (invented 2007), my hairdryer diffuser (invented 1992) and Crispy M&Ms (apparently invented in 1999, although it feels a lot more recent, if you ask me).

But this week, I have been enjoying a bit of wistful nostalgia and living in the past. And not just a half-arsed ‘Yeah, let’s bring back leg-warmers and slap-bracelets’ kind of past. I’m talking a ‘way back before I was even born’ kind of past. This is retro with a capital R. Retro, if you will.

So don’t hang out in 2013. Come on, grab your coat and a Mint Wispa for the road (they should bring those bad boys back, shouldn’t they?) and let’s bez it down Memory Lane together.

Here are 3 of my collisions with history from the past 7 days….

1. I went to where custard was invented. Did you hear me? Where custard was INVENTED. Impressive, no?

I should probably clarify, as I might be exaggerating a smidge, or over egging the pudding, if you prefer (lolz). I went to where Mr Bird invented custard powder in a tin circa 1837. Apparently, the original notion of custard started somewhere in the Middle Ages with a recipe fondly known as Crustardes of flessh but that sounds horrific, so we’ll leave that one alone, shall we?

Back to Mr Bird. He invented custard powder because his wife had an unfortunate egg allergy. Poor Mrs Bird. Presumably he didn’t want her to go through life without knowing the joys of custard. As indeed no-one should.

Anyway, The Custard Factory is in the Irish Quarter of Birmingham, and it is now a delightful little complex of vintage shops and ace cafes. Unfortunately, it is not a museum of custard. A panda can dream.

2. I have been playing Yahtzee. Like a demon. I conducted an informal survey and it seems most people played this as a child. You remember, it’s the one with the dice and the cup and the shaking.

I, on the other hand, played it for the first time last month, and am now completely addicted. I forced my flatmate into printing off score-sheets at work and we’re now embroiled in a full-on tournament. A Yahtzee-athon. The Yahtzee-bowl. I’m still working on the name. The important thing is it’s currently 3-1 to me.

3. I got a splinter. (Stay with me; this story gets more dramatic in a minute. Actually, it totally doesn’t. It gets marginally more interesting, but stay with me anyway). So, I got this splinter. And I couldn’t get the bugger out. And it really hurt. And it completely disappeared into my finger and all that remained was a big red lump. See, marginally more interesting, as promised.

I started having a terribly dark vision whereby said splinter gets into my bloodstream, whooshes up my arm and then my heart explodes. So I did what any sane person would do. I took it to the pharmacist lady in Boots and asked her if she thought I would die from it.

I fully expected her to roll her eyes, feign deep concern at my 6-year-old’s affliction, and send me packing. But no. She said I needed something called a Drawing Paste. I must have looked somewhat sceptical or confused, because she then explained in words of one syllable that it was a paste that would coax it out. What the f? I thought. Is it suddenly 1822? Have we now rejected modern medicine in favour of crackpot Victorian ointments and tinctures and other ridiculous quackery?

I didn’t say any of this, of course. I obediently paid for my pot of Drawing Paste, went home and consulted Google. Guess what? It’s an actual magical thing. A mysterious salve that can somehow suck foreign bodies out of you. Well, not quite magic. Turns out it’s magnesium sulphate, which cures a myriad of ills, including asthma and constipation. Obv.

And you know what? It only bloody worked. Five days of paste-smearing later, my finger ejected a massive shard of wood.

So you can keep your new-fangled modern technologies. I’m sticking to custard and quackery.