The Lost City of Nutlantis

WARNING PLOT SPOILER ALERT: The squirrel gets it

Grasshopper is planning to grow in the next six months and in order to do so we have recruited an easy-going Tasmanian hockey player to head up the investment proposal. His name is Todd and on Tuesday we took him to the nut factory to meet the lovely people who make our porridge for us.

The factory is ENORMOUS and Grassy is its smallest ever customer. In fact Sue our account manager only took us on because we shared her interest in the history of British military vehicles. One whole warehouse is devoted to a 50 ft high stainless steel mixing machine that looks like a cross between a giant washing machine drum and The Wall of Death from Clarence Pier fun fair.

Half the factory is completely sealed off with plastic sheeting similar to when the scientists arrive at Elliott’s house at the end of ET. Behind the plastic screens is the area where the nuts get processed by special nut workers who are not allowed to talk to the non-nut workers in case they contaminate them. They are allowed to smile at them though through the special window in the plastic sheeting.

There is a new warehouse at the factory where they store hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of nuts and nothing else. Only the nut people are allowed in and the whole building is sealed off. Last autumn a lone squirrel managed to penetrate the layers of security and arrive inside what, to him must have seemed like the Lost City of Nutlantis. The discovery apparently blew his mind and before going out to tell his family what he had found he decided to have a spot of lunch. Unfortunately squirrels, like me, find portion-control difficult to manage and his light lunch turned into a lost weekend of constant eating. Sadly, having ingested hundred of times more calories than he had expended he became so fat that he got wedged into the hole in the ceiling that he had come in though and was discovered a few weeks later by the man that come to fix the roof. Having been unable to escape and spread the news of his discovery the existence of the lost city of Nutlantis thankfully remains a mystery to his fellow Rodentia, a place that the squirrels of Britain can only dream of.

Everything I know about sick leave.

Our mum is amazing. In the 70s she ran dad’s practice, threw regular dinner parties involving fondues and avocados, had 3 kids under 10 and dressed every day like Mia Farrow in ‘Rosemary’s baby’ If she was ill and needed time off people would say ‘You put your feet up and have a break, ooh just one thing…have you done the banking and picked up the kids from brownies/orchestra/kung fu?’ It is only now that we have our own business that we truly understand what that must have been like.

In the first year of Grasshopper Abi broke her foot and her arm, it made her cranky for around 6 months. Did she stop working? No…she didn’t miss one day of pestering unwitting members of the media and high on Tramadol she brought home the bacon time after time.

Last week I had minor surgery and, inspired by Abi’s example, the first words I uttered on regaining consciousness after the anaesthetic were ‘custard creams’

Nurse: ‘YOU ARE IN RECOVERY NOW DEAR, YOU HAVE HAD AN OPERATION’

ME: (pushing my drip out the way and extending a shrivelled hand towards the tea trolley) ‘custaaaard creeeeeeeams’

I did one year of nursing training at King’s College London and was top in ‘Drugs Administration’ (mostly because the teacher had really lovely thick hair and I wanted her to notice me) Just as the school for tropical medicine has antivenom for different types of snake bites I can tell you with great authority that the antidote for anaesthetic medication is custard creams. The suggested dose is 6 every 20 minutes with a pint of tea.

If you have your own business or small children it’s the same deal, the only things which get you time off sick are bleeding from the eyes or coma.

Being a celebrity

Today I was on the radio again. Every time before I go on Abi briefs me saying:

A: ‘Make sure you mention that we’re looking for an investor’
F: ‘I will’
A: ‘Make sure you mention the O2 awards and the website’
F: ‘OK’

As I sat in the BBC waiting room this morning I thought ‘We need an investor.We won the O2 award’

Then they sat me down in front of Jonathan Ross’s brother and put Stevie Wonder headphones on me and I blurted out something about how our porridge is not the kind that you should eat in the recession because it is so expensive and how it’s much better to make regular porridge on the hob.

Then I just sat there like a stunned mullet staring at Jonathan Ross’s brother and thinking ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST SAID THAT’. Then I went home and lay under a blanket and had half a bag of humbugs before lunch.

Good news and bad news.

Good News:
Thanks to Grasshopper’s resident newspaper hack Babs my 2 PAGE piece ran in The Daily Mail this week and we discovered that the whole World seems to read the Daily Mail.

Bad News:
They ran the chubby Anthea shots and people now think we have our meetings in full make-up perched on the work surface of my kitchen.

More Good News:
We received about 300 emails overnight and in true Grasshopper fashion they were pretty far out. From Finnish felt-makers to ladies knitting tea cosies from kelp in the Outer Hebrides they have all been in touch to let us know that our catalogue of incompetence has inspired them to give up their day job and make felt/ weave kelp full time.

We are so grateful to Babs for taking time out of her busy schedule unearthing sex scandals and interviewing cannibals to get this published, we couldn’t have done it without her.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1141409

PS Grasshopper mum would like to point out that I didn’t go to Kings and in fact went to UCL which is consistently several points above Kings in The Times ratings, not that it matters, but that it was definitely UCL and that I did a really hard course that there's only like 6 places on each year.

Everything I know about stress

Dad says that stress doesn’t exist but he also says ‘lunch is for wimps’ and he’s wrong about that (lunch is my third favourite meal of the day after breakfast and elevenses). According to medical science the symptoms of stress include irritability and sensitivity to criticism: in Abi’s case you can add spontaneous freak weather conditions and national security threats (http://teamgrassy.blogspot.com/2008/08/my-sister-london-and-pathetic-fallacy.html).

Stress busting is a very personal thing, it’s all about finding out what’s right for you... I once dated a man who used to listen to Enya in the shower before he had to sack someone (she wasn’t in the shower with him, her songs played through a speaker) and another who used to go to Africa and shoot things. Abi’s favourite stress busting activity is swimming lengths; she recommends 50-150 depending on the level of relief required. Mine is seeing Ralf who bends me like a pretzel while I play dead (www.stillpointlondon.com) Abi also advises the following activities in times of extreme crisis: stroking your pet (see below), baking and pacing. I like to line things up, put things in alphabetical order or count things (using my fingers and the number patterns in my mind). I don’t have a pet because I am allergic.

Credit Crunchtastic

Apparently an important part of marketing is in-store promotions. Abi and I made one attempt at this last year and it was a complete failure. Although we tried our best to overcome our nerves and proffer the miniature scoops of congealed porridge with conviction the customers sensed our fear and lurched away from us, taking cover behind a shelf of condiments and other larder essentials.

Last week Waitrose invited us to do an in-store promotion in the food hall at John Lewis Oxford St and because we love Waitrose and do anything they say, we agreed. Having decided that giving away only a morsel of porridge is too stingy and that giving a whole pot is way better we arrived with 500 pots stashed in our trade-mark leopard print bags from the pound shop and prepared to stand in the corner and be ignored. We were SO WRONG, the store is like heaven, everyone who works there was LOVELY to us and we didn’t want to go home afterwards. When we gave people free samples they reacted as though they were auditioning for a Daz commercial, ‘[GASP] I never thought my tea-towels could be that white!’
It was heaven to stand there for an hour feeling the love and meeting our public, people actually THRONGED at one point.

The cherry on the John-Lewis-experience cake came when an old friend of mine arrived out of the blue to help us out. The last time I had seen her I was copying her homework 22 years ago and here she was climbing aboard the Grasshopper Lovetrain. As with everything as soon as it was over, like a monkey with a button I wanted to do it again, so we’re booked in for Friday 6th February and hope to see you then for another credit crunchtastic Grassy give away bonanza.

Grasshopper, friend to the stars

As you will know if you have seen our Facebook pictures, Grasshopper has some celebrity friends. If you were impressed when we told you that we had met Ainsley Harriott and Vanessa Feltz I can tell you that since then we have enjoyed the following celebrity endorsement:

1. We had a drink (tap water) with Angelina Jolie’s hair dresser
2. We gave some to Gemma Aterton from James Bond (V pretty)
3. We talked about Grassy to this American guy who had just sold his company (I realised afterwards that it was Skype)
4. We have also sent porridge to Fern & Philip but we don’t know if they have tried it yet.

Dad said that we should send some porridge to Barrack Obama but I don’t think he’d be allowed to eat it. Having drifted off into a celebrity related daydream starring me as the first lady with hair as thick as Monica Lewinsky’s I was brought back down to Earth with a thud when the photographs from The Daily Mail ‘Anthea Turner’ shoot arrived in my inbox....