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Ha. I didn't eat a single chocolate today. Instead I ate liquorice allsorts, which are basically candy methadone. Oh and some Love Hearts and some Squashies. Oh wait. I nicked some of my son's Smarties. One day at a time.
We're going home tomorrow and hopefully that will mean I can slip back into exercise and eating only mung beans.
We've had some amazing food this week, especially impressive as it's super difficult to cook for 20 people. We took it in turns, though Catie handled our night with an amazing fish pie. It was mainly difficult to know the quantity of ingredients required. I thought she'd got way too much stuff, but it was only a little bit too much, which is the ideal amount. Everyone gets as much as they want and there's some left over for lunch tomorrow.
I have made up for my lack of large-scale cooking skills by doing a couple of stints of washing up. I did about half of today's lunch stuff which still took me over an hour. The kitchen has two dishwashers but they were already full when I started. I chased the other helpers out of the kitchen as I wanted to listen to York fail to get 8 league wins in a row (they nicked a draw in the last minute, though should have settled things in the first half- for about ten minutes York were top of the league).
In my teenage years I did everything I could to avoid helping out with the Christmas dishwashing (or providing any real help in the kitchen all the year round). I don't know why I was so determined to be a selfish prick or show so little gratitude for all the hard work of my mum. My favourite trick was to leave my chores for as long as possible, so that one of my parents would complain and I could say, "God, I'm doing it. Give me a chance!" Before then still not doing it.
Admittedly I will have my own teenagers soon enough and get my payback on this. Teenagers are terrible narcissists who think the whole world is against them because it expects them to do the bare minimum of helping out with stuff. Some people remain teenagers for all their adult life. Not me. I only carried on like that til I was about 40.
And the joke is on me because washing up is one of the most enjoyable things you can do. Especially when it's just you doing all of it. I found it very relaxing and satisfying to wash, dry and put away. It might just have been great to get some time alone after spending a week in a house with loads of other people including some very noisy children (to be fair, most of those were mine).
I know I have many teenage readers, so I want to put this message out there. Guys, me, your hero, loves washing up and so should you. It's better than watching TV or going on an iPad or taking drugs or thinking about sex, but being too shy to ask anyone to do it with you. Also it will make your mum happy (though mine didn't even notice I'd done anything today). You'll get more out of it then you give.
Maybe I'll get some T-shirts made up saying "Richard Herring says Do The Washing Up!" You will look cool if you wear one and I will look very cool for telling you about this.
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