My salad dressing days

1. The swanky new dishwasher on its rinse cycle sounds *just* like the Eurostar entering the Channel Tunnel.

2. It is not possible effortlessly to bash the compressed coffee grains into the bin in the style of a Starbucks barista with our swanky new espresso machine. Grrr.

3. It’s a near miracle we were around to enjoy Christmas at all given that the rubber transformer on the rope lights began to melt just days beforehand.

4. Isabel Dalhousie is impossibly twee for a woman in her early 40s. Just what kind of young friends does Alexander McCall Smith have?

5. I am open-minded about the prospect of a Thai green turkey curry.

6. Fifty per cent of my children are going to be disappointed on or around 3 July next year, given that my daughter wants a girl cousin and my son wants a boy cousin.

7. I am stepping back on the applique bandwagon (because it’s easier on the waistline than working my way through Tamasin Day-Lewis’ tarts).

8. I am almost persuaded that your late 30s is the time to invest in some rollerblades.

So! Smug folk who believe themselves to be on a higher intellectual plain because they ‘don’t watch and/or own a TV’.

And yet…

they and their children often watch DVDs.

they are perfectly happy to watch iPlayer and the commercial equivalents on their PC.

they might even occasionally videotape TV programmes (documentaries – of course!) to watch at a time of their own choosing.

So, oughtn’t they be changing their boast to: “I don’t watch broadcast television live on a TV set’? (Hmm. Somehow not quite as punchy as ‘I don’t watch TV!’.)

Yeah, so just like the rest of us, eh? Except that the rest of us have (a) familiarised ourselves with the ‘off’ button and (b) know how to use it.

</rant>