Laces refuse to die
We are not living in a golden age of shoe fastenings, according to Turkeypants on Reddit. "We're still using primitive shoelaces just like all of those grim people in the earliest photographs, standing there in their tall uncomfortable black boots, out in the barnyard next to the well, with the tethered mule standing dumbly by the family, all of whom look angry or like they want to die instead of face yet another brutal day trying to wrestle their sustenance out of the unforgiving ground. The well is gone, the mule is gone, even the barnyard is gone, and we sit in our shiny air-conditioned towers talking to each other across a networked world swarmed with satellites, yet still we wear those same laces. We tried in the 80s with Velcro; every kid had a pair, or at least some hybrid hi-tops. But Big Shoelace crushed it behind the scenes, relegating it to the shoes of wriggling infants and arthritic seniors in the painful twilight of their mobility ... "
Want (well-whisked) blowflies with that?
The plague of ants on the birthday cake reminded Carol of when her mum was making the Christmas pavlova on a hot summer's day. A huge blowfly flew into the meringue as she was beating it, immediately smooshed through the eight-eggwhite pavlova. I was 8 ... mum decided there was no time to make a new one, told me not to tell anyone and served it up for Christmas pudding. None of my (older) siblings could understand why I wasn't eating dessert. I felt sick watching them chow in, but my mother was formidable. Don't you DARE say anything, she said.
