This week I have mostly been … a bit of a twat.

Yes, I have not covered myself in glory this week, indeed, while I concede I may have come up covered in something, glory is definitely not it. Cf my attempts to laminate bacon (yes, you read that right). But on the upside at least it was funny. More on that story … later.

#00A650 … SORRY oops, I mean Sorry. The cat has just sat on keyboard. Where was I? Ah yes.

Before we get to the funny bit, just a quick update.

The Kickstarter funded!

Woot! Not only did it fund but it finally came to rest at £985 from 41 backers. This now means I can do the book officially. I’ve tweaked the colours over the week and sent off for a proof copy of the paperback to see if it looks better. I’m slightly erring on the side of it being a bit too vivid rather than washed out, which can result from the transition from photos (RGB colour) to print (CMYK colour).

Anyway, considering that I doubted I’d get £100 I am absolutely stoked! If I’d left it going another 15 minutes I’d have got another £15 and hit £1000 as another potential backer went to try and put it over the line just after it had finished. Next time I know to leave it running a bit later.

General stuff …

These last few weeks I’ve been doing fair bit on probate. It’s is a bit of a ball ache but we are getting there, I think our application should go in next week.

On a lighter note, I have an event coming up and am also going with a friend to see Reginald D Hunter at the Theatre Royal which should be a gas.

Bury is surprisingly brilliant for comedy. I booked to go to a satirical show about politics a while back but the chap is ill and having treatment so it was postponed. With an empty theatre that night, clearly The Theatre Royal had a look round for something or someone else. Who?

Frank Skinner.

Seriously? Comedy legend at the drop of a hat anyone? Why yes please?

So me and my mate Jill went along to that and it was an absolute hoot. It’s like sitting with some really witty guy in the pub who just tells you funny stories. He was lightning quick. Seriously good.  The more I watch people do stand up, the more I realise; a) how comprehensively not smart enough to do it I am and b) how truly appalling my act must have been. Mwahahahrgh!

Blimey.

But yes, what a gas it was to see Frank Skinner … especially as I was in the middle of a bout of flu. Although, at the time I thought it was just a shit cold and that I was getting over it. I’d been feeling a bit odd so I spent the day in bed asleep and woke up feeling a great deal better. I dunno. Perhaps I was, but as well as seeing Frank Skinner’s show, I went on a metal detecting rally the next day which might, possibly, have put the kybosh on me. Either way, I soon discovered that no, I was not better, and I proceeded to spend the best part of a week in bed. Definitely a bonus gig that one, after the other performance was cancelled, not to mention squeaking in during an intermission in the flu.

So yay. Frank Skinner. And bonus, Jill did not get flu so I’m hoping no-one else did either, because I did feel incredibly bad about going to both the show and the dig and potentially giving it to others, when I finally had succumbed. Obviously, this being Britain, if we all stayed at home when we had a cold the streets would be deserted and the country would grind to a halt in winter. But flu? Yes, we do try not to give that to one another.

Other news with a neurodiversity tangent

This last three Saturdays, I’ve been donning my God bothering hat on Saturday mornings (as well as Sundays) to do some lent courses. They have been great fun and also rather lovely, especially the first one where we discussed how we came to become Christians and I enjoyed learning how interesting and varied other people’s paths to faith were.

Last week I talked too much, this week I think I managed, if not to talk less, then not to talk more than anyone else on my table. I do have a tendency to say too much though and I really have to watch it. I’m actually quite shy and socially anxious and I have an unfortunate propensity to over compensate by rattling on, and on, and never shutting up.

That said, I think different people take different levels of offence, and when they do, it’s probably more about their own brand of neurodiversity and how badly I’ve read the room. The great thing about places like church is that no-one appears to mind or, if they do, they hide it really well (a big thank you to any of them reading this and possibly an unofficial BAFTA nomination to anyone who did mind because I had no clue). I do try to rein it in though, especially if the people on my table seem to be quieter and more introverted. Also, I try to always help with the washing up afterwards, or putting the chairs away, so that if my unfortunate propensity to witter on has proved too much of a cross to bear for anyone, there is, at least, an upside to my being there and I have done something thoughtful and displayed a Redeeming Feature.

This week, the conversation on our table aligned rather well. We were like a bunch of autistic nerds hyper-focussing about God stuff. If you have a faith, it’s not often you get to talk about it among the normals. Not without people Looking At You In A Funny Way anyway. So I suppose it’s always going to be reasonably relaxing and we’re always going to be quite enthusiastic. It got me thinking about the whole reading the room thing. I mean, it’s interesting how different the interpretations of a phrase like  ‘polite conversation’ can be isn’t it? But I guess the nub of it is having the social nouse to work out what’s going on and tailor your style to fit accordingly. Bizarrely, I seem to be better at that in a stand up setting than a social one … which just shows how comprehensively I must suck at it. Gulp.

In defence of my deficiencies, I grew up in a house where everyone talked at once so ‘polite’ was quite a loose term and short of not insulting anyone (or at least only in jest) and refraining from resorting to actual physical blows, the niceties of how the words flowed back and forth wasn’t considered part of the issue. There was always a lot of information to be exchanged and everyone was enthusiastic and often perched on the edge of their seats. In many instances, so much Important Information had to be exchanged in such a (relatively) short amount of time, that in order to make full use of their time together, people ended up having more than one conversation at once.

Thinking about all this, I have a kind of generic memory from when I was probably about 14. I was sitting on a small stool one Boxing Day, because all the chairs were taken by adults, and more to the point, I was young, and still bendy and flexible enough to fold up onto a small stool, and they weren’t. My great aunt and grandmother sat either end of the sofa with Mum in between. My Grandfather was the other side of the room, chatting to Dad, while my brother was floating around somewhere, it may have been his turn to hand round the snacks, and my great aunt’s sons … which I think makes them removed cousins … might have been there, although they don’t feature in the memory so I can’t be sure. But I do remember that my grandfather was conducting a conversation with my father and me at the same time from one side of the room, while both my grandmother and great aunt were also each conducting a separate conversation with me at the same time, along with an animated chat with my mother, from the other.

Three conversations at once for me then, and a minimum of two at once for everyone else, including the blokes.

The room rang with laughter and cheery voices, it was sunny and the fire was lit, the bright light spilling through the windows shining onto the flames and rendering them almost invisible. The smell of cooking lunch wafted through the house and we were all drinking pre-lunch brandy alexanders which my father had made (taught by my grandfather, these were a bit of a feature at family parties and were something I particularly enjoyed).  We were eating salmon—smoked just up the road—on small, buttered squares of my mother’s homemade bread… with lashings of black pepper and lemon juice squeezed over it, of course. And as well as eating we were talking. A lot. I grew up thinking that was quite normal; a sea of enthusiastic conversations going on, and dialogue coming thick and fast from all sides. So much information to exchange, so little time, the more you give out the more you get back; maximum KBPS for everyone involved and then home for a lie down.

Even now, it’s easy to slip into conversing like that if I’m not concentrating, whereas both my menfolk find it extremely challenging, and toe-curlingly awful if I so much as interject details in a story as one of them tells it (standard procedure in my family growing up think Lee Mack on Would I Lie To You? Only probably not quite as funny). I have had to watch McOther on the phone before now, arranging to meet people on a day we can’t do and then wait until he hangs up to explain to him, and call them back, because he simply can’t handle being on the phone to one person and having another person talk to him. Not even if it’s to say something like, ‘We won’t be here that day!’

Likewise, I suspect I feel equally uncomfortable and exposed in situations where there’s a room full of people and only one person is allowed to speak at a time. I don’t know the rules of engagement, I can’t work out when the person speaking has finished, how anyone knows if it’s their turn to speak next or, more to the point, remember what I was going to say by the time it is my go, anyway. Then there’s that whatever I had to say usually pertains to something several sentences earlier in the speaker’s train of thought that is no longer relevant now. Tangents not allowed I guess, whereas I can’t imagine a conversation without the kinds of tangents Eddie Izzard would be proud of.

Awkward.

Almost as awkward as the way my cat is lying in this picture. Or when I was a kid and people used to think I wasn’t listening because I turned my ear towards them so I could concentrate on what they were saying. I still find it properly difficult to remember a thing anyone says to me if I have to look them in the eye during our conversation, but I do know to cup my hand round my ear now, if I turn it towards them for concentration purposes.

You’ve read all that on autopilot while wondering how I’m going to get from there to laminating bacon haven’t you?

Yeh. Well … looking at the sorry tale I’m about to relate, it’s probably all relative. Perhaps my reading the room skills aren’t as bad as my judgement in some other areas, considering some of the other things I do. But I suspect that merely means that the bar is set embarrassingly low. On we go then.

A serious lapse in judgement.

In my defence, I reckon the only difference between genius and madness is failure with this particular one… er hem … probably.  To put it another way, this is what happens when you combine an enquiring mind with less than stellar attention to detail, not quite enough information and very little forethought. I still reckon that if I’d thought this through properly I’d have pulled it off. But there we go.

This week I have been, mostly, laminating bacon.

Come again?

No really; bacon.

Thinking about it, perhaps I should have said, attempting to laminate bacon. McMini attended a gig ten days ago at which he won a signed piece of bacon by a local band he follows. It was framed. It was also raw. It’s been in the fridge for a week and on Friday I thought it might be a good idea to either a) bin it or b) preserve it in some way. Obviously the smart money is on binning it isn’t it? So what did I do?

That’s right. I decided to preserve it. (Here’s my moron’s anonymous card for your perusal.) Head desk.

Do you want to know how I did this?

Braniac-McBraniac here decided that if I did so carefully I could laminate the bacon; preserve it forever in the air-tight security of an A3 laminating pouch. OK on the face of it, the idea is sound isn’t it? … ish. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Apart from … well … you know … everything?

If I put the bacon in the middle of a really big laminating pouch and stuck it through, I reasoned (except that there was probably not much reason involved here but for the sake of finding a convenient adjective let’s call … whatever it was I did … ‘reasoning’) I reasoned that I could reverse the polarity direction of the pouch and would have something to haul the un-encapsulated end (is that even a word?) back out with should anything … untoward … happen.

So far, so good. I unframed the bacon, which had two rather worrying black dots on it and smelled not quite right but at the same time, was not as gagworthily high as I had feared it might. Mmm bonus.

OK a quick aside here people. If you’re going to laminate bacon … yeh, I know who the fuck would laminate bacon apart from me? But I digress; should you wish, for some God forsaken reason of your own, to laminate some bacon, you need to remember that it’s quite thick. Or at least, it’s quite a bit thicker than the gap-between-the-rollers that the usual sheet of paper and plastic pouch go through in your laminator.

You also have to remember that as the bacon goes through the laminator it will get hot and cook. Raw bacon is squishy and can be squished by the rollers so it will spread out and go through like a steak through a mangle. Cooked bacon is a lot more rigid. It will not spread out.

Now, I had realised the bacon-is-thicker-than-the-laminator thing going into this but clearly I hadn’t realised it quite hard enough.

If you are ever going to laminate bacon, can I suggest you add a critical step here? A step I missed. Once you have the bacon in the pouch, before you put it through the laminator, you need to flatten it. A LOT.

Thinking about it, you can do this with the kind of 2lb rubber twatting hammer (that’s a technical term) which I used to use, as a young woman, to hit the starter motor on my Triumph Spitfire when it jammed. I still have the twatting hammer and to be honest I was a bit of a twat not to use it to twat the bacon into flatness but there’s now’t as clear as hindsight is there? Anyway, on with the story.

Captain Encapsulator plugged in and running, I placed the bacon carefully slap bang in the centre of the pouch so there was room for it to flatten and spread, and started it through. As the lamination pouch began to exit, bacon in situ, everything appeared to be tickety boo. The tip of the bacon was where I had placed it and where it should be. It suggested that the rest would come through fine then, didn’t it?

Um … no.

But I thought so, so I took my eye off the ball, lulled by the crackly sounds of the plastic bending and flexing as it went through the hot elements. And then, just as the back end of the pouch disappeared into the darkness of the encapsuluator’s innards I realised that … no no no! That’s not how it should look. Where’s the rest of the fucking— Aaaargh! Aaargh. Reverse! Reverse!

I reversed the direction of the laminator.

Predictably the pouch, which had disappeared, didn’t come out again. It merely crumpled up, concertinaing itself into a zig-zag of melty bits.

Bollocks. Now what?

Nothing for it. Press on and hope the rest of the bacon comes through. So I started it forward again and listened to the whirr of the motor and the gentle crackling sound as the plastic continued on its merry way through whatever gubbins it goes through inside the laminator. The bacon was coming through or at least some of it, the major question was, how much? No way of knowing until the rest of the pouch came out.

As the last of the plastic exited the laminator (hoorah!) I realised, with dismay, that the greater portion of the bacon had not.

There was a hissing noise, much like the sound a slice of bacon makes when it hits the surface of a very hot pan. Next there was a smell. Despite the apparent age of the bacon and the dubious black spots in the middle, it was still the right side of utterly putrid to smell pleasing when fried. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Checking the laminated sheet I could see there was some bacon. The problem was the other bacon which appeared to be frying merrily somewhere inside the laminator.

A partial success then.

Now, I had a laminator full of bacon. Putting aside the legion health and safety issues surrounding this simple fact, there was a mechanical one too. Ergo, that if I tried to laminate anything else it would get stuck on the three quarters of a rasher of cooked (but still festering) bacon within and crumple up inside. I had to get the bacon out.

In a rasher moment (did you see what I did there?) I decided to try putting the laminated bacon through again in the hope that the sheet would push the rest of the bacon out. But the rest of the bacon had cooked. So all that happened was the plastic hit the part of the encapsulator that was blocked with bacon and stopped. Meanwhile, the rest was being gradually drawn in ..

Remember what I said about cooked bacon being harder and less squishy?

Yeh. That.

But I was on it this time, I reversed the polarity direction and the plastic pouch with its scattered porcine contents reappeared, crumpled but unbowed and more to the point un-melted. The last three inches of the laminated sheet with the bacon in, the ones that had been crushed up against the blockage within, was now matt with a layer of fat.

Oh dear.

For a moment I toyed with the idea of just lobbing the whole sorry mess into the bin.

No.

Never give up! Never surrender!

This was Captain Encapsulator. I had bought it for £5 at a car boot and it had seen many years’ faithful service. How hard would it be to take it apart and remove the bacon?

You can guess the answer to that can’t you?

Correct. It was extremely smecking hard.

It was I-spent-four-fucking-hours-on-Thursday-afternoon-and-I-have-still-not-reassembled-it-three-days-later hard. And having taken the encapsulator apart or at least, having taken enough of it apart to realise I could not take the roller assembly off and that the bacon was trapped in its innards forever between the two sets of rollers under the hot bit that melts the plastic. I knew it was going to be tough to free the bacon and the laminator from their unfortunate entanglement.

Except maybe it wasn’t. By running the laminator for a long time and essentially, cooking the bacon until it desiccated, I boiled off most of the fat and burned most of the bacon off the laminator’s principal parts. Small dried bits of meat came through the rollers and dropped through the small gap between the cold rollers that bring the pouch in and the hot ones that push the pouch out, landing on the inside of the casing, below. I cleaned those up with a hand held hoover and dried the rollers with kitchen towel until the grease stopped coming. I think the laminator is now clear of the vast majority of the actual bacon.

However, you know how, when you cook bacon, you get crunchy bits on the pan? Well, there are some of those on the metal part between the two sets of rollers, and surprisingly, my encapsulator lacks a teflon coating. The edges of any pouches I put through will get stuck on that I fear. Although, I suspect I may be able to remove it with ethanol and then run it with the casing off, putting a paper pouch protector through again and again. If I can find one, it’s not a laminator that needs the outer paper protective pouches normally so I have none and I’m not sure if they are used anymore these days.

So there we are.

The wages of stupidity are many hours wasted … and possibly a broken laminator … but the jury’s out on that one. I’ll let you know if I manage to fix it.

Ho hum. In the meantime … at least I wrote something even if it was just this. Onwards and upwards eh?