The love of my life

Say what you like about Prince Charles. He bakes a good biscuit. The Duchy Originals range are some of my favourite ever flourbuttersugar-based helpings of heaven. Marks & Spencer make highly commendable high-street offerings. Harvey Nichols are all style over substance. I could go on.

But my point is: a new addition has ascended to the pantheon, and now nothing can ever be the same again.

Oh, celestial marriage of shortbread, dark chocolate and magical limeyness, I love you like no other. I could never care for the chocolate lime in confectionary form. They are hard work for scant reward. But somehow I was gifted the strength to see beyond this poor relation, and in the biscuit aisle of the Tobermory Bakery it was as though some kind of higher power was moving my cagouled left arm towards the shelf and lifting a box of Island Bakery Chocolate Limes through the air towards me. There can truly be no finer biscuit in heaven.

Thank goodness for the power of the Chocolate Limes to purge the senses, as I started the day in a state of some confusion. No, I mean even more than the usual bovine a.m. fog. When my alarm went off, I was in the thick of a dream where I was in an episode of Doctor Who. Not as an actress battling Moderate Alien Peril, but actually living it, as though I'd taken Le Tennant's hand and climbed into my television set (like in the Take On Me video, although that was a magazine), and was right there in the world of marching monsters and badly dressed assistants. Annoyingly, on waking I could remember hardly any details that would enable me to sell the outline to the BBC and buy nothing but biscuits made by The Island Bakery with the profits, but I remember that I could Trust No One, and also that if you spread butter over your hands, you could repel the enemy with them, like some kind of bad-ass articulated teacake. 

Home sweet home

I am, as they used to say in the glory days of Smash Hits, back back back! Although perhaps not with enough news to warrant an over-excited exclamation mark. I have only been to Scotland, after all. Not the Congo. Not the Crusades. I am not, metaphorically or otherwise, riding through the streets on an open-topped bus holding the FA Cup. Or even the FA Trophy. But still, since we last spoke I have seen with my own eyes real-life puffins and otters gambolling in the wild, and I don't believe that I am not irrevocably changed by these experiences. How? I cannot tell yet, but you will be the first to know.

These are just a few small things I have learnt in my time away.

• The Angel Of The North is, like all famous people, shorter in real life than she looks on telly. We spotted her from the train on the way to Glasgow, after following excellent directions from my friend Mr Taylor, a native of the north-east ('right-hand window of the carriage, stay alert from Durham'). Mrs Jones, the retired art historian (although I wonder if this is a calling from which you can never truly retire), was wildly excited. 
  

• Old people really, really like ice cream. At many of the destinations I visit with my mum, the grey army is marauding – and they have well and truly taken the Inner Hebrides. It seemed that every which way I turned, there was a pensioner gleefully unpeeling a Cornetto or excitedly fumbling to unwedge the teeny plastic spade from the lid of some upmarket hand-churned lifestyle brand. These specimens were recorded on the Oban to Mull ferry:

I'm not sure how or why this love affair came about. But perhaps as your ageing body slowly dries out, shrinks and atrophies, unwrapping an ice cream and enjoying every last delicious drip that runs down your fingers is the kind of sensual experience you may be starting to miss.

There are, however, always exceptions. One night, at a restaurant in Tobermory, our dinner was soundtracked by a tiny, crooked old lady at the next table who had hair like Douglas Hurd and a very high, penetrating Northern voice which could have been field-recorded by Nick Park for Creature Comforts. That day, I had been reading A Prayer For Owen Meany, whose eponymous hero sounds similarly high-pitched, and now I find I cannot differentiate the two in my mind, so I will have to capitalise her dialogue, as Owen's is in the book. While I was in the loo, my mum overheard the following: 'I CAN NEVER EAT AN ICE LOLLY DOWN TO THE STICK. I JUST CAN'T!' This made me and Mrs Jones (not the song, obviously) laugh till tears ran down our faces, but perhaps we'd just caught too much of the sun. I wonder why she could never finish the job. Perhaps she was particularly susceptible to splinters. We all have our physical frailties.

• Chaffinches really like cheese. 
  

Who knew? I did not, but this was a particularly excellent local Cheddar. I could not blame him/her (I don't know the difference, but I imagine plumage is key) one little bit.

• My mother is a slave to The Sunday Times. She wears the yoke of its oppressively infinite number of supplements. Our holiday stretched over two Sundays – representing the first and second times she had been in the country and not bought a copy of the paperboy-crippler. I asked her how she felt without it – anxious, fearful, as though she was missing a limb? 'Relieved,' she said. 'I know that it's not hanging over me for the whole week.' She was free of her chains. I cannot remember a time when The Sunday Times was not a part of the Parental Jones' weekend. Although there was a brief period many many years ago, it must have been the 70s, when some kind of strike ensued at Sunday Times Towers, and The Observer made a fleeting appearance at number 9 Arber Close, Bottisham. Even as a tot, I recognised that it looked all wrong fanned out across the Parental Jones' sitting room carpet and, later, lining the vegetable rack. It was like an unwanted newsprint foundling we discovered on the doorstep that never really fitted in. I knew that however kind we, as a family, tried to be to it, we could never truly accept it as one of our own.

• Plum sorbet is one of life's myriad tiny disappointments.
  

Au revoir

I will be taking an enforced week off from the blog, but will return with stories of rites of passage and extraordinary garments that have recently found their way into the Jones portmanteau. Thank you to my small but loyal band of browsers for the browsing you have done until this point. I will see you, metaphorically speaking, very soon. Until then, as Daniel Day-Lewis says in Last Of The Mohicans: Be strong, survive, stay alive. I will find you.

 

Daniel Day-Lewis is like myself, very pallid. We are probably distantly related. Or perhaps we resided in the same sanitorium for consumptives in a previous life. Also, my hair quite often looks like this. But I don't even have to be runnng.

Honey, I Blew Up The Squids

Someone who commissions stories for BBC news online is entranced by the miracles of the animal kingdom. Enormous creatures, tiny creatures, creatures who think their parents are a totally different species of creature – these stories find a home on the BBC website with surprising frequency. I think that the individual responsible used to be a zoo keeper, a shark hunter or lion tamer, forced into a more gentle way of life by an exhausted spouse, sick of worrying about the day she'd go to meet her partner after work to find him waiting for her with an arm missing, or with his legs dangling from the mouth of a python. He's happy enough in his new job, but misses his daily brush with danger, and is known to confront any errant journalist missing their deadline with an upturned chair and a whip.

Today he is enraptured with the eyes of a colossal squid, which measure 11 inches across. And who can blame him? I anticipate the gelatinous lenses alone will be in huge demand from now on as organic breast implants. And just imagine the deep-fried squid rings – you could hula-hoop with them, if you were wearing a grease-resistant leotard. Fully grown, the creature in its entirety is almost twice the length of a double-decker bus. And on just such a bus – I am nothing if not an effortless welder of topics – I overheard this conversation on my way home from work this evening:

Commuter 1: 'Will you be voting tomorrow?'

Commuter 2: 'I might do. It depends what the weather's like.'

The power of democracy.

Happy birthday

It is Jones major's birthday today. Happy birthday, Jones major, over-38s record holder in the long jump for Biggleswade Athletics Club*, from Jones minor (Miss).

Please observe how on trend I once was in my patent Mary-Janes from the Start-rite atelier. Also, I appear to have once possessed the chicken legs of Amy Winehouse.

*Awaiting official IAAF ratification.

My favourite things on TV this weekend

No 1: Tim Burgess's hair on Later… 

It is a fact women discover sometime during their 20s: pretty boys do not always grow up to be pretty older men. In the early 90s, everyone was wild for the waifish charm of Burgess, Albarn and the like, their teeny snub noses and planed cheekbones. But fifteen years on? 

Most women shift their criteria of physical attraction as they get older, in response to their own softenings and widenings. They begin to feel increasingly warm about paunches and heavy jaws, overlooking bald spots and bad shoes, and indulging the kind of imperfections that would have been dealbreakers years before. The thicker-set and rougher-hewn start to take their turn in the spotlight of hotness, while the gamine-featured are left behind, like an ageing child star. As supporting evidence, I would refer you to the individual members of Take That. 

But in addition, I wonder if there is an element of self-sabotage at large with the once-cute. Johnny Depp has immersed himself in roles of steadfast oddness for years (though he is, strictly speaking, beautiful not cute). Mark Owen borrowed from the wardrobe of a clean-shaven Catweazle and the physical onstage quirks of Michael Stipe.  And how else to explain what on earth is going on with Tim from the ears up? The density… the gloss finish… and does David Copperfield know someone's stolen his foils? 

No 2: the world's worst escapologist, as seen on Britain's Got Talent. The first moment of brilliance: his name – Nicky Flash. The second: his interview in the contestants' waiting room, where he said with unwitting yet deadly accuracy, 'Tonight escape-apology will be done.' He pushed his equipment onto the stage in a supermarket trolley, knocking over a couple of floor lights as he went, and took the microphone to introduce his act, oblivious to the fact he was being upstaged by his trolley which had carried on freewheeling downstage towards the pit. He had pledged to break the world record and escape from a bound-up sack in less than 30 seconds, but ended up being unceremoniously dragged off stage some minutes later by volunteers from the St John's Ambulance Service and released from his predicament, now apparently battling some kind of panic attack, instead of his padlock. I'm only sad that the apposite YouTube clip does not yet exist but imagine if you can, conjure if you must from the darkest of places, a Frankenstein-like creation stitched together from Bobby Davro, Andrew Marr and Rhydian Roberts. 

Those are names I never thought I would type – well, at all. Never mind in the same sentence. 

Try not to have nightmares.

Being Michael Schumacher

The most amazing thing I've heard today came from the radio news – and regular readers may recall that I am not a fan of the medium. Subsequently, I discovered that the story had also been in the Metro, meaning it is 100% truth with no lying bits.

Bruce Willis is being lined up to play elderly motor racing commentator and bumbling genius Murray Walker in a film about the life of Michael Schumacher. Bruce Willis? As Murray Walker? This is even more extraordinary than the fact that someone would want to make a film about Michael Schumacher.

What could come next in the alternate universe of sporting biopics? Sylvester Stallone as Alan Hansen? This would be perfect, since Sly would be required to demonstrate absolutely no emotional range whatsoever. But personally, I would pay literally all the money I have to see Clooney play Hansen. In fact the idea of these two titanic men being somehow fused via celluloid into one male colossus is so incredible it necessitates a lie-down with a damp flannel across the forehead, perhaps for the rest of my life.

But back with F1 – who to play Schumacher? I think that perhaps Bill S Preston esq could do some good work within the role.

But dye his hair, and Beaker is surely a shoo-in.