Laugh or Cry?

Well, I have been in school all day, tutoring and enjoying myself enormously. The intensity of tutoring means that one does feel very tired after a full day, and thus felt I as I left today. But it was okay because I had achieved progress with my students including counselling one lad who was feeling anxious because his relationship with his girlfriend had run its course and he wanted to call it a day; his method was to a) text her and end it or b) just run off. I told him to man up, tell her face to face and take the fallout on his little spotty chin.

So, on the way home I thought, 'I'll pop into Sainsbugs and get a magazine to flollop on the sofa with this evening. And maybe some cooking apples to make a crumble, because we haven't had a pudding in AGES.' (Which, now I think about it isn't strictly true, because we had raspberry cheesecake last Saturday but hey, a week is a long time in the life of a mayfly.)

Into Sainsbugs I went. I picked up a few other bits 'n' bobs, too - milk, a cabbage for the chickens, some Gouda, aforesaid apples and magazine, some soup on special offer - and I was VERY GOOD because I ignored the chocolate aisle and the cake aisle, even though I thought I might like a bit o'chocolate to nibble on the way home.

Instead, because I hadn't really had lunch beyond a banana and a couple of oatcakes and was feeling a bit peckish, I bought a packet of cherry tomatoes. And in the car I opened the packet of cherry tomatoes and...

...boooff! The packet burst in quite spectacular fashion sending what seemed like hundreds of tomatoes ricocheting all over my little car!

Well, if it had been a Friday before Christmas, when I was still a full-time stressed out classroom teacher I probably would have cried. Actually, I WOULD have cried AND gone back into Sainsbugs AND bought 10 bars of chocolate AND a couple of boxes of chocolate eclairs, AND I would have slumped by a checkout and stuffed them all in my face, crying 'Effing tomatoes!' until I was sick on the little bucket they leave by the tills for people to drop receipts in.

But as it was, because I am under pas de stress, I laughed! In order to retrieve the escapee salad, I had to upend myself into the passenger footwell and hang pretty much upside down, displaying my not inconsiderable bottom to all in the car park. And because I didn't have a receptacle in which to place the tomatoes, I ended up balancing them in various nooks and crannies on the dashboard, and in the gearstick thingy and the cup holders. Some decorate their cars with flowers and furry toys - I have tomatoes!

And then I came home and had a bit of a face off with Primrose who is getting very possessive about me collecting eggs from the pod, so much so that it takes more than a cabbage to distract her, and we both nearly ended up, feather and wellies, on our bottoms in the mud!

But I wouldn't have minded. I would have laughed!