Guest Blog: Nigella Lawson

Us working mums have hectic schedules and it’s easy to neglect the little things in life – like washing your hands after you’ve been to the toilet. And when you’ve a diet that’s as rich and varied as mine, the bathroom can become a seething, nightmarish jungle of microscopic ghouls.

Indeed, when my children were potty training, I was elbow deep in faecal matter for the best part of a decade and we all just had to learn to live with it. These days, my internal flora is a miracle of science but not everyone is so formidable – as I discovered one evening when I had ‘Baroness W’ over for dinner. Instead of complimenting me on my glistening clam, she was abruptly taken out with a nasty bout of dysentery. That was one unctuous, steaming rump she’d never forget – but sadly for all the wrong reasons.

The following Sunday, before I got knuckled down in the kitchen, my husband caught me emerging from the bathroom with shame on my hands again. He raised one eyebrow at me so I flashed him my best coy smile, murmured the word ‘exquisite’ – and then quite forgot what I’d been doing!

Well, as you can imagine, what happened next rather called to mind the story of the old lady who swallowed a spider, which wriggled and tiggled and jiggled inside her. Except the spider was a waterborne lovely called ‘norovirus’ that made a terrible mess of our Egyptian cotton sheets.

(In this situation, you might want to introduce some Febreze, but I can’t recommend enough the difference made by shelling out that little bit extra on a Jo Malone ‘Serpent and Black Daffodil’ room spritz. Delectable!)

I was curious about our playful microscopic companions, so I invited my professor friend over for supper. He took a few scrapings and revealed up to 500 families of bacteria were living between my breasts. At this stage, I considered it wise to remain silent about the special folding method I’d used to get the perfect fluffiness on the cheese souffles. But a word of advice would be to stick to a palette knife in future. Stiff peaks!

These days, I’ve learned my lesson so I always take care to pump generously onto my guilty fingers – I could literally squirt all day long. You can buy supermarket own brand handwash but I rather prefer the special cleaning power of Cinzano and crushed diamond. Then, I simply work myself up to a good old-fashioned lather before replacing my fist into my mouth and gnawing slowly. Yummy!

 

 

Creative people likely to suffer from pretentiousness

ARTISTIC people are prone to being full of shit, according to a new study.

Research by the Institute for Studies found a link between creativity and being a jumped-up tosser with a stupid scarf.

Professor Henry Brubaker said: “Writers, artists, musicians and even the people who make adverts for fucking bath products, they all have a psychological flaw that makes them think they’re really, really amazing.

“If you look at pictures of Virginia Woolf mooning around with her toff mates, you can tell she reckons she’s pretty deep.

“‘I’m the shit’, she’s thinking, ‘because I’ve just written a book about a boring day trip’. Whatever, I bet she’d have been hopeless with a puncture repair kit.

“And Salvador Dali. That moustache. What a twat.”

Brubaker believes that artistic pretentiousness is also a tool for avoiding domestic chores.

He said: “Picasso consistently refused to put the bins out, making up lame excuses about how he was too busy creating Cubism. Yet he always had plenty of time for shagging.”