It’s been a while you lovely bunch of bloggettes! How have you all been?! I will break away from my usual mantra and do a self-indulgent update post in the coming weeks (if only to make sense of the bat-shit craziness of life at the moment!) but right now, we need to talk about carrot sticks and other first world things that really piss me off!

I was in Waitrose at the weekend (and before you say it, I know it was my own fault and this wouldn’t have happened in Lidl; but Lidl don’t do pimento stuffed olives with manchego cheese in a chilli dressing, so back off!) I had just picked up the aforementioned olives and decided that my life was also missing a red onion, so I duly headed into vegetable territory. It was there that I overheard a dad (or a mid-thirties man who had borrowed a kid for the day, whatevs) say “right, let’s find those carrot sticks”. An innocent enough statement on the face of it, but the fact he was stood in front of the real life actual carrots astounded me. He was prepared to scour the supermarket for several minutes to find the pre-cut carrot sticks, but peeling and chopping his own carrots was an incredulous notion. I know we are all busy, but fudge me, surely we can make time to peel a chuffing carrot!

Pre-grated cheese also winds me up (and as a graterphobe I feel I have the right to disapprove.) Not only does it go off way quicker, leading to more potential food wastage, you pay a professional grater a shitload of extra money to do something that takes literally seconds at home.  Washing up, mess blah blah blah, as above, let’s just set an extra minute aside to do something mundane for once.

Netflix also has a choke hold on my goat (not a euphemism) at the moment. Gone are the days of looking forward to a good TV series at 9pm on a Wednesday night, we just binge-watch shit (or in my case addictive documentaries about US prisons). I am a total Netflix addict and I am thoroughly ashamed of it (not ashamed enough to unsubscribe though, I might add!)

The perfect Thursday evening (or Tuesday afternoon, or Sunday morning while I get dressed…)

What’s my conclusion? We are too flipping busy being busy. Everyone is running through life just to keep up; therefore convenience, in any form, is seen as a godsend. Instead, I think we should embrace a certain amount of ennui if only to slow us down somewhat. The premise of not sticking our kids in front of the TV at every opportunity is because their brains struggle to adapt to slower-paced tasks such as reading and drawing.

The same principle apply to big people too. We are so caught up in living the fast life, that mundane tasks are deemed unimportant and replaceable. Convenience items merely exacerbate our reluctance to do the menial things… cleaning, ironing, chopping carrots, etc. but I think our brains need a break from screens and work. Give your grey matter a break, grate some cheese and save yourself a quid in the process.