Food not so glorious food.....

My granny would have been horrified but I was actually rather proud - my friend's husband had looked at me and his wife and expressed his scarcely disguised horror at the thought of us doing the weekly food shop.....

He reluctantly agreed and then proceeded to write us a very detailed list, one of those idiot proof ones, I'm surprised he didn't go the whole hog and draw us pictures, he was clearly so concerned about what we'd come home with.

It struck me then just how far we women have come since our grandmothers' day when a man can look at two women in their 40s and worry about what his family will eat if he lets them loose with a trolley in Waitrose.

Actually I felt a bit guilty, we women have rather hoodwinked men. Both my friend and I are perfectly capable of buying food but the plain truth is neither of us is particularly keen and within minutes of being in a supermarket we'll have veered off to the magazines or smellies because they're far more interesting than groceries. Naturally, that's exactly what happened, well, who can blame us when there's Neal's Yard blue bottles calling....

When I took a career break last year I decided I would become a supermarket shopper extraordinaire. I gave it a good bash but, boy, buying food is so blooming boring and the trolley got so heavy. So halfway round I came up with a cunning ruse and just said they'd sold out of the rest of the stuff on the list.

So, huge respect to all those women who week in, week out tackle the supermarket especially if you get all the way round. My kids have got used to being fed from the first three aisles!

Weather to fly - part two

Technical problems - now that's a phrase no nervous flyer wants to hear and even more so when they're about to entrust their being to a flying yellow sewing machine.

Flying to and from the Channel Islands is always an adventure in itself and, once again, this weekend's travel didn't let me down. Outbound on Friday from Bristol my flight was delayed and when we were finally aboard, the pilot explained why - the plane had got stuck in a pothole at Guernsey Airport and had had to be yanked out......I decided I didn't even want to think about that too much....potholes?!

Checking in to fly back the flight was showing a delay and we boarded almost an hour late to be told perkily by the pilot that it was due to a 'technical problem' with the plane but everything was hunkydory now and it was back in service.

Now that's where they go wrong - either tell us exactly what the problem is or don't tell us at all because those of us with wild imaginations are now off and running and are already in places we'd really rather not be......It may well be that a light bulb had just gone pop in the loo but I'm imagining propellors hanging on by a thread ready to drop off the minute we headed skyward.

Fortunately said propellors kept turning and remained attached to the plane but my suspicions that something was not quite right were compounded when we flew back at just 8,000 ft, far lower than normal, virtually skimming the sea.

Now I understand why the late Pope John Paul II liked to kiss the tarmac when he got off a plane, it clearly had nothing to do with arriving on new ground, he'd just flown to the Channel Islands in the past..... 

Weather to fly......

The Channel Islands, well Guernsey in particular, seem to have it in for me.

One of my best friends moved there a few years ago so seeing her involves flying from Bristol or Exeter. Now I'm not overly keen on flying these days and only manage to get on aircraft at all thanks to hypnosis and a family sized pack of Valium.

The fear isn't as bad as it used to be, those days of 'oh dear god the pilot has forgotten to put down the landing gear, I need to jump out of my seat and warn him right now' have passed, thankfully.

Now I plug myself into my iPod and turn the music up loud so I can't spend the flight convincing myself the engines have cut out....

Which brings me back to Guernsey. It hadn't really crossed my mind until I turned up for my first skip across the Channel that the plane would be small.......well there's small and then there's a yellow sewing machine on wheels and that's what we were going on. I fully expected to see the pilot cranking the propellors to get the thing started. If he'd climbed aboard in a wartime leather flying helmet I wouldn't have been surprised. I've blanked the rest of that flight from my memory although I seem to remember whimpering at one stage.

Going from Exeter is slightly better as the planes, while still props, are bigger and newer. It was a bit unnerving though when on my last flight the cabin crew asked some of the footie team who had all gone to sit at the back, to move forward to balance the plane!

So wouldn't you think that the Channel Islands would take it easy on me? Oh no, I've been subjected to gale force winds, fog suddenly descending and apocalyptic rain storms. My next flight is tomorrow morning and as I write this the sun is shining and it's a lovely bright summer evening. The forecast for tomorrow? Yep, torrential rain and thunderstorms. Oh joy.

Anyone for streaming?

Once again I'm feeling inadequate and it's all the fault of technology.

I was at a friend's for dinner and Adele's album 21 was playing. We were discussing how fab it is when he started fiddling with an iPad on a side table. When I asked what he was doing I got one of those looks, you know the type, the looks that are reserved for people like me, the technologically challenged.

I could almost hear his inward sigh as he gave me a long suffering look and said: "I'm streaming." Well, the only streaming I tend to do is when I have a cold and that's my nose.

Some of my favourite people are very techy indeed. I 've never really understood why they feel they have a duty to enlighten people like me who don't know one end of a scart cable to the other, but they do and boy does that enlightening tend to go on...... So now I know all about streaming.........and to be honest I can see I'll be happy to let it pass me by.

After all, just what is the issue with getting up off the sofa, going over to the CD shelves and slapping on a CD? Apparently, this is out dated and the CD's days are numbered. Blimey, I hope not as I've only recently worked out how to load them on to my iPod and I'm only half way through my collection.

And that's another thing, it seems it won't be long before I'll be getting pitying looks as I take my iPod out when I'm at the beach or plug it in in the car........Call me a dinosaur if you like but I'm rather fond of my bright pink iPod. I love that I can have all my favourite music on one little machine, it suits me fine, but I'm being told by my cutting edge friends that the iPod will soon be old hat too.

I've realised that I have absolutely no hope of ever keeping up with technology. Today streaming, tomorrow who knows what? It's all going too fast for a poor techno-phobe like me so I've decided to jump off the techy bandwagon and just pootle along in my own sweet outdated way.

When we were kids my father hung on to his black and white TV until we were the only ones in the road without a colour one. The TV salesman used to joke that he'd do coach trips to see the old antique. Perhaps that'll be me soon......come visit the mad woman with her pink iPod......