So what does your husband stick in the marmalade each morning?

webitha

pelirocco wrote: »

[/COLOR]



I have just spent ages reading all the posts just
to find you pinched my idea!!!:mad:

oh dont be angry darlin
that just proves the saying "great minds think alike" right :D

Loanranger

Ebay? Amazon?
The Husband is insisting he needs to get himself a trammel.
I'm just a tiny bit worried about why he wants one.

sarymclary

Loanranger, there are 38 trammels available on Ebay at the moment, and you'll be pleased to hear the budget ones are under a fiver. I'd suggest he doesn't go flashing it off to his male friends, or they'll all be wanting one, and that could spell all manner of potential marital problems.

I'm not happy with double-dipping either, and I like to consider myself the marmalade queen in my house. That jar of chunky cut, or silvershred is mine, since I buy it, and I keep it safely in the fridge, but does that stop my teenage sons from having a plunge? Oh no! The filthy beasts just pound away in there with their dirty instruments willy-nilly. I can't tell you how traumatising it is to find my pristine preserve sullied in such a way. Even worse, one of them will even give it a a hefty whipping, and it goes all of a quiver, and loses it's firmness. It gets even worse still, he shoves his marmite enrobed knife INTO the marmalade, and intermittently it goes into the spreadable butter. I can't tell you how horrific a sight this is.

My way of trying to deal with this is that I now have my own packet of spreadable butter, a different brand to their's, and they are warned that I will remove dangly body parts if they dare lift the lid, let alone shove their dirty instruments in there. I hide the marmalade in the salad drawer - since teenagers rarely seek out salad, and purchased squeezy Marmite.

I have to say I would seriously have to reconsider any marital vows if this were to be something Mr Mclary was getting up to. He's older and wiser, and having felt the full thrust of my large hairbrush before, would never contemplate such behaviour.

BTW, I have to confess to being a toast waver too, but have also perfected the 'toast triangle' and lean slices upright against each other, and leave to cool, while I make a nice pot of tea.

PhylPho

First of all. . . Apologies to everyone here who has been so kind / sympathetic / uncomprehending / impervious to proposals of marriage. I have been desperately trying to get back to this marital etiquette thread but some trouble with rubble has had to be dealt with first. Anyway. . .

I've now thanked every single person who has been gracious enough to contribute to this debate, even if MSE has been too mean to allow me to acknowledge myself.

So much in the way of genuinely constructive information has appeared here that I intend to submit it for the latest edition of Debrett's Guide to Etiquette as it seems highly unlikely that Debrett's would ever have thought of using one's tongue in a jar of marmalade, or deploying a trammel to scoop out Dundee's best (* see later) as a means of safeguarding both marriage and, um, Flora.

I was going to cut and paste some particularly distinctive contributions here but that'd get Flora all over umpteen new tabs in Internet Explorer and a completely new thread would then be needed on the MSE Tech Support forum. However. . .

First of all, to my wife, angelicmary @ #20. Yes, I know it's you, this despite your protestation over the wreckage of breakfast this morning when you said there was no bloody chance of anyone being angelic if married to you (that is, me) for all these years. I also thought you were unnecessarily hostile on the subject of elementary etiquette: I do not think, nor have I ever once said, that 'decorum' is Latin for painter and decorator.

Thorsoak @ #21 and ailuro @ #49. I am indebted to Thorsoak for the picture of people in hairnets at a nuclear re-processing plant somewhere in Essex, though had not hitherto associated this with marmalade making. Where ailuro is concerned, however, the accusation that this thread is a wind-up is most hurtful. Sitting in front of me is a Flora-smeared crumb-splattered jar with a label that reads: Mackays The Dundee Orange Marmalade Made in Scotland. Taking together the words 'Mackays', 'Dundee' and 'Scotland', it is surely reasonable for a purchaser to conclude that this has something to do with the land of the free (healthcare) and face-painting lessons from Mel Gibson, rather than, er, people in hairnets in Essex.

Paulie'sGirl @ #23 and Alikay @ #41. Brilliant advice! I think this has to be one of the best reasons ever for taking a Saga holiday, and perhaps even a cruise, seeing as how every week I get a brochure from them saying Saga never changes its prices and that, for instance, going round the Baltic in winter costs £47,000 for an inside cabin and, understandably, a fiver for one outside, but then the next no-prices-cut brochure says it's £2,200, then £1,850, and then £900 and that they'll pay me to sleep outside. (Mrs P must secretly work for Saga. I think she wrote that last bit.) The only problem with smuggling out jars is that my baggage allowance weight will incur astronomic costs. Also, Mrs P played hell in Benidorm last year when we did a Thomson Gold and I kept the plastic twirly cocktail things they'd kindly put in our Wincarnis-on-the-Rocks.

OwenMoneysaver @ #30: I tried that once with Castrol GTX. It ruined a saucepan and then we had to get the engine steam-cleaned afterwards.

spaghettimonster @ #33: Please stand for Parliament. More than ever, this country needs lateral thinking of such clarity and originality. You have my vote, covered in Flora though it is.

onlyroz @ #39: Thank you for that, though it might have helped -- before I followed your advice this morning -- to explain in your post just how closely option 2 is linked to option 6.

balletshoes @ #45: Another painful rejection, even if tempered with good wishes for yet more years of life without a trammel in sight. However. . . thanks to loanranger @ #56, I now belatedly realise that I've been wearing an invisible one all these years. . . <sob>

Anyway. . . Apologies for this belated response, even more apologies if I've missed anyone out, and -- again -- sincere thanks to *everyone* who appreciated the gravity of this thread and generously brought their expertise and experience to bear.

I have learned a great deal about marriage, marmalade, nuclear-reprocessing, Saga holidays, and the reason why the UK economy is in a bigger mess than our breakfast table. And also, finally, what a trammel really is.

:beer:

emiliah

LOL I thought it was just me - didn't realise that butter in the marmalade jar annoys other people.

I just spoon enough for breakfast into a ramekin in the morning.

Loanranger

Wincarnis, is that of the same genus as Sanatogen?

Ettenna

My Grandparents told me a story about when they used to live and work in East Africa. They were out surveying Mt. Kilimanjaro and their servants got up in the morning to lay out their breakfast (yes they really did have servants back in the day!). They usually had toast and marmalade with breakfast. Their friends that they were with were quite well-to-do and in the middle of the Tanganyikan desert, amid all the sand and heat, the husband was heard to complain to his wife that she had got butter in the marmalade !!!

PhylPho

Ettenna wrote: »

My Grandparents told me a story about when they used to live and work in East Africa. They were out surveying Mt. Kilimanjaro and their servants got up in the morning to lay out their breakfast .. . amid all the sand and heat, the husband was heard to complain to his wife that she had got butter in the marmalade !!!

I'm sorry, but. . . This was how we lost the Empire. Some people here may not have been around in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's era, but I was. And I still remember his epoch-defining Rind of Change speech, about the contamination of marmalade.

Sadly, this was mis-reported by the Daily Mail at that time and has ever since been known as Macmillan's Wind of Change speech. (Misreporting by British media also explains why undergraduates in Modern History -- particularly, those I have lectured -- still babble on about The Suez Crisis, when in fact it was all about Macmillan's ill-advised obsession with suet.)

Loanranger wrote: »

Wincarnis, is that of the same genus as Sanatogen?

Wincarnis is slightly more hard-core. It's the British answer to France's absinthe. Unfortunately, the latter has been banned and the former isn't widely available in the UK anymore, though on any Thomson Gold holiday it's quite usual to see people doing something called the hokey-cokey as a result of consuming Wincarnis infused with Phyllosan. It's one of the reasons Mrs P and I now holiday only with Club 18-30.

Owain_Moneysaver

Alikay wrote: »

Another solution ... Works for my mother-in-law - she's not bought any condiments or preserves since retiring in 1994:)

I no longer buy sugar since I discovered it's given away free in self-service cafes.

DansMum_2

Look on the bright side PhylPho - with all the replacement jars of marmalade that Mrs P is buying for you is keeping the Dundee Marmalade Makers Guild in production and also singlehandedly keeping a Spanish orange grower, Juan and his Donkey Pepebob in the manner to which they are now accustomed.....

Instead of being berrated, you should be given a hearty slap on the back and taken straight to the 19th hole....:beer: