Upsetting everyone in North America. And the world.

OK, I knew grits was some sort of corn gruel. Like porridge.

But I did not know that people in North America actually love this stuff. So much so, that once a year on April 14 they throw away all their inhibitions and get down and dirty in a frenzied celebration of corn gruel. Maybe when they've smeared it all over their bodies they chuck it at each other like La Tomatina.

You can tell I am jealous. I want the English to do this. Can't we have Scone Day? When all the English bake scones then hurl them at their neighbours?

But it would all go horribly wrong here, wouldn't it? Working class scones would be made with water, and upper class scones with egg, which would mean the appointment of a Scone Committee to ensure rules of fair play. They would declare only upper plays against upper because upper scones are crumbly and do not dent on impact, whereas the oinks would cheat by concealing half an engineering brick in their dough to bring on the revolution.

Then of course the Ministry of Centralised Scone Throwing would get in on the act with all the healthandsafetygonemad, and you wouldn't be able to pick up a scone without having filled out in triplicate the Scone Risk Assessment Form, taken out special Scone Insurance, paid a £150 entrance fee, and entered all your details on a database run by Capita.

On the actual celebratory day we'd have cones and National Trust rope and the Scone Police on duty supervising everything, issuing on the spot fines for inappropriate throwing and loitering with uncooked dough.

It would be a total nightmare and all the fun would be taken out of it and that is just another straightforward and simple reason why I won't be voting Labour in the general election.

Anyway, I did a photo homage to Grits Day, the North American variety. Here is Squirrel, being told that Grits Day is not mama's blog, but a celebration of a delicious Southern foodstuff.

I hope they are happy with my loving gift to their nation.


Probably not. But in my experience, Grit's Day does not usually aim to please.

Vengeance

Nothing happened today. Nothing AT ALL. Nothing to do with ME.

For the triplets - and I use that word knowingly, because today Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are truly one being - it has been a day of inflamed passions, emotional over-reaction, and the type of outrage that ends in nuclear war.

Pressing the red button marked EXPLODE takes place one nanosecond after an insult is detected on the insult scanning device, stored somewhere under common sense and reason behind the back of a triplet brain.

Insults like, 'I want pasta for tea'.

This insult, delivered by Tiger in the kitchen and picked up by the scanning device stored in the Shark brain in the front room, is clearly a personal affront to all non-pasta eaters.

Don't say Shark liked pasta today and will like pasta tomorrow, for today she is allied with the Outraged Union of Non-pasta Eaters who have suffered this abuse LONG ENOUGH.

Tiger must be stopped. She is attempting a coup. She is trying to control all tea-times. She is seeking to remove any other sister's better right to eat tea at tea-time, especially any sister who doesn't want to eat pasta. And this merely proves Tiger's long sustained, vindictive campaign; to judge herself better than anyone else; to deny the righteousness of non-pasta eaters; to declare all non-pasta eaters upon the earth as rats and garbage; to punish all non-pasta eaters to an eternity of tea-times with pasta shaped like tubes. Tiger is the PASTA HITLER.

Now Tiger has revealed her plan all along! She is malice aforethought. She has been doing this kind of thing FOREVER and certainly before she was born.

The punishment for that is to be chased round the house by Shark threatening to pull your face off.

Dear reader, just replay that scene of insult, wounded pride, outrage, injustice, and vengeance, in all triplet dimensions. Shark-Tiger; Tiger-Shark; Squirrel-Tiger, Tiger-Squirrel; Squirrel-Shark...

It takes quite some hours, doesn't it? Which might explain why - after four hours with her life reduced to acts of retribution over wrong doings connected with pasta, dress buttons, that book left on the sofa last Thursday, who had the computer longest - mummy Grit ignites, hurls across the kitchen table a packet of frozen bread rolls garnished with a blasphemy, and stomps out of the house wearing the same hat everyone else seems to be wearing today: the hat of inflamed righteous indignation.

So, Triplets. Three parts of the same outraged being. Three parts of the same mind alive to all the injustices of dress buttons and pasta tubes.

If today is a food to be served up at teatime on Judgment Day, then these brief daylight hours deserve to be a bowl of cold porridge that Doreen, the right-handed dinner lady of wasted time, discovers under the kitchen sink of pointlessness.

The same bowl will have lodged there fifteen years, catching the grease drips from the defective u-bend of misery. It will have caught the drips from the upturned bottle of harboured grudges, be coated with the bitter crystals from the bar of insult, be bubbling with the hidden gas of resentful anger. It should now be served up, garnished with Lux soap flakes and a mouse corpse.

This is my vengeance. You get pasta.

I am never going on another treasure hunt for as long as I live

Yesterday, passed through all nine circles of hell.

It started off alright, as one might expect, with the easy clue number one of the TREASURE HUNT OF HELL being something of the sort like Can you write here what is on the sign by the lake? Well of course we could! Ha ha ha ha ha!


How we laughed, and filled in the answer, and the sunshine sparkled on the gentle ripples of the lake.

Not for much longer matey. Because the next clue was beyond the deathly River Acheron


and that next clue was GIBBERISH. Like, B4 UC GL 5 PT can U C the HEART?

And GL 5 PT is a lamp post! And lo! There was no heart! THERE WAS NO HEART. BUT THEY DIDN'T MEAN A HEART! THEY MEANT THE SIGN ON THE GRATE UNDER THE LAMP POST YOU DUMBO GRIT.


But by then it was all too late. The little grits had begun to cast themselves downward, forlorn, and soon began to weep and hold their heads in their hands with the incomprehension of it all, with the painful process of finding out EXACTLY WTF DO THESE QUESTIONS MEAN?


But we had already strayed with willfulness into the dark wood of the lamenting doomed, and now there was NO TURNING BACK.

We went on and on, FAILING to answer 50 QUESTIONS about Cardiff and rats and barns and Christian Ronaldo and all the Grits weeping louder and louder with the despair and impossibility of it all and REFUSING TO GIVE IN and all of it bringing me close to madness with the constant weeping of the damned ringing in my ears, and then I had to forsake all SANITY and have A BIG SHOUT.

I cannot then recall all the horrors.

No, not the incontinence and violence, the assailing by beasts, the wrathful fighting, the gnashing of teeth, tearing of clothes, pulling of hair, and agonies of TRIPLET PAIN having the BIGGEST FIGHT THIS WORLD HAS EVER SEEN. With mama shouting and children screaming and Here Here! Witness! An imminent physical attack with clipboard!


I ASK YOU, CAN A WOMAN SUFFER MORE?

And all of this horror and mutilation was done in the name of the RSPB TREASURE HUNT which should have taken an hour OF FUN IN THE SUN but which took Grit and the gritlets THREE HOURS OF MISERY.

As we wretched, exhausted half-beings crawled back through the festering sore that was our pain, back to the solitude of our car, the LAST CAR IN THE CAR PARK


now numb with the pain and the sorrow of it all, seeing the organisers locking up, thinking we must have given up and gone home, they produced from Satan's back passage AN OUT OF DATE CHOCOLATE EASTER EGG EACH.

And then the little grits all calmed down and clambered with vigour into the car and went happy home as if nothing could possibly have gone wrong with such a splendid day out.

Don't mention the horse nose

I want to take the man who invented Shrinkles and I want to give him a damn big smackeroo for bringing five hours worth of peace to this household today.

Well, until Princess Fairy Raindrop created a diplomatic incident by pointing out King Horse Julian's nose had a slice taken out of it. Then the dolphins got involved by laughing and made everything worse. As night follows day, The War of the Kitchen Table began. Order was not restored until all the Shrinkles knights were banished to their rooms to consider the errors of their ways and the great Grit Controller picked up the kitchen chairs.

The offending injury

Until that point, great.