Skip to main content

One Friday in Farringdon...

Although this blog has been going for less than a year, I’m pleased to report that it already has big following. The audience is mixed, although certain key trends can be observed. There’s a tendency, for instance, for the typical visitor to be a Class A nutter. And the site also seems to have been a big hit with the ladies.

On Friday - before setting off for Tom and Katie's wedding in Bracciano - a team from Washed and Ready to Eat went to meet some typical readers at a bar in London’s ubercool Farringdon district. News of our attendance must have spread quickly, as there was a good crowd there, although most kept a respectful distance. Full report follows. Any relation to actual conversations is purely coincidental.


Meet Helena, Gee, Bethany and Caz. Fun-loving career girls, with demanding jobs and deadlines to meet, they like nothing better than getting together at the end of the working week for an informal drink and a goss. With a £14 bottle of house white to keep them company, the conversation soon turns to future plans, sleb news, guy trouble and – inevitably – their number one blog of the moment.

WARTE:
Come on girls. Tell us about your fave reading material.


CAZ:
There’s nothing like a good Maeve Binchy when I’m chilling on the beach.

BETHANY:

I stock up on celeb mags and can often spend the whole weekend in bed reading them. It’s like so cool to know what Christina Aguilera is doing.

WARTE:
But what about your online reading? Any wicked websites you can recommend?


GEE:
Isn’t it just sad guys that look at the web all day?

HJ:
Yeah, I mean, I might visit lastminute.com for a pampering session, but most of the time I’m too busy to go surfing.

BETHANY:
What’s a website?

WARTE:
Let's try this another way. If we said the words “Washed and Ready to Eat” to you, would they ring any bells?


HJ:
Ah, now I see where all this is leading.

CAZ:
Alright, yes. I admit it. I have looked at it once or twice. But only because everybody else was talking about it.

GEE:
No one likes to be the odd one out.

BETHANY:

It’s written by that guy.

GEE:

Yeah.

CAZ:
Phyllis.

BETHANY:
It’s very weird. Every time I read it, I get contractions.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m...

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...