Some life advice.
- Do not drop a cast iron le creuset casserole pan on your big toe. It will hurt. A lot.
- Do not put a chai teabag close to your nose and inhale deeply. It burns.
- Do not put your finger into boiling hot sugar. No matter how delicious it looks. Especially don’t do this when you have a holiday booked to California in a few days and then have to spend the entire thing with a bandage on you hand.
- Absolutely use the gloves provided with expanding polyeurethane foam. When it sticks and dries, your skin will look like an old man’s and you will spend the next fortnight picking it off.
- Do not spin on a chair with your eyes shut for a few minutes. You will feel dizzy. You will feel sick. You will have to go lie down for half an hour until it goes away. There will be nobody to blame but yourself.
- If you to want be a culinary pest, always prepare food that is to be shared with prime number of portions.
- If you have a penchant for buying socks, the rule must always be ‘one pair in, one pair out’. Otherwise there will be sartorial chaos.
- Do not leave your passport in your band uniform which is travelling back home in the van, when you’ll need it fly home from Amsterdam. You will be stranded, and you will have to beg to be allowed to fly home without it.
- Always tell yourself “Don’t put it down, put it away”. A game-changing habit that emphasises and ingrains the importance of maintaining organisation by immediately returning items to their designated places rather than leaving them out. This will keep your home tidy, reduce clutter, keep your partner happy, and eliminate those days that end up being entirely dedicated to dealing with all the accumulated instances—where this rule was not followed—all in one go.
- For many rough calculations you’ll be fine to assume that
. NB: tell your engineering and mathematician friends this to see them laugh and get very angry respectively. For a surprisingly accurate substitute you can also use , which is correct to within 0.04%. - When cooking a roast chicken to strip for later use, it is widely agreed that it is simply impossible to not eat some of the unlucky bird during the stripping process. There is of course a limit to how much the assigned stripper can sequester for personal consumption before the ruse is rumbled. Through extensive research, I have found this limit to be roughly 10-15% of the total meat extracted before having to suffer being slapped on the back of the head by your dining partner.
- When filling your hot water bottle, trying to avoid letting your gaze stray out of the window to see what those birds on the feeder are. You might pour boiling water on your hand, and you might be rightfully mocked for this.
- When on holiday in a B&B in the middle of nowhere, don’t attempt to cut the wax from a delicious wheel of Snowdonia Black Bomber cheese with an extremely sharp pocket knife. Definitely don’t cut the top 5mm of your thumb off and have to have the nice lady at the farmhouse patch you up because it’s at least 45 minutes drive to a hospital. The bleeding will not stop for 12 hours, and you will spend the entire night in pain with your thumb throbbing, and you will get very little sleep.