Kisses For Sale/Manky Christmas Trifle (ED! #12)

I've been planning this edition of Ed since well before Christmas, but somehow never actually got around to writing it.
I had a great Christmas actually. It was pretty quiet, not a lot happened, but I had a surprisingly nice time.

There is, however, always a fly in the ointment (what a curious expression) and this year it was my saucepans that let me down.

I had cause to be in the kitchen, making food go hot (I believe it's called "cooking", but that sounds much too complicated) as I was in the mood to make my traditional christmas trifle.

Let's check those instructions, shall we? Make jelly with water which is hot. Check. Break up little sponge cubes into bowl. Check. Cover with jelly. Check. Make up custard..

Custard.. Custard.. Hot milk, and pink powder. Together in a saucepan.

Well, that sounds easy. I do pride myself on being able to make extremely good custard. But this year it was not so.

My excellent custard did smell a little unusual but I thought no more of it, poured it over the jelly and whammed it in the back of the fridge to cool down.

While washing up, I couldn't help but notice that most of the base of my saucepan had pretty much come off. "Odd", I thought.

Later, on a hunch, I sampled a little of the custard.

UGH! Puh! Puh! Well that's where the base of the saucepan went then..

I was disappointed. I mean, when people use saucepans on TV, it's "perfect results every time", like Paul Lavers says.

That'll teach me for not buying my saucepans from QVC. I thought 3 for £9.99 at my local little shop was a good deal. Oh, how wrong I was.

My parents never warned me life would be like this. The perils of saucepans wrecking your trifle was most definitely not in the manual.

Parents are great though. Even if they do spend most of their time asking "When are you going to get a proper job?".

Obviously this one doesn't count. Difficult to imagine what would be classed as a "proper" job, though - something like cleaning out telephone boxes, perhaps.

I can't be the only person who has this trouble.

"Hello Mum, I'm home!"

"Hello dear, what did you do at work today in your job as an advertising songwriter?"

"I composed a tune which goes 'Toblerone.. Out On It's Own..'"

"You wrote 30 seconds of music? Very nice dear. When are you going to get a proper job, by the way?"

Something else that parents seem to ask a lot is "When are you going to get a girlfriend?".

I've tried to explain that I'm a busy person. I try to remind them of the failure of my "Kissing Booth" enterprise when I was younger. I must have been at least.. ooh, six, and even at that wonderful age I was unable to persuade any of the girls to take my "Kisses: 5p" sign seriously.

Usually I couldn't even catch up with them, they ran away too fast.

Twenty years on, and I'm a child of the TV generation, and in the absence of actually having a social life, I have this worrying habit of falling in love with people on TV commercials.

This is, as you might expect, not good enough for my parents. I cannot legitimately claim a long-term relationship with the lady from the 'Burning Heart 2' commercial. I suspect she wouldn't want me for my wit and personality anyway, she'd just want me to buy her old CDs.

I might have had more success with the woman in the 'Riesen Chocolate Chew' ad, and for two important reasons.

1) She rides a motorbike. This is an extremely attractive quality, so TV has taught me.

2) She is happily giving away free chocolate to anyone who pulls up beside her.

How could any man resist? But it just wouldn't work out.. And anyway, chocolate gives me headaches.

So for the moment, it seems, it's the single life for me.

Perhaps in the meantime I should re-open my kissing booth in the hope that someone will pass by my window, and, like in Bagpuss, come into the shop to look around.

I'll need a commercial, with a snappy jingle. I wonder if that Toblerone guy is available.

Kisses for sale.. And phoneboxes cleaned on request..