After the Funeral, Tea.
Strong tea in served in cups with saucers (matching) alongside understated, embarrassed looking food served in small pieces. This is to ensure that even the hungriest eat absent-mindedly, the morsels finding their way into their mouths accidentally.

Builder’s or Workmen’s Tea.
Type a. Made by the householder, willingly at first and offered with biscuits. As the work progresses into weeks and the breaks seem to match the length of the work achieved daily it is offered more and more grudgingly until it is stopped altogether. What they don’t know is that the workmen place bets on who can get the householder to make another cuppa.
Type b. The flask of strong dark syrupy tea fortified with 25 sugars which workmen bring with them, in case they meet a householder that does not offer any and for the days when their goodwill tea making will expires.

Friends’ Tea
Informal tea served in mugs, over such a good chat you don’t notice that you have polished off a plate of biscuits between you.

Meet the Boyfriend/Girlfriend’s parent’s tea.
Weak tea, served in the best china to ensure that the nervousness is accentuated by fear of smashing something. Large biscuits or cake are offered but you have a tiny side plate so you cannot avoid apologising about crumbs. Questions are always asked when you have just taken a bite.

Committee Meeting Tea.
Whether it is served in mugs or cups and whether there are biscuits (even the type of) is the result of an ealier meeting. Somebody always chokes on biscuit crumbs at a crucial moment, usually to make everyone feel bad if the vote has gone against them. Whoever makes tea always makes a racket with the china so that someone else feels obliged to make an offer of help which is refused with great martyrdom.

Community Tea
Served in churches, community halls, or school buildings at jumble sales, fetes and fairs. This is always served through a hatch on pale yellow or bule china. It is never hot but the price includes a biscuit.

Working Tea
The worst cases are those with drinks dispensing machines slopping out tepid grey liquid. The snack crisps or chocolate is usually spat out of another machine. Tea ladies with trolleys are the best; bringing round a great urn with hot, strong tea and a choice of sandwiches and cakes subsidized by the firm so everyone at work is podgy. Others have a kitchen area with a kettle, teabags that everyone chips in for and everybody’s individual mug, bought from home. One is always being used inadvertently by a visitor or new arrival who doesn’t understand the dark looks they are getting from the owner.

Morning Tea
Whereby one partner always makes the other a cuppa in bed and the one crappy thing about being single is having to make your own.

Solitary Tea
Bleary eyed, on your own at the breakfast table, talking yourself into the day with a large mug of tea and lashings of hot buttered toast.

Comfort Tea
At any time of misery or hunger, with an enormous mug, and further lashings of hot buttered toast or biscuits straight from the packet.

Attacks of this can come any time but especially when life seems gloomy and the theme topic like a mountainous heap of manure. Unfortunately our Government is humiliating, it is also winter and raining daily. The sky is white, the day grey, Christmas is shining plastically in every shop and has been for weeks and they have now added polly wolly Christmas music. Weeks of jollification stretch ahead, office parties, drunken dinners and ridiculous presents, with the continuing backdrop of a big brother nanny state that is losing the plot and showing signs of sheer lunacy on a daily basis. Oceans of money are being thrown away on quangos, expenses and stupid council brainwaves while hospitals can’t even keep the floors dust free. Sometimes there is so much to say it is exhausting.

The Government.
Unlimited moan fodder on a daily basis.

Our Partner
Habits, lack of romance, dull sex.

Weather.
We moan about the cold but on warm days worry about global warming. When it rains it’s miserable but when it doesn’t we worry and hose pipe bans are put in place. We are never prepared for radical weather like snow or gales.

Money.
Mortgage rates, pensions, credit cards, debts. Not having enough, or other people having too much.

Health
The reason that the question ‘how are you?’ was invented. ‘Fine’ is the wrong answer. Then there is the state of the National Health Service, hospital superbugs, low paid nurses, highly paid doctors.

Bad Service.
Restaurants, shops, garages, post offices, mail order companies. Is bad service really more common than good service or do we just notice it more?

Reality TV Shows.
We have to watch the shows to get to know the best characters to moan about.

Neighbours
Nosiness, noise, pets or children, they’re bound to be guilty of something.

Kids
They have everything we had nothing. Ungratefulness. Noise.

Mobile Phones
Noise. Noise. Noise.

If we had an equivalent of football specifically for women, lets call it fingernailball (well football probably sounded weird at first) with a similar profile, mega pay packets and fingernailball stars with partners whose only claim to fame is to be with them, then women would probably feel more cheerful about football.

There would be the HATS; husbands and toyboys, who would spend their days meeting for coffee, shopping and getting photographed watching their wives and girlfriends playing fingernailball.

There would be fabulously wealthy fingernailball stars who would be bought by fingernailball teams for impossible amounts of money.

Of course there would be a series called ‘fingernailball Husbands’, with major star, Bestbitter involved in lots of partner swapping and lustful intrigues.

Female fingernailball hooligans would be the scourge of Europe as they beat the opposing fingernailball supporters up.

Women would meet at the pub to watch fingernailball on the big screens while their partners stayed home to tend the family. They would devote entire afternoons to watching it on the television with no question as to it taking priority over everything else. A woman’s mood could be gauged according to the fingernailball results and whether her team won, and obviously the whole country would be in mourning if we lost the fingernailball championship.

The media are wondering why sex education is so inadequate in this country and why teenage pregnancies and STD’s are so high.

It boils down (like most things) to communication. Sex education starts early, usually about the age of ten, but assumptions are made about what children understand and comprehend.

For example I can remember adults muttering that the birds and the bees were to do with sex education but it was not until I was in my twenties that I understood the relevance. Boys used to call girls ‘birds’ so I thought that ‘bees’ were a slang name for them.

Children are taught to ‘use a condom because it will protect them’, but they are at the age of Harry Potter and other fables and adventures. They still believe that they might wake up one morning into an adventure whereby they leave home and go to face danger in the big wide world. It is understandable that they might think a condom is some kind of shield of protection which they can hold before them when enemies approach.

When they are told that a condom is worn, it is not always clear where, unless the mechanics of sex have been clearly explained beforehand.

Couple all this with our National reticence and shyness it is no wonder that sex education in this country needs a complete overhaul.

I think due to the problems with the Government that there is a sinister plan taking place whereby cats are taking over the country.

see Shhh, the Kittens are nappping http://littleredboat.co.uk/?p=2785.

I have noticed an incredible amount of usually well-balanced people suddenly developing an urge to get a cat (3 this week, 2 last week..)

Once they go ahead they either decide to get two, or they don’t get them spayed in time or get an already pregnant cat and end up with kittens which they don’t have the heart to re-home. I know 5 different families/individuals with between 3 and 7 cats. Now if everyone else knows one or two people with cats…they are infiltrating every home.

Bearing in mind the well-known saying that dogs have owners but cats have servants, it’s not computers but cats that will be running the country and most people won’t notice it happening because they’ll be so busy running around serving their cats. Still cats running the country will probably be an improvement!

http://www.fotosearch.com/UNN207/u15537375

While it is vital that those that are genuinely incapable of work receive the financial support they need; ‘the argument of the libertarian right against the welfare state is that it provides a massive disincentive to work’.  It is well documented that we are seen as country that offers ‘free money.’ However, it is easy to get into a cycle of depression so that when you have  been out to work for a while, you lose confidence, and the will to do find a job.  For those receiving job seekers allowance and those with disabilities and illnesses where they can do something, why not make the money conditional on doing voluntary work?   

Volunteers are needed in so many areas, that there will be a role to suit every taste, giving the claimant plenty of choice.   This would enable them to meet people, make friends and increase their skills while maintaining a role in society so that they would be more likely to find life fulfilling and enjoyable.  It also looks better on a CV to have done something rather than nothing. 

Some posts could have a bonus or commission payment attached which would increase motivation and add the reward factor!

Area Store Wet floor eradicators.  Why do so many stores leave the wet floor and put these signs in place.  They need somebody on call with a walky talky to dash from store to store and deal with the mess.

Charity shop laundering technician.  This will makes sure  the clothes are clean and sweet smelling so the stores lose their musty odour and sell more goods.

Bag police.   Their mission - to lurk in stores at every checkout muttering ‘do you really need that plastic bag?’

Fast Food Trash Busters.  To collect all the rubbish deposited in the street and return it to the original outlet, dumping it in the middle of the floor when they are open, or posting it through the door or piling it up outside when closed.

Okay, joke!  But there are many vital and interesting roles:- giving carers respite, youth work, hospital radio, conservation, advice, support for the elderly, helping in schools……etc.

Apart from money rewards for extra work could be to get on a top priority list to be selected for TV talk or quiz shows, or even (if they must) reality TV.

Saw this post and thought of some more.

‘Let’s not discuss the weather.’

‘No, I don’t drink tea.’

‘I love children.’

‘I hate animals.’

‘Isn’t Gordon Brown the best Prime Minister ever.’

,Isn’t life wonderful.’

I watched ‘Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation,’ the other day. They were looking at the female body shape and identified 12 types; including lollipop and brick. They carted one hundred women to the Long Man at Wilmington. The Long Man is a giant male figure cut in chalk on Windover Hill, in East Sussex. There are many theories around his/its existence. Some believe he was a war god, some an ancient fertility symbol, while others a religious figure. Some think that he did originally have his full manhood but the prudish Victorians disposed of it.

The women, dressed in white boiler suits, lay head to foot along the lines of the Long Man and altered his body shape, adding pigtails, breasts and hips, and moving to demonstrate different female body types.

It turned into a typically British farce when twenty-two pagans gathered to protest during filming, because they believe that the site is sacred.

The group formed a circle and chanted, and the eerie wailing could be heard in the background while the cameras rolled - hilarious. It was like the mystics from the old 80’s film Dark Crystal. Even funnier was when Trinny gave one of the druids some fashion advice – to wear a wider belt with his robe.