Is Mother Nature having a laugh?
I mean really, is she sat in her ivory tower somewhere in the clouds, having a cuppa and sniggering behind her hand, Horrid Henry-fashion (Dennis the Menace-fashion for more mature readers), saying to herself: "Let's see how they handle this one!"
I refer to the approximate, yet highly likely, timing of a woman's menopause years to, frighteningly, coincide with her children being teenagers.
C-C Syndrome appears to have arrived in my life of recent months and, guess what, I have one pre-teen and one full-blown one, thank you Ms N!!!!
I'm in denial of course, so refuse to use the M word by name and am affectionately referring to it as Cardi on-Cardi off Syndrome, or C-C for short. (In winter, my acronym will still work as I'm darn sure it will become Coat on-Coat off)
Anyways, before the C-C central heating fires up once again and I strip off and lay naked on the lino (or before my boss comes in), back to those boys and their unwittingly funny banter.
Just a normal day having tea with the pair and Teddy, the older one, is telling Daniel, the younger one, about the fingerprint scanning system which they use in his high school canteen to take payment for dinner.
A quick aside; I genuinely wonder if Teddy thinks he stores money under his skin. I'm not sure he realises it links to an account where I regularly, oh so regularly, deposit wads of money to fund his relentless diet of crap followed by more crap. I thought Jamie Oliver had some sort of say over what they eat in schools these days, nothing resembling healthy seems to be on the menu at my son's school.
Well, back to the tea table at home, and Daniel, who is heading to high school next year, asks his brother how the fingerprint scanner works: "How do you pay for your dinner at school Teddy?"
Teddy: "They use a thumb-scanning machine."
Daniel nearly chokes on his sausage sandwich (yes, looks like Jamie isn't in charge of the menu in our house either), and, clearly horrified, blurts out: "What!?!? A bum-scanning machine???????"
He then asks me politely if he can please go to a different high school to Teddy, to allow him to preserve his dignity at dinnertime.
And speaking of dinner. In Yorkshire, we famously call a spade a spade but in London it seems they're intent on calling it anything but.
On a recent trip, I discovered that in London, menu items such as salmon or chicken are generically referred to as 'protein'. I selected a salad in the British Library café, only for the long-suffering counter assistant to spot a northerner a mile off and pretentiously sigh, 'do you want protein with that?', barely disguising her eye roll when I politely asked what the fuck she was on about!
I then proceeded to order a side plate of complex-carbohydrates, a dollop of polyunsaturated fat, a smidge of starch, a slurp of dairy, a soupcon of caffeine and some refined sugars for good measure. I asked her to go easy on the pesto which, never mind belonging to its own food group, in my opinion needs a Government health warning, along with Apium graveolens (or celery as it's known up north).
After my yummy protein, I asked the chap on the Library's information desk whether I should walk or take the tube to the National Gallery. He assured me it was far too far to walk, proclaiming: "And I'm a keen walker, look, I have a FitBit and everything."
I took his advice and set off to the underground station only to find it surrounded by the flashing blue lights of police cars and ambulances. I asked a man in a news kiosk what was going on and got more information than I had bargained for: "Somebody has jumped in front of a train," he said, and then added: "I once worked in a hotel and found a man hung in a wardrobe."
I walked to the National Gallery, it took me less than an hour. We're made of stern stuff us northern lasses.
