"Media centre" ffs.

[BubblegumBrigade]

Packing up to spend Christmas with my PILwhom I do generally like and get on with.

BUT, I am already in an irrational rage about three things:

1, They took out their table from the dining room a few years ago and put their television in there with two chairs facing it. There are book shelves lining the walls. The stereo is in the living room. This is all fine, except they insist on calling this shabby, cramped little room with a telly in it The Media Centre, in a very smug sort of way. Each time they say it I want to scream at the ridiculousness of it.

1. They will produce something completely ordinary for lunchtimes (such as cheese with those part-baked baguettes that you finish off in the oven) and then go ON AND ON for the whole meal about them, as though they were caviar encrusted venison steaks. "I must say, it's lovely to have warm bread. It's lovely, isn't it? Isn't it lovely everyone? I do love warm bread." (DP and I always cook the dinners btw, and I am very grateful for the lunches. I just don't want to be required to have an orgasm over perfectly unremarkable fare)

1. They insist on cloth napkins for every meal. Fine, no problem with this. The thing is, they only have one cloth napkin per person, so we are expected to wipe our hands and mouths with it and then store it inside the napkin ring for the next meal. This continues for at least four days. It makes me heave, especially as we have under eights, who turn napkins into a Pollockesque mess after a single meal. We are not allowed to use kitchen roll instead as it is "common".

I am not being unreasonable in finding any of these things entirely maddening, am I? I intend to be nothing but gracious and grateful and enjoy their company, of course, but I need to know that I am entirely justified in having an internal NOITSALLWRONGANDTERRIBLEAREYOUMAD alarm about these things. DP thinks I should just be able to let it wash over me as mild pretentions/eccentricities, and feels I am U to become so riled.

My PIL do the cloth napkin thing. And have given us two sets, one that lives In the back of our towels and sheets cupboard, upstairs (they are for best, or when we start hosting the posh dinner parties my DH imagines we might around 2020, when our children are no longer little). And one that lives downstairs, with the dish towels and occasionally gets pressed into services he. They accidentally surface at the top of the pile.

At their house we have cloth napkins, and reuse them. But we are not supposed to USE them use them. Oh no. When we were hear last summer DH rollicked me for wiping the peach juice from the peach I was eating on mine 'because it stains'. And i thought napkins are for keeping your clothes clean while eating, silly me using them for that purpose.
Our my PIL are french, naturellement.

Brilliant!

Media Centre would irk me too.
Agree you should call it the telly room as often as poss.

Oh yes, they aren't selfish with The Media Centre's charms at all. We will probably all watch Wallace and Grommet on Christmas Eve in there. The kids will sit on the floor and DP and I can bring in a green plastic garden chair from the shed to take shifts sitting on if we like. It's all a bit of an event.

The kids will sit on the floor and DP and I can bring in a green plastic garden chair from the shed to take shifts sitting on if we like.

^ For some reason I'm thinking of Chandler and Joey's flat when it was stripped bare of the furniture and they watched tv in the canoe

Don't be ridiculous: "stripped bare" is the diametric opposite of what The Media Centre is. What it is is full of teetering towers of useless tat.

You have to bring luxury reclining camping chairs with you, you know the ones that have a built in sunshade, cupholder and footrest. Now that would be funny!

Keep hinting that the DC might have worms. And accidentally mix up the napkins constantly. Surely they'll wash them then?

When I read "media Center" I thought you meant a lovely '70/80's Hi-Fi!

We have an east wing & a west wing in our home.

Other people refer to them as the front & back bedroom - but they are simply uncouth.

My PILs do the same napkin for every meal thing too. Plus napkin ring.

I'm afraid I just ignore the napkins until the final meal and use baby wipes on the children and myself if necessary in the intervening time.

PILs also have amusing names for the rooms (eg one kitchen is named after a dog who used to sleep there a couple of decades ago).

Haha, the only point I agree with is the last napkin one. The rest are neither here nor there.

Good luck OP. I have just been sick at point 3. I would refuse to use them [buerk].

It's quite posh, isn't it, endlessly reusing cloth napkins.

I've blown my nose on a cloth napkin in a very posh restaurant like NewEra suggested.

I had a sneezing fit - you know like about 12 violent sneezes in a row? I scrabbled for a tissue in my bag and couldn't find one. I never go anywhere without a tissue. I think DH, who never carries tissues, sneaked it out.

My nose was pouring snot and even if I'd have gone to the loo with my hand over my face it would have been disgusting.

So I blew on the cloth. I screwed it up and put it to one side as discreetly as I could, but obviously everyone noticed and judged me.

The waiter noticed too and immediately came over to replace it.

I said: 'I'm really sorry. Please don't touch that,' and he said: 'That's perfectly all right Madam', flicked open a freshly starched and folded one and laid it in my lap without even touching me. Then he scooped up the snot-rag without a wince.

That is the sign of 5-star service. We left a big tip.

I am loving the media centre.

You all seem to have much more patience than me for indulging this kind of behaviour, 'it's just a part baked supermarket baguette' would be out of my mouth before i could stop it as well as 'i am not re-using a dirty napkin' and it would stay firmly in the ring.

AND 'beef tea' is a thing. It's not a poncy name, it's what bovril is - 'a beef tea' is the description of it. It's what people who were convalescing used to get told to drink. i don't understand what's funny about saying beef tea?

Lucozade was also the thing that convalescing people would get told to drink as much as Bovril and Oxo in the Sixties and Seventies MrsKoala.

Whenever I was poorly as a child I used to love my mum buying a bottle of Lucozade in its yellow cellophane.

She also used to buy me those magazines with a cut out girl on the back and paper pictures inside with tabs so you could change her clothes. She'd sit with me while I carefully cut them out with round-nosed scissors.

I know now that it wasn't that that got me well. But the magic of sitting with my mum drinking Lucozade and cutting out shapes worked as much.

That's all I meant

Just how old are your pils OP?

i can't even think of lucozade without tasting sick in my mouth. mum used to force me to drink it when i was ill and then inevitably i would yog and bring it all up. (i also had those cut out 'fashion' magazines )

What does it actually taste like? I suspect it just tastes of vom anyway.

limitedperiodonly.... that magazine was called Twinkle if I remember correctly! Ahh those were the days... Misty, Bunty, Twinkle.. all 10p each!

Sharp intake of breath ThePrincessWhoSatOnTheSprout.

It was indeed Twinkle.

Bunty had that girl and her cut-out-able clothes as well!

When I was a nipper I used to work on a food stall on Brighton Pier and we used to sell Bovril as one of our hot drinks: when foreign tourists at the counter would ask me "Bovril? Who at is this Bovril?" and I'd say "It's a drink ... a drink made out of meat." the bemused "wow, you English people are crazy" faces never failed to crack me up

Twinkle! Bunty! Paper girls with paper cut-out clothes! This thread is taking me right back.

When I was ill (which I was a lot), my mum used to make me this thing called "lemon water", which was basically lots of sliced up lemons and loads of sugar in hot water. Loved it. Have never had it as an adult (obviously - no one else has ever heard of it).

My PIL have their beautiful linen napkins, clean one every meal, but give me and DH kitchen roll. Really annoys me. I only get a cloth napkin when we are invited to a dinner party.

I used to work for a firm that had a women's netball team. The standard excuse for being late for a match was "Sorry, I was reading my kid sister's copy of Bunty".