You may remember that in my last post there was a picture of a box of Quality Street chocolates.  You may also remember that I told you these were very popular with ex-pats.

The reason there was a box of Quality Street in the house at all is this: one of the forums I belong to is running a Secret Santa, and because it’s an international forum, it’s already well under way, to give people time to post things from various countries across the world.

And one of the American members of this forum, knowing that I’m English, sent me a plea for help.

‘Help!’ she cried.

I said that I’d do what I could, if only she’d elucidate.

‘My Secret Santa is a Brit who lives over here now, and she’s hinting that she wants some English candy!  And in particular, some Quality Street!’ she elucidated. ‘And we can’t buy it over here!’

Well, never let it be said that I’d ignore a chocoholic in distress, so I said I’d see what I could do.  And the next time I went shopping I picked up a variety of English sweets - which the Americans call ‘candy’ for some reason - and put them on the scales …

… whereupon I took a deep breath and sent a PM* to my friend.

‘Are you aware that the postage on your stuff is likely to come to .. um .. quite a lot?’  I said, cautiously.

She said she was.

So I went and added up the weights of various combinations of the items I’d bought and consulted the Post Office website (which I must say is very useful for making estimates of shipping costs) and I sent the results to my SS* contact.

‘Here’s a list of how much it would cost you to send the two boxes of chocolates, OR the three bags of sweets, OR one box of chocolates and the bags,’ I said. ‘You choose!’

‘Send the lot!’ she said.

So today I took a package to the Post Office.  It contained £9.60 worth of sweets in five packs.  Guess how much it cost to ship?

The lady at the Post Office raised her eyebrows when she weighed it, and she frowned and shook her head as she informed me that it would cost eighteen pounds and sixty-seven pence to send over, which is just about twice as expensive as the actual contents!

But it will all be worth it, because the things inside that package are more or less unobtainable in America and if you do find them, they cost an arm and a leg.

Hmm.  I think I know why.

*Personal Message

* Secret Santa

Not such an easy letter, Q, is it? But I’m doing my best because the challenge is half the fun of ABC Wednesday, after all!

Now.  The question is … what are those questions up there?  They are from the game Trivial Pursuit - and I have to admit, I love it!  We’ve had our edition a very long time, so we really need a new set of question cards as some are now quite out of date.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I do tend to hang on to things for years.  Games can work just as well for many decades, after all.  And books too!  I am blessed with the kind of memory which allows me to forget the plot, so I can read them over and over again and enjoy them just as much.

This one dates from the sixties. It’s a spy thriller - by Adam Hall, as you can see - about a secret agent by the name of Quiller.  There was a TV series back in the seventies, starring Michael Jayston and I loved that, too.  They’re lightweight stories, but nicely written and the hero is tough and intelligent.

These days, I can do much the same with movies, although I have to be careful not to watch them too often, or they do become very familiar.   My Johnny Depp collection of movies has to be rationed, so as not to take the edge off the fun.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re quite right. Neither of those titles have a Q in them.  And neither of the main characters have a Q in their names either. But Jack the Ripper was the quintessential serial killer, wasn’t he?  And that’s the subject of the movie ‘From Hell’.   The Libertine is the story of John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, born in 1647, and a writer of satirical and salacious poetry.  Needless to say, Wilmot used a quill to write with.  Nothing much else was available in those days!   He probably wrote on sheets of quarto, and he certainly did an awful lot of quaffing while he was at it.  A bit of a lad, was Wilmot.  Still, he left us with a few quotes, even if the only people likely to recognise them are students and scholars.

While we’re on the subject of movies, here’s another.

Lost in La Mancha.  No Qs there, either!  But bear with me.  This movie is about Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated attempt to make a movie, during which he was thwarted by the Spanish weather, air force jets and a painful illness in one of his actors, an elderly man who was to play Don Quixote.  Johnny Depp was in this, too - but he wasn’t the one who was unable to sit in the saddle and having to fly home.  The failed movie was ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote‘ and Gilliam still hopes to make it one day, but until then, he thought he could recoup a little of the losses by making this movie - Lost in La Mancha - as a documentary of the series of disasters which killed the project.

From the sombre to the frivolous - here we have a box of chocolates.

Quality Street is a very popular selection and is often requested by Brits living abroad.  It’s one of my favourites too - but again, like the movies, it has to be rationed quite severely or I’d quickly put on weight!

I’m trying very hard to keep up my level of exercise so that doesn’t happen, and to this end, tomorrow OH and I are going riding.  and guess what?

We go to a Western riding stable where they use Quarter Horses.  Aren’t they beautiful?

Now, before I quit writing, here’s something you probably don’t know about me. I’m a Quaker.  I don’t attend Meeting these days for a variety of reasons, but I still have a Quaker soul, and several Quaker books.

I might not always get it right, but the quest is the thing, right?

You know what I mean, don’t you?

Mothers tell their kids lots of things, but there are those particular things that lodge in a young mind and fester, sometimes for years. Things that kids don’t quite have the courage to question.

Here’s the one I remember best from my childhood:

‘If you go to bed wearing socks, you’ll wake up with a bed full of rubbish’

This one was said to me in tones of such dire foreboding that I very quickly took off the socks I was planning to wear in bed, and pulled the covers over my head to check that it hadn’t already happened.  Of course, I was only about six at the time, or I might have … I dunno … put them back on later and risked it, maybe.  But I was quite a timid child who always did as she was told (… and never let her soup get cold*)

Anyway, this admonition really played on my mind.  I can remember having vivid nightmares about waking up in a bed full of chocolate wrappers, soggy tea-leaves and assorted bits of junk.  Why this should have been so terrifying I have no idea, but it was. It was right up there with the skeleton dancing outside my window in the dead of night, and the very scary Ball of Wool dream.  Right bang alongside the dream where I was trying to cross a busy road by myself and the cars all had huge eyes for headlights and lunged at me as they zoomed past.

As I grew older, I tried to reason with myself about this Thing.  I told myself that Mum had just been kidding me and there was absolutely no substance in the rumour at all, and finally I put it out of my mind.  Then, many years later, I had an ‘Aha!’ moment when I was collecting the laundry.   And I understood exactly what she meant.

One of my young sons had in fact gone to bed in his socks. Not once, but several times.  And guess what?

His bed was full of rubbish!!

But, no.  Not chocolate wrappers and soggy tea-bags.  No lolly sticks or half-eaten sandwiches or scraps of used paper.  Just hundreds of tiny little woolly dust-bunnies, rubbed off his socks against the sheets.

Goes to show, doesn’t it?  You can’t be too careful what you tell your kids, because some of it might stick!

And there’s a damn good chance they STILL won’t get it right!

*Brownie points for anyone who can tell me where that comes from

Babs of Beetle Blog has graciously awarded me the Butterfly Award ‘for the coolest blog I ever know’ - thanks, Babs!!

I’ll ignore the grammar, because it is churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth, even when the award does come with the injunction to find TEN other blogs to award it to!

But I’m truly chuffed to be given a ‘cool blog’ award, because I was never one of the cool kids.  I wasn’t even a cool adult, although my kids were very kind and said I was ‘insane, but in a good way’.  Actually, they still say that … maybe I should be concerned, but actually I’m secretly pleased.  Probably because I’m insane.  But in a good way!

Whether I can find ten blogs to award it to is another matter.  You see, while I do love getting awards, part of me rebels about the ‘pass it on to x number of other blogs’ part.  I know that when you’re busy it can get a little onerous to do, and I know that some blog owners just don’t like the commitment.

So I hope Babs will forgive me if I cut down the number of blogs a tad.  I’m going to award this one to Maureen of I’d Rather Be Blogging today, and then I’ll come up with one more blog each time I post for a while.  I like doing it that way.  Maureen’s blog is very cool - partly because of the content (which I love) but also because it’s one of the coolest designs out there. It’s very easy on the eye.

Another award comes from Petra Michelle, of Who’s Role Is It Anyway? who does those wonderful screenplays inviting you to choose your actors for the roles.  Always fun!  Petra has given me the Superior Scribbler Award.  Thank you, Petra!  I’m honoured.

I started this blog for the writing practice, and to make me write something every day, if it was only this.  I’ve found it a lot more fun than I expected, and I’m making friends, too.  This is a huge bonus, and also unexpected, because I thought it would just be a kind of online diary/scribbling pad, and go largely unnoticed among the vast offering on the internet.

Now, I have to admit that I had no idea that Petra had another blog, but she does!  She also has one called - wait for it - Petra Michelle!   Well, I can be forgiven for that, perhaps, because there are things Petra doesn’t know about me.

For instance, like many others, Petra seems to think I’m a guy.  It’s the name, I know it is.  Jay is usually a man’s name, isn’t it?  But not in this case. I’m a woman in my fifties, married for over thirty years and with two adult sons.  I hope that sets things straight for everyone!  I’m not in the least offended to be mistaken for a gay man - there have been times when I’ve had to scan blogs closely for clues as to the gender of the writer - but I thought perhaps I should ‘fess up.

Hmm.  Maybe that’s why I get so much spam for Viagra, Cialis and the various dubious methods of penis enlargement?  I must say I was a little puzzled about that.

So anyway, here are the rules - and you should all know me well enough by now to know that I won’t be upset with you if you don’t comply.

1 - Should you choose to accept it, post the award on your blog with a link to the person who gave it to you

2 - Visit the blog of the originator of this award, Scholastic Scribe, and add your name/URL to Mr Linky

3 - If you choose to pass it along, post these rules on your site

4 - Post the names of the recipients, then let them know.

There.

Once again, I will pass it to just one blogger today, and perhaps a few more in future posts.

Today’s lucky recipient of the Superior Scribbler Award is  Granny Grimble of Granny Grimble’s Grunts.  Granny is 76 years old, and started blogging fairly recently.  Her blog is very much an online diary, but a very superior one, being reminiscences from her childhood, beautifully and evocatively written.  Go and see - if you or your parents lived through World War Two and/or the fifties, you’ll be fascinated - but do go back and start at the beginning.