How much time do you spend washing dishes?

I

 used to think I spent about 2 hours every day washing/drying dishes and putting them away. Not any more my friends.

I must be the only woman over 40 who has NEVER had a dishwasher... until now.

Almost everyone I confessed to about living without would look at me as if I’d grown another head: “What? You wash up? Every day?”

Yep. The truth is when there was just the two of us we really didn’t need one but when the kids came along it was a whole different story.

It’s taken a mere five years to get one, purely because we followed the wrong advice, which was that it would be very costly to put in a dishwasher.

Since we want to completely gut our Eighties kitchen (sometime in the next millennium) it didn't seem to be a viable option. It was desperation that inspired my ‘lightbulb’ moment and changed things.

Prompted by daddy longlegs, who was sick of me moaning about how my life would change with one, he said: “Just get on with it. Where else could it be fitted?”

I recalled pointing at the kitchen cupboard next to the fridge and saying: "If we lose that it’ll work." I called the plumber and he said: “Yeah, simple. Eighty quid!”

Had I really wasted all those man hours to washing up when all it took was to ditch the cupboard that I stash the plastic in and hand over eight tenners?

Within two weeks our lovely LG model arrived and we fell in love with it. Ahhhh, what bliss it is. I couldn’t contain my excitement the day it arrived. I knew I’d been going on about our new arrival too much when my five year old wrote me a note that said “Happy dishwasher day”.

Almost everyone I spoke to said variously: “It’s about time”, “It’ll change your life”, “You won’t look back,” and “I can’t believe you’ve existed all this time without one.”

We had a roast dinner that weekend and it took me five minutes to load the dishwasher, slam the door shut and join the family on the crowded sofa for an afternoon film as we scoffed chocolate.

That night, as it started up its cycle daddy longlegs and I paused, stood back and admired our new purchase, then we patted it, kissed it and went up the wooden hill. Isn’t technology grand.

What piece of technology has changed YOUR life?

Wedding presents... setting up home together

T

here’s going to be a wedding in the family – my beautiful, gorgeous niece who’s tripping down the aisle in October to marry her farmer.

At the tender age of 23, Miss Gorgeous will be embarking on married life in the first home of her own so, rarely these days, the wedding present list really IS going to help set this young couple up for married domestic life.

When I got married we both had our own homes plus all the kit, and then some, so the wedding present list wasn’t the slightest bit vital.

We had so much in duplication that Mr Tall Dark and Handsome and I had to ditch a whole load of household items. And there was one major brand that had to go. His.

Our sofa, for instance, was just a two-seater. Generally, if I had planted my derrière on the spongy cushion before Mr Big I could be guaranteed of some comfort.

However, the moment I saw his backside making contact with the identical soft squashy cushion next to me I knew I was in trouble, especially if I was balancing a TV dinner on my lap tray accompanied by a welcome glass of wine.

When he sat down next to me the sofa turned into quicksand. I’d have to brace myself so that I didn’t roll into the centre towards him along with my dinner.

Before I could return to any comfort I’d have to wedge a slim cushion under my thigh nearest to him to make myself level again.

It had to go.

I can’t say what we got to replace it was that much better – it was still too soft and the cushions needed plumping up every day or else it looked like an unmade bed – but it was free as it was a family member’s cast off and at least it was a three seater.

Then there was the cutlery drawer. You’ve never seen such a sorry state. Cutlery tray? Oh no, this was a M.A.N.’s cutlery drawer. All the knives, forks and spoons were thrown in en mass, nothing matched and a lot of the pointy bits on the forks were bent.

In went my cutlery tray and a lovely shiny set of Sheffield Steel cutlery. It was a joy to scrape food off an unbent fork with my lips.

He was very compliant, bless him. Until it came to the crockery. His style was garish plates that chipped very easily. Mine still chipped but were not so garish. We had a debate about what was better.

Me: “But I eat with my eyes, I don’t want to eat off a busy plate that detracts from the food.”

Him: “A curry’s a curry whether it’s on one of my plates or yours.”

When it came to the pots and pans he knew he didn’t have a hope in keeping his... after nuking his cheap frying pan he had to concede the best place to store it was in the bin along with his other pots and pans.

Mine – a set of heavy-bottomed pans from M&S are still going strong 15 years on! He’s nuked the bottom of those many times, too, whilst cooking his signature dishes of bolognaise and curry but they continue to effortlessly survive.

I think the only things of his that did survive were the bed – but not the horrible bedding, a double duvet on a king-size bed is not to be recommended – his TV (of course) oh and the dining room table and chairs. Amazingly very nice!

So back to my original advice to my niece and any other bride, below is a short list of great, practical wedding gifts that will either stand the test of time or turn out to be one of your most used items:

1. Heavy-bottomed pots and pans – they’ll go on forever.
2. Hand blender. Use mine all the time – much better than getting the liquidizer out and less mess to clean up.
3. A good set of every-day cutlery.
4. A dinner service, but not one that you’ll only bring out for special occasions. I know many people who chose a dinner service for their wedding present but ten years later hated it because their tastes had changed.
   
   Yours might, too, so go for something that you can use daily that will be hardwearing. Denby china is a good option – that way if you do go off it at least when you ebay it you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you did actually use it.
5. Ask for vouchers from John Lewis, that way you can get yourself a much larger item that you need, such as a bed, or some other piece of furniture. It will also give your man the opportunity of getting a wedding gift HE can get excited about – technology, for instance.

Here endeth the lesson! Hey Prestopeople.

Running a costume-jewellery business – Paula’s gems of knowledge

W

e all like a little bit of bling to brighten up our outfits. But Paula Williams took it a stage further. She set up her own business selling costume jewellery and branched out into bags and scarves.

The mother of two discovered her new money-making outlet after her second child went to school and she found herself with time on her hands and the urge to start working.

Paula Williams with one of her scarves

She already had a long background working in the jewellery industry so it wasn’t such a giant leap into the great unknown for the 43-year-old from North Essex.

With her knowledge of the industry it wasn’t long before the Paula Bling costume jewellery business was born and it took off through her jewellery parties.

She has spent ten years selling costume jewellery to friends, family and the public and although she is now playing a bigger part in her husband Lee’s Hatton Garden jewellery business, she still does the parties from time to time.

She casts her mind back to the beginnings of Paula Bling and says she got the idea for jewellery parties as she found herself attending parties such as Pampered Chef. “It just grew from there.

“Now I travel all around Essex with the parties and I sell at a lot of charity events and craft fairs.”

She accepts the brisk business with parties is “not what it used to be” mainly as the market has become bloated with other parties selling a variety of products: “But I still pick up party business,” she says.

These days she finds networking is helping draw in business and has taken part in ‘pamper evenings’ at the local school for instance. In the run up to Christmas she can be very busy. “From October I probably do five parties a week.”

 

Bestseller: Gerbera necklace

She accepts she could spread her net wider if she developed an online presence but admits that’s not her. Her advice to others starting any business is simple: do your research, know your products and start small so you can build up gradually.

The income from Paula Bling goes a long way to helping out the family finances, the running of the house and the food bills, which she confesses are not small with two sons of senior-school age! It also means she’s on hand for her first and major job, being a mum.  

To book a party Paula can be contacted on 07941 892978.

How to help protect your child from sexual assault

One of our roles as parents is to make our children independent so they can cope with adult society and have productive, happy lives.

But part of that is navigating our way around some pretty awful subjects. In our house, Daddy Longlegs and I keep shaking our heads as all the old TV favourites have been falling off their perches because of some past shocking misdeeds. The latest to topple being Stuart Hall.

I remember with great affection the It’s a Knockout TV programmes on a Saturday night. It was family viewing and Stuart Hall made a big contribution to that.

How many more are going to crash and burn in the post-Jimmy-Savile climate?

It got me thinking on what information to give our children to protect them from sexual assault because you can be 100 per cent certain that if it is going to happen to them YOU won’t be there.

Forearmed is forewarned, so I did a bit of research online to see if there was any professional advice out there on how to best inform your child on protecting themselves from sexual assault or at least to know what inappropriate behaviour is.

Disappointingly, I didn’t find much information on any UK sites along those lines, the only information I found was on how to watch out for the signs that your child IS being abused.

However, I found some information on an Australian site My Dr. So, if you want to be better prepared when the ugly subject comes up for discussion in your house, here it is:

How to help protect your child

• Children need to be taught about personal (sexual) safety as openly as they are taught about road safety and water safety.
• Teach your child that it is not OK for anyone to touch the parts of their body that are covered by their underwear.
  
  (Prestopeople edit: a tricky one - and it's been pointed out to me by a reader that it's hard to explain that it's wrong now, but with a person they love when they are older...
  Personally, for a primary school child, I think I would say that no one should be touching their private parts unless they have asked someone to help them such as someone you both know you trust implicitly. What do you think?)
  
• Teach your child that it is not OK for them to touch another person’s private parts, even if an adult or an older child asks them to do so.
• Encourage your child to tell you if anyone touches their private parts.
• Encourage your child to tell you about anything that happens that makes them feel scared or worried.
• Tell your child never to keep a secret that makes them feel bad or worried, no matter how much another adult is telling them to keep the secret.
• Teach your child respectful and accurate names for the sexual parts of their body.
• Teach your child that their body can warn them when a situation is wrong or dangerous — they might get a tight feeling in their tummy and feel scared. Talking about what these feelings mean helps children to recognise and trust their own feelings about a dangerous situation.
• Be suspicious of an adult wanting to spend time alone with your child, or being overly generous or affectionate towards your child.
• As you cannot be with your child all the time, ask about the child protection policy of any organisations that are involved in looking after your child.

If you have any other suggestions on how to inform your children when the subject comes up, and at what age, I’d really like to hear it and I’m sure other parents would, too, so be brave – post a comment.

Margaret Thatcher – like her or loathe her?

I

’m breaking my own promise to myself here by writing this particular blog because I always thought I wouldn't get into the murky world of politics in Prestopeople. What do I know anyway.

However, Margaret Thatcher dying has been an exception. When I was first asked about my opinion about her departing this world I rashly said I hated her.

But as the days drew on I realised that wasn’t strictly the truth. I’m just old enough to have been earning a living while Maggie was on her Parliamentary throne. That means I was old enough to have been forced to pay the hugely unpopular Poll Tax.

For young people like me that meant about £300 a year and all my three other housemates, too. That was on top of running a car, feeding myself and paying rent, other bills and attempting to have a social life but there was hardly anything left for clothes from my meagre reporter’s wage.

I had friends who were living in London at the time and they were being asked to pay much more. Over £700 each or face a court fine and a criminal record. They didn’t pay, they simply moved and they weren’t the only ones.

I also remember watching incredulously as the Poll Tax riots in Scotland unfurled where the awful tax was first trialled.

This was also the time when people were going to parties and sitting around talking about how their properties had hit the roof in terms of their value. Some of these people had bought their council houses but there was no provision for other social housing stock.

All of a sudden the news was full of people who were in negative equity thanks to the property crash. I think a lot of marriages are likely to have crumbled under that kind of pressure.  

The truth is Maggie did a lot of bad and, I’ve been forced to admit in the past week, a lot of good. I wasn’t old enough to have really appreciated what was going on in the “winter of discontent”, when the country was grinding to a halt. If I had maybe I’d be looking upon Margaret Thatcher’s reign more favourably.

All the commentators are saying it was she who broke the unions, she who lifted our country out of the doldrums. But mud sticks, doesn’t it. I’m also aware that it’s easy to hate an easy target, and as leader of the country that’s what you are.

She was fair game for the fabulous Spitting Image current affairs puppet show. I remember a scene where they had Margaret Thatcher and all the Cabinet members being served lunch around the cabinet table.

The waiter leaned over Mrs Thatcher and asked if she’d like something he was serving from his platter. Then he said: “And the vegetables?” To which Maggie barked authoritatively: “They’ll have what I’m having.”

In fact Max Hastings says that she once opened a ministerial meeting by slamming her handbag down on the table and saying: “Well, I haven’t much time today – only enough time to explode and have my way!”

And wasn’t that the whole problem with Maggie – it was her way or the highway.

I can understand hatred in the north of England, after all if you are going to decimate an industry (coal mining) that generations of people have relied upon as an income and a way of life then you have to help provide them with another way to make ends meet. Maggie didn’t do that.

She may have been Britain’s first female prime minister but practically every political commentator I’ve heard/read has said she did nothing for feminism. Let’s face it, she only appointed two female ministers to the Cabinet and there hasn’t been a whiff of a female leader of a political party since she left office in 1990.

Was she a man in a skirt? I can’t help but laugh at this famous quote of hers “everyone needs a Willie” – she meant Willie Whitelaw.

Thatcher fans are quick to point out that she made us a nation of home owners, share owners and changed the Labour party for good. Didn’t she once say that New Labour was effectively her creation?

What I don’t agree with is those people who are celebrating the death of an 87-year-old woman who was no longer a threat to anyone. She didn’t send anyone to the gas chambers like Hitler. To me Margaret Thatcher had her time and that time was 20 years ago.

I’ll never be a fan but I will take a peek at the Margaret Thatcher funeral mainly because it's history in the making and it closes a chapter. What’s your view? I DID include a poll but have had to take it down as people were telling me they were voting and the poll wasn't recording them! Technology, eh!

Pure filth - you'll love it - FAB Oven cleaner

I

’m not too proud of this but the picture below shows the state I allowed my oven to get into. Yes, I’m a slattern but I just couldn’t face all that elbow grease.

I had the same feeling in an office I once worked at every time someone sent me to the messy stationery cupboard to find something. “Don’t send me in there!” Then the begging started, “Can’t YOU do it for me, I’m not sure I’ll come out for days if I go in.”

I digress. Back to the oven. I even considered paying one of those specialist oven cleaners to come in and do the job for me and I’ve heard some of them charge £45 – that’s how desperate I was.

Every time I opened the oven door I shut my eyes to the mess and issued a quiet promise to this inanimate object that helps me create half decent meals that tomorrow I'd clean it, which of course I failed to keep.

So why am I telling you all this domestic drudge? Well this little handy housewife hint is too good NOT to share. If you don’t want to scrub your oven... EVER you’ve just got to get a bottle of OvenMate.

If you haven’t got one go out to Lakeland or contact one of those committed Kleeneze distributers and get yourself one for under a tenner.

It comes with a little paint brush to apply the clear gel on to your scummy oven interior (BBQ or greasy pan). Once I’d liberally applied it Van Gogh-like, I slammed the oven door shut and got on with other stuff for an hour (or two since as you can see my oven was particularly mistreated).

When I came back all I did was wipe it gently with a sponge and VOILA! It was such a thing of beauty I couldn’t help but play with it and write the word "clean" in the filth before wiping it all off 10 seconds later Yes, what a sad life I lead!

A family day out at the Tower of London

H

alf term seems a bit of a blur now but I just wanted to let you know what a great day out we had that week at the Tower of London and what a great family day it is for others, too.

We managed to pick the ONLY warm sunny day that week to go, which made a massive difference, and I would recommend you check the forecast before going because there’s a fair bit of walking around within the grounds to get from one section to the other.

It’s not impossible to take a child in a buggy but be prepared for carrying the buggy up a lot of those 11^th Century stairs, which were built for people a lot smaller than us.

Either that or you take it in turns to visit various sections of the tourist attraction one at a time while the other stays with the buggy.

We got our entry on Tesco ClubCard vouchers, otherwise the entry ticket for all four of us would have been £57.

We took a packed lunch and were able to sit outside in the sun (yay) on a bench scoffing on our sarnies, which is part of why I’m saying having good weather makes all the difference.

There are indoor facilities for eating packed lunches, although we didn’t check them out. One other tip is if you intend to get there as early as you can, go and see the Crown Jewels first.

The earliest we could get there after rush hour was at about 11am. Just an hour later the queue was endless but we were able to walk straight in without queuing.

As it was half term there were a number of extra activities that were laid on such as the medieval sweetmeats workshop (which we missed by a whisker); actors staging a Wars of the Roses interactive event; storytelling by the fearsome “knight” Sir Anthony Woodville (no, not the real one) and guided tours by Yeoman warders (that’s Beefeaters to you and me).

Had a lovely chat with one Beefeater. He was sitting in his little box just watching the world go by with his radio at his elbow. He told me a little bit about Beefeaters.

They all have to have served 22 years in one of the armed forces in this country, which means some of them are only in their late 30s!

They all live on site. Imagine having the Tower of London as your home address. The Beefeater I was talking to pointed to where he lived just across the courtyard from us and said he had the best view of Tower Bridge in the whole of London.

He’s also got his own parking space! Gold dust in central London. However, they are not allowed to bring their cars up to the front door of their home to offload the shopping until all the tourists have gone!

We didn’t see all the Tower has to offer such as the Royal Beasts tower where for 600 years exotic animals were kept captive; we didn’t have a Yeoman tour; and we didn’t go into the Medieval Palace, so lots more to see on another visit.

Was a bit confused at how disappointed I was in the torture chamber. Only three instruments of torture on show! Would have liked to see the thumb screws and the cat-o-ninetails! What does that say about me?

We left the Tower of London just before it closed at around 5.30pm and headed to the South Bank. Loads of things to do there. However, we were hungry by that time and were about to use our ClubCard Pizza Express vouchers but found a hot food market instead. It was a great way to round off the day before heading home. 

PS.
Incidentally, if you are reading this on a mobile, I'm told that the option to receive Prestopeople posts by email is not visible. If you checkout this site on a PC you can sign up for the posts so you can receive them as they are put up. (For those friends of mine, it means you can dispense with those pesky text messages I keep sending you once I post! Just let me know if you want to be left of the list)