Self-isolation stuff to do with kids: toilet-roll holder crafts

Anyone can make stuff out of the insides of toilet rolls.  And those people who bought in bulk in the run-up to the lockdown (fearing no doubt that they would be suffering from dreadfully upset digestive systems due to the stress of self-isolation) will now have loads of cardboard tubes to play with.

SUGGESTION ONE:

Stair Tunnel

Stick a lot of cardboard tubes together to form a single tube long enough to stretch down your stairs. Make one of these per child. Lay them on the stairs (someone will have to be at the top to hold them), then roll toy cars down inside the tubes, racing to see whose car gets down first.  A child on his/her own could test different types of cars against each other.

Warning: the cars can shoot out of the end very quickly and might chip paintwork or even hit someone, so have some cushions at the bottom to catch them.


SUGGESTION TWO:

Toilet Tube Car

Here are the things you need:



Note that the toilet roll tube has had an oval hole cut out of its side.

I forgot to add that you will also need two circles of coloured paper, the same size as the wheels, for the front and back of the car.  You will also needs paints or crayons of some sort to colour in the wheels and maybe decorate the car.  Covering the toilet roll holder with coloured paper makes it quicker to 'colour' it, but your child might prefer to paint it or colour it in.

First, cover the toilet roll tube with coloured paper, starting at the side with the hole. Snip the paper that covers the hole so you can push the flaps inside the tube - this is where the driver will sit.



Second, glue the long strip of coloured paper so it covers the place where the other paper meets (tuck the end into hold).  This strip of paper will bend over the end of the roll, along the bottom, up the other side and should be long enough for you to tuck the end into the other side of the hole.  When you reach the ends of the roll (front and back of the car), slip in the circles of coloured paper to form the back and front of the car.




Third, paint or colour the wheels in any design you fancy.



Fourth, attach two wheels on one side of the car with glue. Leave to allow the glue to set completely before turning the car over and gluing the remaining two wheels on the other side.



Finally, when everything is dry, pop a little driver into the hole.


  

Obviously, there are further decorative embellishments you might add - headlamps drawn on or made with shiny star stickers or beads, doors and handles drawn on the sides of the car, an exhaust pipe made out of a piece of a straw, etc.  I have given you the basic idea, but it can be taken wherever your child wants to take it.  Handy people might want to make proper turning wheels on an axel made out of a wooden skewer or some such item, and a roof to cover the driver made out of a clear plastic lid from some sort of container, or a steering wheel made out a large button, or...well, you get the picture!

There are a multitude of other things you can make with toilet roll innards: people, trees, houses, etc.

                    

[NOTE: You can't make a working hard drive out of cardboard tubes!]

Self-isolation recipe: Leftovers Salad

You can make this with whatever you happen to have in your fridge, within reason, but here's what I used:

• the last few leaves of a Little Gem lettuce, chopped
• six piccolini tomatoes, halved
• a quarter of a large red bell pepper, diced
• a stick of rather floppy celery, diced
• a single large closed cup mushroom, wiped and sliced
• a quarter of a medium-sized onion, finely diced
• half an avocado from a few days earlier, brown bits cut off, rest chopped into bite-sized pieces
• some pink and green grapes, picked off an old bunch that had been in the fridge a while - I picked off best ones and threw rest away as they were too manky (I hate throwing food out but these had been pushed to back of fridge by P and we'd forgotten they were there)
• half a can of mixed beans (not in tomato sauce!) left over from day before
• parmesan cheese, grated
• lemon zest, microplaned (optional)
• black pepper
• French dressing (bought)

All the effort goes into the prep.  Make sure you wash and dry all the veg, and obviously don't use stuff that is definitely going off. However, many things that are past their best but not actually mouldy would work well in this type of salad. Rinse the beans in a sieve.

Mix everything together except parmesan and pepper.  Cover liberally with dressing. Add parmesan and black pepper at the end.

It was delicious, much better than I expected. We ate it with a shop-bought quiche lorraine out of the freezer.

VARIATIONS: You could easily experiment with other raw veg and fruit - courgettes, cucumber, carrot, spring onions, raddishes, peaches, apples, pears, etc - and things like seeds and nuts.  You could experiment with different dressings, and/or make your own.  You might drizzle a little runny honey onto the salad and/or some lemon, lime, orange or grapefruit juice. You could try out different herbs and spices.

This week's Writing Prompt

Write a story or poem inspired by something hanging on, attached to or drawn on a wall inside your house or garden. 

It might be anything - some possibilities:

a picture or photograph, a calendar, an ornament or souvenir, an item of clothing on a coat hook, a kitchen implement, a jar of spice on a wall-mounted spice-rack, a climbing plant or hanging basket attached to a garden wall, a wall-clock, a child's finger painting, graffitti, a paint sample, a dado rail, a mirror, a light switch, a thermostat, a key box, a toilet roll or towel on a rail or holder,a shelf, a wall-mounted cupboard 

What I've learned this week: The TV is your enemy...

Last year, we bought a Smart TV.  It was part of our ongoing efforts to try to update and improve our house.  And, since the Covid-19 outbreak, we are SO glad we did, as without it we’d now be forced to talk to each other and play card games, like we used to during times of national crisis. 

           It's main effect has been to make us recognise the sheer dreadfulness of mainstream TV. We watch Only Connect and University Challenge on Mondays, and flit in and out of Masterchef (trying to cut out the bits where Greg Wallace chuckles with inappropriate heartiness before giving a faux cockernee ‘THAT…is…DEEvine…, THAT is!’, and the shots of John Torode munching food like a cow chewing cud). Occasionally there's a good film on which hasn’t been repeated six times a day for the past three months. Talking Pictures is the only channel I can stand, if I’m honest, and that’s only because I love black-and-white British melodramas starring John Mills, Dirk Bogarde and any child actor you care to mention.  If they showed Bette Davis films, and film noir starring Dana Andrews, I’d watch nothing else. 

               I like cookery shows, because I like food and cooking, but I often find the presenters unbearable. Jamie Oliver, for example, cooks fab grub but his ‘bish bash bosh, guys, whazz it all up in a blender, happy days’ spiel leaves me wanting to hit him with a frying pan.

               One of the programmes I particularly enjoy is Gogglebox, which is a surreal experience – I am being entertained by watching people watching TV programmes, most of which I’ve never seen.  Twenty years ago, I’d never have guessed that watching people watching stuff could be so much more interesting and funny than watching the actual programmes they’re watching. Maybe in the future we’ll watch families watching Gogglebox?

           Different channels do their own specific brand of awfulness, I’ve noticed.  BBC1 is just unwatchable.  Eastenders alone puts me into a coma. BBC2 ties with BBC4 as being my second favourite after Talking Pictures. ITV is full of drama serials which people assure me are well worth watching but the adverts drive me up the wall, and I miss episodes because they’re always changing the broadcasting times.  Channel Four is wall-to-wall public information-type documentaries about the corona virus which leave you gibbering in a corner  - How to Disinfect Your Garden Fence, or Ten Deadly Microorganisms You Didn't Realise Were Lurking In Your Shoe-rack, or Cats: Deadlier than Ebola!... And there are adverts there too!  Channel Five is back-to-back freakshow-TV:  My Nazi Trans Mother, or Cockapoos: The Hideous Facts Your Vet Didn’t Tell You, or Britain’s Top Ten Favourite Serial Killers In Their Speedos.

           So the smart TV has been a godsend during lockdown.  I took out a subscription to Amazon Prime, which I think is great. I’ve watched entire boxsets of several long series since we bought the TV, and I’m constantly finding new things to enjoy. We’ve just got into Tales From The Loop.  Because I’m slow on the uptake, I didn’t realise you could watch stuff like iPlayer, All Four and You Tube for free, so I’m just beginning to discover their delights.  On iPlayer and All Four, I can watch stuff I actually like when I want to (Number 9, Stewart Lee, University Challenge – and the Channel 4 series about RSPCA training, Animal Rescue School,  which was filmed during the year my niece undertook the course so she pops up in the background every so often). And the National Theatre, Globe, Royal Opera House, etc are streaming stage productions into our living rooms now, which means I’m experiencing more culture than I did before I went into self-isolation!

            When the lockdown began, I honestly expected I would get fitter and would do loads of writing.  I intended to eat less – empty supermarket shelves suggested food might be in short supply so in the first week of self-isolation we cut down from two to one slices of toast in the morning, had just a bowl of homemade soup for lunch, and ensured we had modest portions of an evening.  But once we realised the supermarkets had restocked their shelves, and our fridge, freezer and cupboards were overflowing with food, we quickly started slipping into bad eating habits.  When you’re bored, you find yourself thinking obsessively about that box of Jaffa Cakes you put in the drawer at the bottom of the bookcase to save for when you were really fed-up, or the pack of hot cross buns you stashed in the freezer for a rainy day.  Yes, you do – admit it! Before you know it, you're asking your partner to throw another sausage on your porridge and melt some cheese on your fruit cocktail because 'it will only go off and have to be thrown out'!

           I also anticipated going for local daily walks and then doing my daily yoga workout (which I haven’t done for about two years!) and an exercise routine I’d found online.  In the first week, I managed to hurt my neck doing supposedly moderate stretching exercises aimed at people with chronic pain caused by conditions like fibromyalgia, and this triggered two days of non-stop migraine-type headaches that left me dizzy and nauseous, with visual disturbances, convinced I had a brain tumour. Since then, these have returned twice but for a shorter duration, but they put me off the yoga and stretching exercises.  I have been for a few walks, but mostly my exercise has been doing modest amounts of housework and lots of typing!  And of course dragging my flabby body to and from the sofa and the table where my laptop is set up uses up calories. 

           If I continue like this, by the time we get permission to go back to normal life I’m going to be one of those stupendously fat people who can’t get out of their houses without having the walls removed, who lose the TV remote in their rolls of flab, and who can't stay awake for longer than half an hour at a stretch.

           But I’ll be an expert on US box-set drama serials.

                                            

What I learned this week: The Perils of Boredom...

I might be confined to the house most of the time, but I am not short of things to do.  I have Masters coursework to work on, and two chapters I still haven’t looked at properly.  I have background reading to complete. I have the first few months of the Write Club monthly writing challenge to compose (it’s ironic that I haven’t yet contributed anything as I was one of the people begging for it to be brought back!).  I have what feels like a multitude of texts and emails to respond to, and phone calls to make. I have shelves full of books, half-watched dvd-boxsets, all the so-far-unwatched stuff on Amazon Prime. There is also housework, ironing, cooking, several household decoration jobs for which I actually have the materials necessary here in the house already.

Nagging my partner, P, takes up a large chunk of every day.

            So, why then did I decide to cut my hair a few days ago?  I was washing my hands in the sink in the downstairs toilet, which is the only room in the house that has a mirror low enough for me to see my whole head.  The bathroom mirror is just a tad too high so I have to stand on tiptoe and even then I can’t fully see my neck and chin without jumping.  There’s a full length mirror in our bedroom, but it’s in a dark corner behind the door because that’s the only place we could put it, and it’s extremely difficult to see yourself in it without squinting and having to find a torch. So, seeing my whole head without effort was quite a novelty, and I found myself considering my hair in a critical fashion.

               I have let it grow long for the past few years, though I usually wear it in a pony tail or, if I’m feeling glamorous, I twist it up in a hair-gripper-thingy.  I sometimes get the straighteners on it, but I think it looks better with its natural wave – straightened, it reminds me of one of those non-iron ‘pre-crumpled’ shirts that your mum has accidentally ironed.  I have bought several electrical items which have claimed to help people create gorgeous curls of various kinds easily at home, but none have proven satisfactory.  The heated curlers made me look like Shirley Temple, a look not recommended in the middle-aged.  The heated brush, resembling a World War 2 German hand grenade according to P, is unwieldy and I am constantly dropping it.  I find it impossible to use the Mark Hill curling wand, despite watching Youtube demonstrations, as I just can’t get my hair to stay put long enough to set into a curl.

               So, I thought, gazing at my reflection.  I could make it look a bit different by cutting off a few inches and making it into a shoulder-length bob. I mean, how hard could it be?  First problem was that I couldn’t be arsed to go upstairs to get my sharp hairdresser-type scissors, so I decided to use the kitchen scissors – these are huge and designed to cut meat.  P refers to them as ‘the chicken scissors’ which always makes me imagine they are made of chicken bones and sinew, a kind of hideous witch’s torture implement.  They have a little spring on them which sometimes pops out of its housing rendering the blades unusable. Needless to say, this happened frequently while I was hacking at my hair – on one occasion the spring sprang away and landed in the (fortunately clean) toilet pan so I had to fish it out.  Making a mental note to remember to boil the scissors before I next cut up any meat with them, I gave them a quick rinse and continued. 

               The problem is, as anyone knows who has tried to cut their own hair, you get one side to a perfect length only to discover that the other side is a tad shorter.  Then of course, when you try to even them up, you end up making the first side too short, and then you realise it’s harder than you imagined cutting the back, so you call your partner in and ask if he could just cut a couple of inches in a straight line off the back, and he says:

               ‘With the bloody chicken scissors? Are you crazy?’ And you have to glare at him and tell him to just do it.  And of course he ends up cutting the back in a zigzag line so by this stage you look like a punk rocker who’s forgotten the orange hair dye.

              Then you think, Oh, I know what I can do! I’ll layer the hair that’s left – it will look 

fashionably straggly, like I intended it to have uneven lengths all along, once I get the hair-dryer round it.  But chicken scissors, though they cut off quite a lot of hair at a time, don’t do it very consistently. 

Look, let’s just say that after half an hour my hair didn’t look as good as it would have done if an actual hairdresser had done it, and leave it at that…

              

                ‘Anyway,’ I said, bravely, watching P trying to stop himself laughing. ‘No one important is going to see me. It isn’t like I have to go to work, is it? And the neighbours are used to me looking weird.’

               ‘I thought you were teaching your two private tutees tomorrow?’

               ‘Yeah, but not face-to-face. It’s online…’ 

               I realised what I was saying, just as P said: ‘They can see you on Skype, you know. It isn’t just one-way video.’

               So, that’s why I taught my two tutees while wearing a pink chiffon scarf round my head.  I’d considered wearing P’s old black woollen beanie but it made me look like I’d recently done a bank job, so I thought it was the wrong image.  I did try wearing the scarf in various stylish ways, such as tied in a bow round my blow-dried hair in a manner reminiscent of Molly Ringwald in Pretty In Pink (I looked more like Divine in Female Trouble), or in a kind of turban, a look which always looks fab on people like Jennifer Saunders but on me it just looked pretentious – possibly because I’m in South Yorkshire where women just don’t wear things like bright pink turbans. But in the end I wore it in the style of one of the older, more staid members of the royal family.  Utterly inappropriate when sitting indoors teaching a lesson, but I figured that with the headset and mic on top it would be barely noticeable…

               Fortunately, after an initial extremely slight widening of the eyes, my first tutee (a girl) seemed to just accept my appearance without comment, and my second (a boy) was too concerned about convincing me that he didn’t need any homework to pay any attention to his teacher’s head adornment.  I’m now considering making a feature of my headgear during the tutorials – maybe wearing a fedora one week, or a wimple, or a wizard’s hat, or chrysanthemums.  Just to see if they’d notice at all.

              

Writing Prompt:

Write a story or poem inspired by any of the following:

An old letter

            An old theatre or concert ticket

                  An old bus or train ticket


       A diary entry you wrote years ago

An old newspaper clipping


             An old theatre programme

What I've learned this week: The problem of feeding the Oldies [cont]

 My partner’s mum, whom I will call Ermintrude (because it makes me laugh), is in her eighties and, though she has no underlying lung problems, she is quite frail and has had at least one TIA (essentially a mini-stroke, TIA stands for Transient Ischaemic Attacks), so we are very concerned about her in the current crisis. 

One thing that makes her easier to deal with than my own mum is that she rarely goes out except into the garden anyway these days.  Under normal circumstances, getting her to come over to ours for a meal or let us take her out somewhere for the afternoon is a major feat of persuasion.  She requires several weeks of preparation time in the build-up to such a jaunt – but then she has never been a spontaneous person.  When her husband was still alive, whenever we took them out anywhere, we’d arrive at their house to pick them up and find them sitting on the settee in their coats and outdoor shoes, where they would have been waiting for at least an hour.

 

            Ermintrude doesn’t eat much. In fact, she eats less than an anorexic squirrel.  Her diet is not only small in quantity but also very restricted in variety due to her being what we call round here ‘faddy’ (or ‘normal’, as most people I come across since we moved back north in the early 2000s seem to be surprisingly unadventurous about food – it’s the same instinct that made so many of them vote Brexit).  She used to have Wiltshire Farm Foods delivered to her house, but apparently they were introducing far too much ‘weird, foreign food’ (like pasta, which in Ermintrude’s opinion should be restricted to milk puddings – though she isn’t keen on them either). 

These days, she has a ham sandwich for lunch and a Marks and Spencers mini-meal every evening. Ordinary sized ready-meals are far too large for her.  She won’t eat lamb because she likes lambs. She won’t eat pork because her father used to have a smallholding and he kept pigs. She’s not keen on beef because it’s too chewy for her dentures.  She doesn’t like sauces of any description, including ketchups, pickles, chutneys, etc,  except gravy, because she’s from Yorkshire. She won’t eat fruit because ‘I used to work in a greengrocers’ – this non-sequitur always makes me think that she’s implying that she’s seen how they really treat fruit, behind the scenes, like those whistle-blowers in abattoirs: flaying oranges alive, dipping lemons in boiling wax, juggling with innocent apples.

Her comments about food are often mysterious, random and hysterical.  For example, on Christmas Day, while watching a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, she suddenly said:

‘Did you know, Louise, that pigs can’t swim?’

‘Well, I knew they couldn’t fly,’ I muttered.

‘My father used to have a smallholding and he kept pigs.  We were always running down to the river to fish them out when they fell in.  It’s their little legs…’  She then tried to demonstrate how a pig would, according to her, flail its short legs wildly. She looked like she was having another TIA. ‘They cut their own throats, see?’

‘What?’ I asked, mouth dropping open in astonishment. ‘How?’

‘It’s their trotters,’ she explained, deadly serious. ‘They thrash about so much in the water that they end up cutting their own throats with their trotters.’

I spent some time trying to visualise this.  I didn’t think pig’s knees were the right way round to allow for this incredible feat of self-immolation and I foolishly expressed my doubts, ignoring my partner’s frantic hand gestures behind his mum telling me to shut up.

‘Oh, yes,’ she went on. ‘It’s a terrible thing.  My dad always used to tell us we had to get them out of the water double-quick before they slit their own throats. They just sink, you see.’

‘But loads of four-legged animals can swim…’ I tried.

‘Their bodies are too fat.’

‘So is mine, but I can swim. What about hippos?’

But she wouldn’t be persuaded. ‘Pigs just thrash about, sink, and cut their own throats.’

Later, my partner told me he had been through this conversation with her many times and had even shown her videos of pigs swimming, from the internet, but all she did was solemnly shake her head and say ‘Well, I don’t know about that, but all I do know is that pigs can’t swim because they cut their own throats with their trotters’. Presumably, she thought the Youtube films were somehow CGI-ed or photoshopped in some way. Or that the pigs they showed were specially trained performing pigs with hidden water-wings.

               Ermintrude’s dislike of most food groups comes into it’s own at Christmas – she doesn’t like mince pies, Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, stuffing, pigs in blankets (possibly she feels the blankets are a cruel additional burden for an animal so liable to cut itself with its own trotters), any more than one and a half sprouts, roast potatoes if they have any ‘hard bits’ on them, trifle (because it might contain sherry and she doesn’t drink alcohol as she hates the taste, and it might contain fruit), turkey (we have a chicken on Christmas Day to keep her happy), chocolates, crisps, sweets, biscuits, gateaux, shop-bought meringues, dates, nuts or any sort of spice.  Which makes cooking Christmas lunch for her very easy.

               Anyway, I digress. My point is that we now have to get food to her. As we are on complete lockdown due to my partner’s health, my niece, who is being fantastically helpful, is prepared to go to the shops for her, but though Marks and Spencers does have food on its shelves, including mini-meals, Ermintrude will only eat a limited range of these meals. There are about four she will tolerate. So there is unlikely to be many of the particular meals she likes on the shelves, and my poor niece will have to make more journeys than she needs to in order to get the specific things Ermintrude wants.  She can’t store much anyway. She has a small fridge freezer that holds about twelve mini-meals and two loaves.  A week before lockdown, we offered to buy her another freezer as there is room for an under-counter one in her little utility room (which she calls ‘the porch’), but she refused on the grounds that it would have to go in front of the electric plug for the washing machine, and she would therefore be unable to unplug the washing machine between washes. 

               We love Ermintrude, despite finding her inadvertently amusing.  She is in many ways a fabulous woman, as is my own mum, and the mums of my friends, all of whom are weird in their own individual fashion.  They are entitled to be weird. They’ve lived a long time. They’ve brought us up. Their bodies are failing and their mental acuity is not what it was.  They deserve to be looked after.

But they do make it very difficult at times!