My 2006 shopping list

So it’s finally 2006. We bade goodbye to 2005 barely 2 days ago by drinking loads of wine and watching countless reruns of Annie and Oliver Twist because television company executives have the moral obligation to show to all british children that despite what Jamie Oliver discovered in their school dinners, they would still grow up unlike little Annie and Oliver.

We’ve also heard the Queen’s Christmas message, seen the London Eye New Year fireworks while doing the countdown with Hootenanny, gobbled up a hideous amount of Christmas pudding with white sauce that reminds me of what we, women usually see during/after extremely passionate moments (yes, that colour and that stickiness) and suddenly it’s another year!

An obligatory list of things to do for year 2006 has to be written and whether or not they’re accomplished is another matter. So mine is here:

● I’ve got to give birth 9 weeks from now. No matter what. This is my priority of the year.

● Learn Chinese language in September. No, not from the BBC site but in a proper class. And I hereby resolve to attend all my classes despite how my tutor looks like. The website design course that I attended last year was a mess. My tutor looked like he’d been in the lion’s den for a century. I sat in between a delightful man who had never encountered toothpaste in almost 5 decades and a miserable goth who believed that she could avert the destruction of the world by learning to control the world wide web. I had enough so I packed up but not before the last day of the course. Clever me.

● Spend more time with Zak’s geography. Yes, he’s only 3 years old but he can find Cyprus in the map but not the Philippines!

● Learn to be more patient. My husband’s side of the family are a bunch of worriers. His mother worries that I eat too much scones but she bakes them for me anyway, every other day. She worries if Karl does the cooking during family gatherings (which is a few times a week) because 5 hours might not be enough to cook chicken with roast potatoes. Dad worries about his Sudoku. Karl’s sister worries about her weight but buys crates of cakes every week. And Karl worries about everybody’s health that he would confiscate all the sweets he could find in their cupboards and pantries, bring them home, and eat them bit by bit while he’s alone in his office or the toilet and come out with his trousers unzipped declaring, I lost a few pounds! It surely sounds a miracle to me.

● Learn the art of making tea. Which should be added last? Water or milk? And which type of mug should I use? The one made in China or the other one which is made in…China?

● Learn to cook british food, like mashed potato, roast potato, boiled potato, Indian curry, and Chinese take-away.

● And oh, shop at Lidle. I forgot my list.