About a month ago, a couple of different friends of mine recommended that I should check out Antonia Cornwell’s blog, “Whoopee, Yet Another Blooming Blog” or “Whoopee,” for short.
Boy, oh boy, am I glad I did, and I’ll expand on that theme another time (I’ve got to head for work in about 10 minutes) but today I’m just going to say that Ms. Cornwell recently wrote up an entry wherein she posted some pictures of a magnetic chalkboard and its accouterments that she’d devised for the amusement for her three-year-old daughter. This included “magnetic poetry,” magnetic facial features and accessories for jazzing up hand-drawn monsters a la Mr Potato Head, and a lewd statement pinned to the wall by her equally witty husband Ian.
Anyway, to the point, she was mocking herself for amusing her child with such an old-fashioned contrivance as a chalkboard, and claimed that she also only fed her daughter “gruts for tea,” and helpfully included the following video, for those of us who did not have the pleasure of growing up with Ivor Cutler as a pop cultural reference:
I was immediately taken with the word “gruts,” and have determined that if I ever have children to annoy, this is what I will tell them is for dinner if they ask and I don’t feel like discussing it because we’re having leftovers, I haven’t figured out what to make, or I am making something they don’t much like, but that Joel and I do.
My mom did the same with “fried parsnips.” If she didn’t feel like discussing dinner for one of the above reasons or some other undisclosed reason, we were told that it would be “fried parsnips,” and that was the end of that.
And apparently, when I was a little twerp, I was asked what I’d like for dinner on my birthday, and I quite decidedly and distinctly informed my mom that “ba-gah-ghistie” was my choice dish. Now, of course, there’s no such thing as ba-gah-ghistie, so I’m sure Mom just made something that she’d noticed me eating with gusto and called it such. It doesn’t take much to fool a four-year-old.
But, because she and Dad thought the “ba-gah-gistie” thing was really funny, they turned this one around on me, and I was offered “ba-gah-ghistie” as a birthday dinner for years, and also sometimes when I asked what was for dinner, and Mom didn’t feel like discussing it.
I also, in the course of seeking gruts on the Internet, came across this fellow’s blog and have been getting myself acquainted with it. I think he’s going to become one of my regular reads, and will probably soon appear on the ol’ blogroll. He writes passionately about science, beer, poots, silly music, puns, British travel, and silly videos. Evidently a kindred soul, across the pond.
Gruts is a good word for that. For years, mine has been “fud,” directly derived from the Far Side. If they press, I tell them it’s either “fud you can eat,” “brown fud,” or, if they’re being particularly annoying, the ever-popular “cat fud.”
They still ask, the pests.