Know him by his trail of breadcrumbs

Quick one today, with it being Friday and everything.

Most of you will (hopefully) have read a few of the stories about my mother, both the ones she features in when she was alive, and those that she still manages to shoe-horn her way into after she'd run down the curtains and joined the choir invisibule.

This one takes place in about 1976 when I was eight and she was still toe-curlingly alive.

Can you imagine the single most embarrassing thing that a Mother can do to her young son?

No, not that, or that, Yes, that probably is more embarrassing, but it's not what I'm talking about... I'll put you out of my misery, she got a job at the school I went to as, what I guess you'd call a Teaching Assistant nowadays.  She had been there there for a while when a position as a cookery (because it was still called cookery then) teacher came up.

She always used to tell us that she got it because she had a certificate from a cookery course that she'd done, but we always knew that she'd put the Head-Teacher in a headlock until he'd agreed - It was common knowledge.

She used to cook all kinds of things, Jam Tarts (When Primary kids were still allowed to heat jam to boiling point), Fudge (With boiling hot sugar), Cakes (The kids put their own stuff in the ovens of the school kitchen), stew (With razor sharp carving knives - Which she always maintained were much safer than those blunt 'Special needs' knives that they were supposed to use... Actually, no-one used the term 'Special Needs' - as it hadn't yet been invented, it was generally held, by teachers and children alike, that the only people who used them were from a large country between China and Russia, and it's capital used to be called Ulan Bator - it was a different time.)

So anyway, there was this one chap,  Let's call him Billy... But only because I can't for the life of me remember his actually name, otherwise I would gladly have used it.  He was sturdily built, certainly no stranger to sweet, fatty foods and possessed of a greasy complexion with straggly hair to match.  His family history, should you have gone back a couple of generations, was of a nomadic nature and the Council-house where he lived was generally believed to be the first bricks and mortar home that anyone in the family had ever had.

And he was a bully.

My Mother was very big on pre-lesson cleanliness, she would check her pupils' hands and nails before they entered class, also going as far as to sniff their hands when they returned from the toilet - Which I understand would be classed as common assault now.

On this particular occasion, the class was making bread and 'Billy' had been returned to the bathroom to 'try washing his hands' about four times before she was satisfied, the girls in the class had started to giggle at him and his face was an angry beetroot colour.

She showed the kids what was expected of them, how you added water to flour and salt and kneaded it until you had a dough etc.  Then she stopped, and showed them her hands.

'She how far the flour goes, it doesn't even pass my wrists.  If I it goes past your wrists, it means that you're being too vigorous, if it goes past your elbows, it means that you are not paying attention... Something for which I will not stand.'

So the kids got on with it, my Mother going from kid to kid, offering encouragement, warning when the flour was making its way towards their armpits... Then she got to Billy... It was safe to say that the flour was past his elbows, quite a lot of it was in his hair, and in fact, some seven years later when his first child was born, it sprang from the womb covered in the same flour, as did his first grandchild, fourteen years later.

So, Mother was upset, the girls started giggling again, which upset Billy, so tensions were high and there may have been shouting and possibly name-calling. Now, for the uninitiated, let me explain that no-one ever shouted at my mother - For years, on the back of all Birth Certificates issued in Derby it said, in large print, 'Oh yes, and another thing, don't shout at Mrs Dandy (Senior) it will be bad.'

With a cry of 'I did warn you that I would be upset!' She picked up Billy, threw him over her shoulder in the manner of an irate fireman, and conveyed him to the school kitchen.  where she opened one of the huge ovens, lit it and made to throw him inside.

She swore, after the fact that she wasn't going to actually put him inside and close the door.

Well, not all the way closed anyway.

Billy didn't know that at the time of course (And no-one was completely convinced after the fact either) - And he became frightened, so frightened in fact that some of his 'fear' may have accidentally leaked out.

She had to throw that particular cheesecloth blouse away.

Terrible waste.

I see a tall, dark stranger

Crap! is it that time already?

Better start Blogging I guess.  I could go for the whole Easter story, what the Bible actually says about it, how it's another stolen holiday that the pagans celebrated ages before Christianity was brought to England, how commercialization has ruined it. How it's a travesty...

But in fairness, I really like chocolate, so it would be a bit two faced of me.

So I sit here, on the verge of a four-day weekend pondering what to re-hash in a humourous fashion and entertain you guys with before you zoom off to Paris for the weekend (or whatever it is that you're telling your workmates you're going to do, we all know you're going to spend the days sat in a dimly lit room playing COD or FIFA, in your pants, whilst the snow falls outside like the cobwebbed cape of Thanatos himself.

So I thought long (lie) and hard (lie) about today's subject... Fortune telling.

There are many ways that people claim to be able to tell the future, there's palmistry (Reading of lines on the palms), hepatoscopy (Reading of entrails), scrying (crystal ball and water-bowl reading) and tasseography (Reading Tea Leaves - Which was a favorite of my paternal Grandmother), to name but a few.

I'm not saying it's all tosh, it could all be cockroach jugglingly true for all I know, but it's very open to abuse... And not in a good way.  In the olden days, anyone who was a bit bald, and a bit mad, and fairly greek, could set themselves up as an oracle, all it took was a bit of narcotic incence, and possibly getting someone from Handmaidens R Us to pop in on a Wednesday afternoon, wear the diaphenous clothes and wiggle about a bit. while you talked about auspicious circumstances, stars rising in the East and the lion lying down with the lamb.

So I got to thinking, I'm a bit bald, and a bit mad, and I like Greek food...

Welcome to the Grotto of Dandyissimus, newest, wisest and most accurate of the new wave of oracular prophets.  Cross my palm with coinage (but not the Euro, obviously, because that's worth less than a dog-fart in a crash helmet) and I will foretell your future with such accuracy as would blind a hamster.

You want a free trial?

Is that the marketing model that you're used to?

OK... Here goes - Some free glimpses into your future, but seeing as you buggers haven't paid me, I'm not going to tell you whose fortunes they are, or whenabouts they're going to happen.  (these are in no way just things I have overheard, or have been told in confidence)

Your husband, who loves you very much, will start living a double life.  Don't worry, he's not gay or having an affair or anything like that.  He finds himself mixing jam, drinking chocolate powder and 'space dust' and spreading it over his body with your best spatula every time you go out.  He will enjoy the feeling at first, but after a while it will become a compulsion, and his usage of it will get more and more extreme.   Things will come to a head when you notice that your toothbrush is sticky and smells of strawberries and every time he breaks wind, it crackles slightly.

An entire group of people, who currently meet under social circumstances will decide, after a celebratory night out, possibly after some kind of sporting event, to have commemorative tattoos.  These will done in ultra-violet ink and will look like random lines drawn all over their bodies.  However, when they stand in a human pyramid, naked, at a local nightclub, the silhouette of Deliah Smith 'tasting a tangy sauce' personally prepared by Heston Blumenthal will be revealed.

Two seperate people, in two wildly seperate locations will start vociferously complaining about the quality of british cheese since we joined the EEC.  MI5, intercepting their (completely seperate) emails will assume that there is some kind of lactose intolerant terrorist uprising on the way and ban the sale of Stinking Bishop and Sage Derby to anyone without a Rolls-Royce.  Questions will be asked in Parliament, which will lead to the leader of the opposition being 'outed' for running his own, black market trade in Dairylea Triangles.

Your wife will decide that her current position as your nearest and dearest, agree-er to your hair-brained schemes and backer-up of your obviously idiotic ideas is no longer enough.  She will start her own business on eBay, buying up surplus fur coats, cutting them up and sewing them back together as suits for those bloody awful sphynx hairless cats.  All will be rosy at first as all over the world people who have mistakenly bought these obscene creatures realise their mistake and buy a new coat for their hairless companions.  Then there will be a short period where sales will fall off due to an expose in the press over allergy issues and then business will boom again as she branches out into fur coats for reptiles who wish to live in arctic areas.  (P.S. she will also discover she is a lesbian and will take you for every penny you have.)

The Government will decide that to bolster the economy, they will put a tax on ducks, only privately held ducks are targeted and the bill (if you'll pardon the pun) flies through Parliament (if you'll pardon the pun) without notice by the general populace.  The next morning you will be visited by agents of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, demanding £6,000,000 pounds tax on the 20,000 ducks that you purchased from a man that you didn't realise at the time was the Speaker of the House of Lords.

And finally.

One of you out there will realise that that thing that your Aunt left you in her will, that one on the mantlepiece that you hate, but can't bring yourself to throw away, the thing that makes you feel all tingly and nauseous in equal measure.  The one with the purple stone that looks like it glows when you look at it out of the corner of your eye, is the key to the time machine that she had in her cellar.  You'll realise this just after the developer you sold her house to to make a quick buck has bulldozed it and built a housing estate on top.  You spend the rest of your life digging in peoples gardens in the darkness... You disappear one night, never to be seen again.

Happy Pascha to everyone.