Alana’s foolish days

On a day traditionally associated with fools, I’ve decided to write about “some” of my foolish acts. Notice, I say “some” not “all”- this is a blog remember not a thesis.

I’ll start with one that I still get ALOT of stick over, the time I cooked my phone…on purpose. I’d been traveling home from work in the worst traffic jam ever. So bad that my usual 40 minute journey ended up taking me six hours! The traffic jam was so bad that I even had time to pull over on a side road, go for a little run and the cars still hadn’t moved.

During the jam I tried to keep my mum updated on my movements but she insisted that as soon as I got home I text her to let her know I was safe. Unfortunately, when I finally pulled up outside my flat, slightly tired and not really thinking properly, I chucked my phone in my bag, along with my water bottle…minus a lid.

Arriving back at the flat I got my phone out as instructed to text my mum, only to find a very wet, very dead phone. Thinking on my feet, I knew I had to dry the phone quickly to avoid permanent damage. With no rice in the cupboards, instead just an old packet of tasty, but useless in this situation, Ainsley Harriet Cous Cous. Racking my brain for what could be the next best option, I noticed the oven.

Placing my phone carefully on a baking tray, I turned the oven up on a low heat and waited a couple of minutes before I saw a flashing light come through the top of the phone. At the time I thought this was good and it meant the torch was working, turns out this was actually the filament burning inside the phone.

Taking the phone out, I kept my fingers crossed that my plan had worked. Sadly and to many unsurprisingly it hadn’t. At this point, I still had some hope and thought that maybe it just needed to cool down for a bit, so I put it in the freezer for five minutes… five, ten, 15 minutes past and my phone had officially croaked.

Thankfully, I did still manage to get a message to my mum via my sister on Facebook messenger through my laptop. Not so thankfully, I can never go in a phone shop again because the next day I decided to see if Carphone Warehouse would let me claim on my insurance. As soon as I said oven they asked me to leave.

Sticking with the cooking theme, the next foolish act I’ll talk about is when I cooked beef in plastic on the TV Dating show, Dinner Date. Now, I won’t go into the full extent of the dinner date experience or my long foolish dating history ( I’ve written about that enough already here) I’m going to focus specifically on the beef!

As anyone who knows me, cooking isn’t exactly my strongest talent, however thanks to years of teaching from my mum, I can just about cook a roast dinner “it’s just timing and good ingredients,” as she always says. This in my mind, I’d delegated the important job of getting the ingredients for my dinner date to mum.

To keep things as simple as possible, mum had got me one of those “finest meal deal” beef roasting joints, where you literally just have to throw it in the oven and you can forget about it (well forget about it for 50-60 mins depending on how rare you want it) Going through the ingredients, we BOTH thoroughly read the instructions and it clearly said put the entire thing with packaging in the oven. Now, if Mum , with her decades of roast, dad Wallace critiqued meal experience said that was the way that was how I was going to do it.

Anyway, by the time it came to the date, I’d kind of let Mum’s cooking rule number one of timing slip slightly because I’d had two Dutch courage vodkas (basically a years supply of alcohol for me normally) and I really don’t know when I chucked the beef in but I remembered not to take the packaging off. Cue twitter comments “why is she doing that?” Surely the bigger question is why are you tweeting about Dinner Date… the backlash continued long after the show, as now if anyone sees it this is the first thing they ask, that and do I actually think I’m psychic. But rest assured the beef was on point, my psychic skills not so much.

Finally, because like I said this is a blog not a thesis, I’ll talk about the time I managed to lock myself in my bathroom and ended up having to jump into my neighbours’ garden to escape… So, when I lived at my flat I had a fair few parties, these were lots of fun but sometimes could get fairly messy. One party in particular got so messy that the lock on my bathroom door broke, resulting in my dad, my friend’s boyfriend and brother in laws’ brother all getting trapped in there together. We still don’t know why they were all in there together at that time, but they managed to escape eventually thanks to my other brother in law, handy man Dan. After fixing the door Dan told me the door was fine but I shouldn’t close it until he could come round to fix it properly tomorrow.

The night continued, more vodka (probably managed two and half that eve) was drank and Dan’s advice became a distant hazy blur. The next morning, feeling ever so slightly worse for wear, wearing my ever so stylish primark fleece leopard print pjs (#singlelife) and last nights make up, I was awoken by a text from Dan saying he was coming round to pick up his DJ stuff from the party. Reading the text, I dragged myself out of bed and went to the bathroom to sort myself and closed the door. Hearing the door click, my heart sank as Dan’s words came rushing back “don’t close the door”

After a good 10-15 minutes of frantically trying to open the door handle, I soon realised it wasn’t going to budge.It’s at this point I should explain the layout of my old beautifully quirky flat. It was ground floor and the bathroom led directly on the garden. Knowing there was no way out into my flat, I decided to go into the garden. Partly to see if there was any escape options and partly to get some fresh air. Surrounded by high rise flats and neighbouring gardens, my only option was to climb into my neighbor’s garden over their fence.

Now, I’m not normally scared of heights, but it did take me a while to build up the courage to do this, not helped by the fact I was dressed like a Banchi with bad fashion sense. It took me so long to build up the courage, that by the time I’d actually climbed the fence and knocked on my very confused but still oh so polite neighbours’ window, Dan, who was petrified I’d passed out when I didn’t answer the door, had managed to break not only into my flat but my bathroom. Staring at me through bathroom window he had that look your dad has when they are so angry with you but thankful you’re safe at the same time. He got his revenge though because whilst he fixed the door he left me waiting on the street in with my banchi hair and Primark reject attire, made all the better when I asked him to bring me some shoes and he decided to grab my green velvet platforms.

So, what have I learnt from these foolish moments? I guess it doesn’t really matter how silly you are because phones fix, beef cooks whatever the packaging says, brother in laws forgive you and worst comes to worse, you’ll have a funny story.