English Rose Kitchen

How we looked at the fancy dress competition according to my memory

When my sister and I were kids we used to get entered into a lot of fancy dress competitions, which we would almost always win due to the ingenuity of our dad. Dad had a simple rule. If you can’t make it good, make it big. The winning outfit that springs to mind at the moment was when we went dressed as the Yellow Submarine ^{1 and 2}.

Invariably the foundation of the outfit would be a selection of cardboard boxes (and in this instance a lot of yellow crepe paper), which we would collect from our friendly-local-corner-shop³. I was reminded of this today when I realised that I needed to put a whole load of afore mentioned STUFF into storage this weekend because – now I hope you’re sitting down for this, the renovation starts on Monday!

You see last weekend Dave’s friend Corrado, who’s going to be effectively project managing the renovation paid us a surprise visit. Except that we were the only ones who were surprised, because evidently we’d arranged a start date of last Monday. Oops! I guess the intervening Christmas cheer was a little more cheerful than I remember.

Frankly we needed the kick up the old wazoolee and this Monday he’s coming round with an electrician to start ripping things up and installing new lighting and – well – whatever else it is that electricians need to do when you’re moving your kitchen from one room to the next.

Remembering those halcyon days of winning fancy dress competitions and not being willing to part with another £25 to our storage company, I popped round to our friendly-local-corner-shop and picked up a selection of cardboard boxes for free. I’m just about to pop up to the storage to press them into action …

¹I hate to sound like a Monty Python sketch here, but we really did have a lot of fun with some cardboard and some gaily coloured paper. Granted you’d be hard pressed to make an Xbox out of it, but we didn’t know about them then so as far as we were concerned this was as much fun as you could have.

²Purely to embarrass him, I thought I’d mention here that my brother, at that stage still learning to speak, used to sing “We all live in a yellow sumbarine”. He also used to enjoy something called “Bread and ha-ha” with his breakfast.

³In the UK a “corner shop” is roughly equivalent to a convenience store in the US. They’re almost always friendly and they’re definitely shops, but the striking feature is that they’re called corner shops whether or not they’re actually on a corner.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is filed under The English rose hunt is on. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.