Radio 4

I have just transferred butter from a paper packet into a butter dish. Usually there is only real butter (still in the packet) anywhere near my person if it is linked so some extraordinary scenario. Like an afternoon tea party, at night. And six million scones. The inflection of this blog may even be off kilter as I am currently listening to Radio 4. It’s so calm and well pronounced. There’s a woman talking about cats. Last night I had a bath (first of 2010) and listened to Just a Minute, watched some of a god awful documentary about Aphrodite in which the presenter (I never want to know his name) pronounced Aphrodite incorrectly the whole way through and got far, far, far too excited at the idea that she was created by an explosion of sperm in the Cypriot sea.

I think the defining factor of my situation is that I come here, to my parents house – like a disposed writer in Tamara Drew or a useless, lonely work colleague in Another Year – to relax and ponder. But relaxing and pondering - without wifi – is dull. And may I just point out that neither of my parents are Tamsin Greig or Jim Broadbent (above films’ best bits respectively,) as much as I love them. It’s not that it’s dull, I managed to get worked up about George Osborne and Strictly last night to the point where my head and hands combined forces and I pronounced “I’m not a habitually violent person – well, since my last temper tantrum in 2001 – but I would really like to” (mum completed sentence) “wipe the smug look from his face” in reference to Osborne and the self-satisfied idiosyncrasy that he wallows in – unawares. Isn’t it worse that he really doesn’t realise how smug he looks? And that other people can see how convinced at his own abilities he is. You know he gets in every night and proffers a glass of Bristol Cream at the family portrait and announces ‘I done well, Mummay’.

When I stay with my parents I’m not sure what they really think; I think they think ‘I done well’ but there’s always a but. And I’m not quite sure where the Bristol Cream is kept. But then again, relaxing and pondering aside I’d much rather come home and be poked and prodded, hummed and hawed at but be able to have a natter about shiz openly, (yes and defend Strictly), than have parents that gave me enough false confidence to convince me I’m good enough to chuck together a budget for the UK in the midst of its meanest economic crisis for donkeys with little more than an abacus’ worth of number skills.