Nigella and Charles - you couldn't make it up!

I don’t know about you, but the public sparring match which is Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi is riveting me.

It’s a tabloid editor’s wet dream, of course, with all the salacious ingredients almost guaranteed to sell newspapers. Gorgeous curvaceous TV cook, millionaire art dealer several years older than her, publicly threatening behaviour, drugs, foreign servants, huge spending on fripperies and allegations of fraud by aforesaid foreigners. What could be better?

Apparently the tide of public opinion is supporting Nigella but that is hardly surprising. She is beautiful, talented, rich through her own endeavours and constantly on our TV screens. He is old, ugly, secretive and reclusive and not just rich but obscenely rich through the talent of others and plain old good luck in investment (you might argue he had foresight and exercised shrewd judgement, but that’s much less fun).

It seems that each new day brings further lurid allegations of wrong doing, law breaking or lack of morals. If it isn’t the fact (bandied across the front of various tabloids this morning) that they spent £25,000 on flowers in one year it’s their multi million pound collection of silverware stored in a special room and which costs £9,000 to clean (who cares? They can spend their money however they like). If it isn’t the coke sniffing, it’s the special fat free noodles which Nigella has allegedly been eating to attain her new, slim line figure. All grist to the mill!

I bought some of those noodles the other day in Holland and Barratt because say what you like about the rest of it, Nigella has lost a staggering amount of weight and surely it can’t all be due to stress? As you’ll know I’ve tried various diets over the years and not really had much success with any of them, or if so only short term. Whilst Christmas shopping at the weekend, I tried to find a new dress for Christmas Day, and failed because sadly, without putting too fine a point on it, I have an enormous overfed belly! So come post panto (about the third week of January) I plan to have another assault on the lard and therefore bought the noodles in anticipation (you may like to know that in an ironic twist, I am eating a homemade mince pie as I type this!).

To say fat free noodles look and feel weird is understating it. In appearance they look like nothing more than thin white worms, not noodle like at all. They have the feel of wet slimy string, all oozing about and slippery in the packet. I can’t honestly say they appear appetising in the slightest. They weren’t particularly expensive, but they certainly weren’t cheap and the packets are very small. I’m going to give them a try; but I don’t see them being a long term thing, although perhaps if you can afford to spend money on stuff to sniff up your nose and on costly flowers all year you don’t really care about that.

All the nasty allegations about one of my favourite TV chefs are rather disappointing (by the way she is also The Hubby’s favourite due to the food porn nature of her programmes. She’s lovely to look at, has curves in the right places and she can cook – what’s not to like?). No one is a saint, but she does seem to have had a rather colourful life over the last few years which, despite her earlier heartaches, can’t really be excused or justified. Mind you, Mr Saatchi certainly isn’t a saint either, so it would be completely wrong to apportion blame for the marriage break up to one or the other (allegedly he used to go round the house looking for dirt and make her grab the Marigolds and clean it up then and there – good job he never comes round to mine, then!).

No doubt this saga will run and run. There will be more scandalous allegations, and the press will have a field day. Nigella will bounce through it and after a short break will come back into the public consciousness more popular than ever (much like happened to Kate Moss when she was caught snorting coke on camera) and make loads more cash to fritter away on flowers. Charles Saatchi will disappear into his reclusive hole to be forgotten about by most and see his wealth increase further.

And no doubt some other public panto will come along with a couple more celebrities to entertain us. All depressingly familiar, and just showing what a shallow society we have become.

Too busy too blog!

I haven’t blogged for a while now, because life has been somewhat busy.

Principally, my time and mind has been occupied with a very unwell little puppy. Coco is a typical Labrador – always grubbing in the hedgerows and digging stuff up, then eating what she finds. Most often it is something totally unsuitable such as cat poo or her particular favourite, horse poo. But she’s not overly fussy and by and large will pick up and eat anything.

This time she clearly ingested something which disagreed in the most violent fashion with her insides. Normally a ravenous eater, she wouldn’t touch food nor, more worryingly, water, for two whole days. We came down one morning to find the carpet covered in vomit and bloody faeces, and throughout the day she was listless and sick even when she sipped water or had a few grains of rice. Desperately worried, we took her to the vet, who didn’t seem worried at all (presumably sees it all the time) and gave us some anti biotics and sent us on our way.

Things didn’t improve and the next day we took her back to the vets where she was kept in and put onto a drip, by this time fairly severely dehydrated. The nasty specimens we had scraped up from the rug have been sent off for analysis, and we don’t yet know what she ate although I’m sure we will soon. It could be anything, on walks we are always taking things out of her mouth that shouldn’t be in there and goodness knows what she digs up when she’s mooching round the garden. And there are definitely toadstools out there somewhere – no matter how many times you try to get rid of them they spring back up.

The vet, an infinitely patient man, checked her over for anything and everything including various canine ailments I rang up to suggest having looked them up on Google (which must be the bane of his life) and after 24 hours when she had stopped emitting foul fluids and seemed more herself and we had had enough time to steam clean the carpets, she came home. Apart from a raspy sore throat caused we think by the pipe put down her throat while she was sedated, she seems absolutely fine. It is an incredible relief, and I don’t think I have been so worried even when my children were ill.

The cost of all this of course, has been astronomic. X-rays, drugs, diagnostics and veterinary time are ridiculously expensive. Thank goodness we took out pet insurance, for which we pay a measly £12 a month and which we are just about to claim against for almost £600. It has made us think that perhaps we better investigate taking out insurance for the moggies, who fortunately have never been really ill or cost me much beyond their annual jabs.

On top of everything else it snowed the other day, and you will know if you read this blog last winter how much I hate the snow, hate being cold and hate being wet. It actually made people on the train speak to one another, mostly in horror, at whether they were going to get home and asking “this wasn’t forecast was it?” looking out of the window with worried eyes.

I’m supposed to be avoiding stress to bring the old blood pressure down. Recent events can’t have done it any good, and it had gone up to treatable levels when I last saw the doc before all this happened so I am now taking tablets every day (someone asked me what drug it was and not remembering exactly, I said "Ritalin" which made them snort with laughter. It isn't, of course). I have had to resort to buying one of those old people’s pill boxes with the days of the week on it so I remember whether I’ve taken them or not – of everything that is going on, that is the one thing which has made me feel oldest!

To finish it all off nicely, my own work has gone crazily busy and The Hubby has been job hunting like mad. On that front at least we have some good news in that he has some temporary work for a few months, which will keep the wolf (or at any rate the debt collectors) away for a little longer.

It seems like it was time someone gave us a break, it’s been a pretty tough year whichever way you look at it.