Comet Service are bastards

I’m going to keep this story short, simply because otherwise my blood pressure will kill not only me but also everyone within a two mile radius.

Comet Service are bastards. In July last year, my washing machine broke down. VERY long story boils down to: after I think EIGHT visits, four different diagnoses, five spare parts, seven ‘ok it’s fixed’-s and FOUR MONTHS, they finally gave me a giftcard so I could get a replacement machine. No cash refund so I could go and get a machine elsewhere, no, they don’t do that, they wanted to trap me into buying from them again. Joke’s on them, I got a cheaper machine and a Wii Fit. But I digress.

New machine was delivered 11 and a half months ago, and fortunately it didn’t wait until it was delivered 12 months and one day ago to go wrong… Last night, it stopped pumping out. But I was able to open the door. Several rolls of kitchen towel later, I retrieved my saturated laundry, hung it up to dry over the bath and switched the machine off. This morning, it still won’t pump out, and now there’s more flashing lights than Blackpool Illuminations on the front of it.

I ring Hotpoint service. Please, I thought. PLEASE send someone out so I don’t have to speak to Comet. PLEASE.

‘Press 2 if you have no extended warranty but the machine is less than 12 months old’
*beep*
‘Press 1 if you bought the machine from Comet’

Ohhhhhhhhhhh bollocks….

They put me through automatically. Now I know what’s coming. I speak to the Very Nice Lady. I explain the situation. I may have neglected to mention I already rescued my washing.

‘Earliest I can get you an engineer is Wednesday.’
*sound of grinding teeth and rending of garments*
‘Glad I rescued my washing last night then’
‘Mmm.’
‘Even if I did flood the kitchen doing it.’
‘Oh.’

‘Oh’? ‘OH’?! Someone tells you they flooded their kitchen when you’ve just said you can’t get an engineer to them for five days, you say a little bit more than ‘OH’! You at least say ‘Oh did you, I’m sorry to hear that!’

I am going to make sure they are aware the fault was reported when the unit was within warranty. They so much as HINT at there being a charge for callout or at making me spend money on a replacement machine, I’m getting my lawyer. I say that like I have one. I don’t. But I will have, and he’ll sue their arses off.

The worst bit is I KNOW that the guy’ll turn up on Wednesday, suck his teeth for a bit and then say he needs to order a part. Which’ll take another week and a half. Then, if last time is anything to go by, they’ll send him out with the wrong part, so I’ll have to wait ANOTHER week and a half….

Bastards.

Rationing

Here’s the thing. As I am unemployed (post baby) and Mr Trellis had a long period of unemployment last year (bastard company letting him go knowing he had a baby on the way. Still haven’t forgiven them and if I ever meet his former boss I’ll thump him one) money is tight. It is for everyone except the Dragons and Branson these days I suppose, but – and this is just an example – this week we’re down to our last twenty pounds. My jobseeker’s allowance comes in on Monday, then that pay has to last the three of us until his payday at the end of the month. So we looked at ways of spending less. We’ve previously tried the wartime diet after seeing a brilliant episode of Tonight with Trevor McDonald, so we thought we’d give it another bash.

So armed with a few books by Marguerite Patten (reasonably priced and well worth a read), this week’s shop consisted of:

• About 900g meat – stewing steak, sausagemeat and a tin of corned beef
• 250g bacon
• 2 herrings
• 1 loaf of bread
• Eggs (of which we’re only allowed three)
• Apples (not from the UK, I may change that soon though)
• Onions
• 2 tomatoes (a treat!)
• Cauliflower, cabbage, marrow and carrots
• 1 tin of sardines
• 1 tin of baked beans
• 1 bag of fudge

I already had cheese, sugar, cooking fats and jam so didn’t need to get those in. The sugar ration for one adult for one week is horrendous: 8oz, about 225g! I don’t have sugar in my tea, or use it for anything other than weetabix really, so that is a struggle. I’m also having problems with Young Trellis’ rations. She’s 1 year old, and I haven’t been able to find a definitive list anywhere of what – if anything – she’d be entitled to. For the moment, she’s on baby porridges for breakfast and then pretty much what we have, within reason. Did treat her to a tin of spaghetti hoops and sausages yesterday – she wasn’t impressed…

The main thing with the diet is to have a big breakfast, much bigger than I’m used to having. Today for example we had fried sardines and half a fried tomato on toast – followed by toast and jam. Normally, I might have had a piece of toast. If that. With darling daughter at that fun age of destroying EVERYTHING, most days I’d be lucky if I ate before 3pm….

A few things are currently uppermost in my mind regarding this whole experiment however. Firstly, having been doing this for a couple of weeks already, it is apparent that there is a LOT of frying involved. Fried sardines, fried eggy bread, fried bacon, frying onions before mixing them into things – that concerns me, but I can’t see much of a way around it. Secondly, our tv’s on the blink and is away for repairs, so I’ve been spending my nights knitting (which is a whole other post in itself). All I need now is someone to come and knock on the door telling me to put that light out and I may as well BE in 1943. You know, aside from the computer, the microwave, daughter’s evil singing toys, the car, etc etc! Lastly, you eat a lot of pulses. A LOT of pulses. It is my considered opinion that Germany never needed to occupy us – they just needed to fly overhead a few hours after we’d finished eating and light a match, the methane would have sent the whole country to oblivion…..

More birdies

Here we go again:

My Aviary

So, recently I’ve been mucking around a lot with my new graphics tablet, and I seem to have ended up doing a load of birds. I thought it was time they were all in one place, so I’m going to start posting them up here. Here goes:

 

So, that’ll do for now – I’ll be adding to this over time.

Oh, and on a completely different note, I’m in a play opening on Thursday. It’s called Out of Sight Out of Murder by Fred Carmichael, and judging by last night’s rehearsal, this is going to be the worst week of my life……

Post-Its

Just thought I’d share these. Ended up doing a doodle on a handy post-it note one day and posted it on b3ta. It was liked, so I did another. It has been christened post-it art, and here they are:

Making Cake

If in doubt, bake. It’s a good motto, and I thought that the recipe I had for Dobos Torte, while complicated, looked pretty fabulous. There was some swearing in the making of this cake however…

So let’s get started: first, draw out four circles on greaseproof paper, about 7 inches in diameter, and preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6. Then, beat together 3 eggs and 100g of caster sugar with an electric mixer until it’s thick and creamy. Looking a bit like this:

This takes aaaaaaaaaaaages! Mix in 1 tsp of vanilla essence. Then sift in 100g plain flour

Fold this in with a metal spoon (well that’s what the recipe says, but it doesn’t say why, and I can’t think of a reason!). Put one of the pieces of greaseproof paper onto a baking tray, outline side down, and spoon about a quarter of the mix into the centre of the circle. Spread the mix out to the edges of the circle, and put it in the oven for 5-8 minutes. Take it out and leave it to cool while you do the other three layers. The cookbook I was using said do two at a time, but my oven ain’t big enough! Once it’s done, you should get something like this:

Now – the filling! You’ll need 175g plain chocolate (I used Green and Black’s 70%), 175g butter, 2tbsp milk and 350g icing sugar.
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, and leave it to cool a little while you mix the rest of the filling

Beat together the other ingredients (don’t use an electric beater for this like I did, icing sugar goes everywhere), then mix in the chocolate, so it looks like this:

Now we come to the swearing bit: this cake is supposed to have a caramel topping. For which caramel must be made. But following directions in the book got me nothing more than two saucepans full of rock solid sugar! So to avoid kicked doggies and blushing relatives, take 75g of granulated sugar, 3 tbsp of water and 2 tsp of lemon juice, mix them all up in a saucepan, and put over a medium heat. Stir it a couple of times while it’s coming up to temperature, then once it starts bubbling, LEAVE IT! This is against all principles and instincts, but if you stir it it gets confused, or something. Swirl the pan a couple of times, but otherwise just let it bubble until it goes caramel colour. Pour it straight over one of the sponge layers and spread it out to even it up as much as possible. Don’t dip your finger in it, tasty as it looks, cos it’s hot, and it hurts!

That’s all the component parts, now to put it together! Peel the sponge layers off the paper and stack them, sticking them together with the chocolate filling.

Put the caramel layer on last, and spread the remaining chocolate round the sides. Ta-da! One dobos torte!

And the best bit? Discovering there’s just a little more chocolate than you require….

A nice dilemna

What do you put into a blog, when your life doesn’t appear that fascinating? I can’t do what Scary does and tell tall tales of my mis-spent youth, because I didn’t spend my youth trying to kill my sister. I can’t do what Tom does, because I don’t save people’s lives by administrating. I can’t talk about my sex life, because I’m sure it’s not that fascinating to the outsider (although I do enjoy it, Mr Trellis). I can’t do what the lovely freebs does, because I’m nowhere near as skilled with pictures as he is.

I can sit and wonder how I’ve managed to start my blog by directing you to other ones though…

Here goes!

Welcome to my blog! I have absolutely no idea what’s going to go here just yet, so let me introduce myself.

 I am Mrs Trellis, 24, but living nowhere near north Wales. I can frequently be found making a fool of myself on stage in the general vicinity of Milton Keynes or being taken for a walk by my two dogs. When I’m not doing either of these, I’ll be lurking on b3ta and hoping my boss doesn’t notice.

Stay tuned!