World’s campest Robin Hood hat

I am a bit behind with my blogging. I don’t know why. It’s not like I have anything else to do, other than go round the house with a squeegee on a stick, obsessively mopping up the condensation on my single-glazed windows and muttering to myself.

I was tagged a couple of weeks ago by Gappy of the inestimable Single Parenthood (www.singleparenthoodbygappy.blogspot.com) to nominate three Shiny, Happy Things. It’s taken me this long to come up with an answer, partly because she seemed to have the whole thing sewn up with her holy trinity of tea, Dolly Parton and ‘Total Wipeout’. And partly because I seem to find it easier to come up with things that irritate me, like SHOPPING:

And my SHIT MEDIEVAL HAIRCUT:

Anyway, in an attempt to present myself as a glass-half-full kind of person, here are my top three happy things:

KENT IN SUMMER
Give me a large Pimm’s, an HE Bates novel and a view of the Weald (possibly a bit of Vaughn Williams on the iPod, too), and I’m content. Yes, I’m aware just how reactionary that makes me sound. You’re probably picturing me stretched out on a Union Jack picnic rug, swatting away flies with a rolled-up copy of ‘The BNP Times’. I promise you I am not a closet fascist, I’m just middle-aged.

‘YOU’VE BEEN FRAMED’
The great American literary critic Harry Levin said, ‘The most protean aspect of comedy is its potentiality for transcending itself, for responding to the conditions of tragedy by laughing in the darkness.’
I say, ‘Hnnnuuhh-huh-huh, look at that man on the jetski! Look! His swimming trunks have fallen down! Hurhurhurhurhur!’

WALKERS SENSATIONS THAI SWEET CHILLI CRISPS
I think this one needs no explanation. What the hell do they put in these things? They’re like crack.

And now I must go and rustle up something suitably butch for my son to wear on World Book Day tomorrow. (Is this dressing-as-your-favourite-book-character nonsense a nationwide thing?) He wants to be Robin Hood. Trouble is, he told his Granddad, who – having never seen the Jonas Armstrong TV series in which Robin and his gang wear chainmail hoodies and camel-coloured suedette trackpants – immediately set to work making the world’s jauntiest-ever Robin Hood hat from green paper, complete with green tissue-paper feather.

It’s so camp even John Barrowman
would refuse to wear it.