How to... Keep house

Given that I’ve been a disciple of the Lakeland catalogue since the age of 19, I’m always slightly forlorn that our home never looks as good as I’d like.

People fall into four ascending categories where housekeeping is concerned: absolute slobs; clean but untidy; tidy but grubby (or “Fur coat and no knickers” as my Gran would disapprovingly have put it) and Anthea Turner.

I’m a “Clean-but-untidy”. While visitors may have to step over three pairs of Crocs, a sleeping cat and a broken umbrella to enter our home, I take comfort from the fact that you could literally eat your dinner off my bathroom surfaces. I also have a thing about spotless plugholes and dishwasher filters - unfortunately places that visitors don’t tend to inspect, unless you insist, in which case they tend to look awkward and suddenly remember a dental appointment.

By contrast, most of my friends are Tidy-but-Grubbies - it all looks great, until you go to move something in the bathroom and find it is welded on with soapscum and rust. An old boyfriend’s stepmother was a prime example: her house could have been featured in Country Living magazine, but after two years we found out that she didn’t bother changing the sheets between guests, relying instead on a few squirts of Febreze. The thought still makes me shiver.

I own a brilliant, tongue-in-cheek book called Feng Sh*** by Anna Crosbie, and I’ll leave you with some of her tips:
· Bookshelves make an ideal holding pen for miscellaneous chores – items you intend to file some day, return to the shop for a refund, or post to your cousin in Australia.
· Buy a coffee table with a lower shelf designed to display posh, oversized photographic books. Use the shelf to create an 8ft³ living sculpture entitled “I think my car keys are in there somewhere”.
· Every home needs a pinboard on which to display menus, eclectic business cards, expired supermarket reward scheme vouchers, inspirational recipes and mystery post-it note phone numbers. Cull the contents only when drawing pins become dysfunctional.

Twitter 1, Argyll and Bute Council 0

As 1) an ex teacher and 2) a glutton, I've been watching the Martha Payne thing unfold on Twitter today with some interest. For those who have been living in a shed with their eyes shut and earplugs in, she's a precocious Scottish 9 year old who set up a blog in April photographing and reviewing her school dinners. Yesterday Argyll & Bute council told her to stop, citing tearful, demoralised dinner ladies and blatant misrepresentation of school dinner portion policy (Yes, such a thing exists!)  After a media frenzy, a bigwig at the council overturned the ban a few hours ago.

The irony is that nine times out of ten, Martha's pretty complimentary about the food, often more so than you would expect from looking at the photo. For instance, a recent dinner of Macaroni Cheese, which looked to me like something you would step round on a city centre pavement on a Saturday night, garnered a perfect score of 10/10.

Having experienced primary school catering first-hand at various points between 1986 and 2012, I think things are on the up overall, although it's been a bumpy trajectory. I managed Suffolk school dinners for about half a term when I was 9 before giving up after a meal of hockey-puck-like burgers and home-made crisps that oozed oil when prodded with a fork. The thought of this still makes me want to retch 26 year later.

My little sister's bete noire, in the early 90s  - different school, same county - was "tuna flan". This sounds revolting and indeed was. It was invariably served with frozen mixed veg of the sort that comes in 2kg bag for 79p from Heron Foods. Hot tuna is the devil's work anyway and combined with mealy broad beans, overcooked diced carrot and the hard ends of green beans, poor baby sis tried in vain to keep it down. I think that was the start of her pack-up period, too.

At the same time I was at high school and the dinners were, largely, delicious. I still hanker after their Mushroom Bake and a baked potato with cheese and herbs, followed by splitting a tiny paper bag of chips with my friend Helen if we both put in 17p. I have nothing but happy memories of the catering at high school, so it is probably no coincidence that I was a bit of a chubber.

After 1995 I didn't set foot in a school canteen until 2006, when I got a job as a TA prior to teacher training. One of the best performing primary schools in Leicestershire, the children's academic excellence clearly wasn't based on what they were eating at lunchtime. Here is a blog post I wrote at the time:

We all love the Jamester, but let’s not pretend our kids are going to come home from school packed full of vitaminy goodness as a result of the new guidelines for school meals.

The hot dinners at my primary school, which I am contractually obliged to force daily down the throats of 15 retching four-year-olds, have allegedly been “healthified” already. So don’t worry, catering managers! Just follow the [name of school removed] four-point plan for Exploiting Every Loophole.

•  When serving spaghetti Bolognese, don’t forget to make it out of the cheapest meat possible then add three times the normal quantity of water, such that it looks and smells like dog diarrhoea.


• Tiresome vegetarian pupils getting you down? Just buy a huge bag of frozen mixed vegetables at the start of term, then serve them daily. With tomato sauce and pasta. With white sauce in pastry. With pasta and cheese in a bake. With some hideous pastiche of curry sauce. Don’t worry, they don’t need protein! It’s their own fault for being pernickety!


• You can get away with serving mashed potato as a main meal if you mix it with a sneeze of Cheddar and call it “cheese and potato pie”. For maximum lethargy, serve with a jacket potato and beans on the hottest day of the year.


• You are not obliged to name a type of meat before the word “burger”.

At the school I've just left, the dinners were either fantastic or shocking. You had to read the menu really carefully in advance. On a bad day, I'd prefer an Aldi pot noodle to flabby fish fingers, dry pasta and chewy sweetcorn. In contrast they did cracking roasts, and their pizza with jacket potato and coleslaw was ambrosia of Last Supper worthy deliciousness. But there was never enough of it, and this appears to be the crux of Martha's complaint too.  One one occasion she recounts being given just one potato croquette, and says she couldn't concentrate all afternoon.

I taught the oldest kids in the school, and every time we held a class council the subject of portion sizes came up - the unfairness, as they saw it, that in a 5'9" eleven year old and a 3' four year old were given roughly the same amount of food. Martha's school apparently told the children a few days ago that they could have unlimited bread and salad. Well, so could we, in theory, but in practice a bowl of salad (of the same size I'd make at home for my husband and me) had to go round a hundred or so kids. Martha's school also seems to have the odd arrangement that you can only have fruit if you've cleared your plate. With public health in Scotland as dire as it is, surely fruit consumption shouldn't depend on whether you have already forced down sausage and chips and treacle tart?

Martha's blog is here. The famous one-croquette meal is here, a particularly nutrient-free attempt at Chinese cuisine is here and in fairness to her dinner ladies, their Jubilee efforts look absolutely lovely.

10

Trying to rid the car of the smell of spilled petrol, I left the boot open. Through two hours of heavy rain.

Niggly

I'm having one of those days when nothing really major goes wrong, so you don't feel properly entitled to be grumpy, but a string of trivial things make you quite irritable. Here is the list, and yes, I do realise that compared to pestilence, famine and world hunger they are pretty trivial.

1. A large, very thin spider has taken up residence in the bathroom. Just as I went to put the plug in and run my bath this morning, I saw one of her legs retract into the plughole where she was hiding. I couldn't stomach the thought of drowning her, so I had a shower instead, and my unshaven legs feel like Velcro.

UPDATE: I might as well have shaved my legs, as Reggie has just eaten her. "What's that in your mouth, Reg? Cotton? Oh..."

2 .Tried a new hair styling product. Hate the smell and it's lingered all day. I smell like a Year 9 boy's changing room.

3. I am on Morning Cat Duty for a friend, whose house I pulled up at on the way to work before realising I hadn't brought her front door key with me.

4. Left my mobile in my husband's car yesterday.

6. Was meant to be at work until 1.15. Stayed chatting until 2.45.

7. Naively volunteered to fill the lawnmower petrol can. Little did I know that petrol pumps have about the same flow rate as a fireman's hose. Drenched the forecourt and myself, much to the amusement of the men in the booth. (The petrol can got about half of it.) This proves that I should have absolutely nothing at all to do with the cutting or maintenance of lawns.

8. Tried to saw a slice off the bread I made last night, which has the approximate colour, texture and heft of one of Moses' tablets of stone. In so doing, robustly grated the antistick coating off the kneading paddle which had stuck in it.

9. Listened to answerphone. Man meant to be purchasing loft ladder at 9.30am tomorrow had left angry voicemail from outside my house at 9.30am today.

10. Don't know. Too scared to move off the sofa.