Unrequited cake

Ana wants to meet the Queen.

Faker. 

Not some street fair amateur in a creepy cardboard mask, or a lost tourist toting an inflatable corgi. Certainly not that guy who sashays across Westminster Bridge.

The Queen, dammit. The REAL Queen.

So far no luck.

It was Ana's first, upsetting glimpse of a fake queen a week ago that triggered this fixation. Since then the cacophony of Jubilee hoopla has exacerbated her delicate condition.

Ana is not unreasonable - she merely wants to play with the Queen's toys, and maybe have tea. She has even made a Victoria sponge for the occasion.

Bait. 

Ana knows where the Queen's house is. She promises to share her toys and be sweet. What else could be required?

Grown-ups talk about the Queen till the are red and blue in the face. They throw parties for her, but she never shows up.

Befuddlement is becoming suspicion - Ana reckons people say the Queen is coming just to shut her up. She wonders if the real Queen is stuck in traffic. Perhaps there are the wrong kind of leaves on the line?

Last night Ana left a wedge of lovingly-crafted Victoria sponge on the windowsill, on the assumption that the Queen would be peckish after her boat ride.

Stuck. 

The cake was gone by morning, and the Queen was thoughtful enough to leave personalised stickers in it's place. But it wasn't enough.

On the train this afternoon a nice man noticed her far-off expression and drooping toy flag.

"Have you been to see the Queen?" he asked with the sort of bubbling excitement that only granddads on the train get.

Ana turned her gaze to him, her eyes teeming with the lost empire and unfulfilled Victoria sponge. She sensed that saying the right thing would shut him up.

"Yes" she said "I have."

Misadventures in food packaging

The cure. 

Nothing beats the blues like Texas chile.

It's so easy to cook that you don't even have to be sober or awake to make it. Nor do you have to be Texan, even if you are both asleep and drunk. Texas chile is a comfort food that spans borders.

Here's how to make it:

• saute an onion and several cloves of garlic
• add a packet of mince 
• throw in oregano, a tin of kidney beans, two tins of tomatoes, salt and cumin. 
• chuck in the scalding chili additive of your choosing. 
• drown the lot in cheap read wine. 
• simmer a couple hours till nearly burnt, then wash it down with what remains of the cheap red wine. 

The trouble with Texas chile a la Chaos HQ, is that it has to go over corn bread and under sour cream. Sour cream is easy enough to come by in London, but cornbread ain't. 

Just say no. 

In the homeland a box of Jiffy cornbread will set you back about forty cents. Sadly Britain remains a Jiffy-less island, even though you can buy a $14 box Lucky Charms in Primrose Hill, which is proof that every expat has a super-gross junk food craving (I admit with shame that mine is Aunt Jemima fake maple syrup).

Last week  I reckoned I was in luck when I stumbled upon a box of Aunt Jemima corn bread in my local shop. I didn't think much about the phrase 'no mess baking' on the box until it actually came to cooking it. Regular readers such as my mother will recall that I have a visceral hatred of fake-lazy cooking products. 

Really?

Texas chili on the burner, I cracked open the cornbread and was nearly knocked down by a horrible fake cardboard baking tray. But then came the real horror: a pouch of cornbread mix and a note instructing me to dump an egg into the bag, squish it around into a slime concoction, and not puke while so doing. 

Make no mistake - no mess baking has its consequences. I can now confirm that chasing an egg yolk round a plastic bag with your fingertips is substantially grosser than just getting a mixing bowl dirty. 

And yet, all it took to wipe the memory of egg squishery from my fingertips was an overly gluttonous helping of Texas chile, and some cheap red wine. So I forgive Aunt Jemima. After all, she is the champion of fake maple syrup, which shines above and beyond your run of the mill fake food products. 

Lurve

Happy Valentimes Day, as they say in New Mexico.

Breakfast of happy champions.

My mom writes great letters. A good thing, as her children tend to wander, putting her in the position of homefront correspondent.

Here's what she sent me today:

Have a lovely day, and remember this true fact -- chocolate makes you happy!! 

So as I sit here eating a metric truckload of chocolate, I'd just like to point out that I am merely following my mama's orders. Plus, I already ate my vegetables.

So there.

Nomnomnom. 

Once upon a time in west London

You are not the kind of gal who would be at a place like this at this time of morning.

But the fridge is barren and it's nearly high noon.

Online supermarkets are lawless territories. They remind you of the wild west, or at least the spaghetti west, where knackered homesteaders are forever waiting around for stagecoaches.

The man with the van finally arrives. You try not to panic. You know something weird will ambush you from the grocery bags.

He tells you to have a good day. You are not fooled. You unpack gingerly.

Rocket Science.

You watch like a hawk the food item gremlin: that one item of shopping that looked delicious in the picture, but is actually crap in real life.

You are no turnip. You know it will jump out and sneer at you like Jack Palance.

This time it's the rice.

You ordered rice. In a bag.

The man with a van has brought you vacuum-packed, half-cooked, microwavable rice. Not in a bag.

Though you are an old hand at Molvanian marketing, the label really takes the cake:

We understand that cooking rice can be a chore. That's why we have done all the hard work for you. Rice so good you will never need to cook it from scratch again. Microwavable in two minutes. Suitable for vegetarians. 

You mumble "suitable for idiots". Then you feel like an idiot. Luckily no one is watching, except maybe Jack Palance.

Kryptonite

You chuck the inferior bag-less rice into the microwave in a huff.

You lean against the counter and recall other hateful food impostors of note: low-fat yogurt, non-alcoholic beer, margarine, decaf anything.

You wonder: when did cooking bog standard rice become challenging? How do these rice-baffled people manage to spoon breakfast cereal into the correct location? How do they muster the energy to chew cake?

That beloved word triggers a vivid memory of every beautiful piece of cake you've ever met in every gin joint in this town. Chocolate cake. Coffee cake. Banana cake. Lemon cake. Carrot cake.

Then you realize with a start that you've let the microwave run far longer than two minutes. Now you have scorched crap rice all over your microwave.

You are a turnip. The food item gremlins - perhaps even the terrorists - have won.

Somewhere, Jack Palance is smiling.

Cookie monster

A word of advice to hostage negotiators: biscuits.

I spent last week studying for exams, literally locked in my bedroom. 

One evening I forgot to remove the key from the bedroom door and hide it from the kids. This same evening our postman delivered a dehumidifier, which Papa unwrapped using a paring knife that he forgot to put back in the kitchen.

Some regions have a wet season and a dry season. England has a wet season and a moldy season, thus the dehumidifier. 

Next morning at 9am, or 'late-o-clock' as it is known in pre-school parlance, Ali ran down the hallway and slammed the bedroom door. Then 'click'...she locked it. 

My heart plummeted to my toes. I called Papa in a flapping panic. I summoned some helpful neighbours by flapping about some more.

We gathered nervously outside the door and planned. Our first strategy was to try talking the self-holding hostage into releasing herself.

"Send one million unmarked biscuits."

"Ali, please unlock the door?"

Nothing.

"Please?"

Nada. Zip. 

We began to worry that the hostage had bound and gagged herself.

The guys talked about shouldering the door.

I dialed a locksmith. 

Then suddenly - hallelujah - she spoke!

 "Needa biscuit."

I stopped flapping long enough to slide a biscuit under the door.

"How about a biscuit in exchange for the keys?" 

Crunch, crunch, crunch. 

"Ali?"

"Outa biscuit."

More flapping. Some swearing. Much gnashing of teeth. 

The guys tried a screwdriver to no avail. 

"No biscuit," commented Ali helpfully from the other side.   

Papa had a thought: "Can somebody get me a knife from the kitchen?"

Swoosh - the tip of a paring knife slid under the door. 

"Honey," squeaked Papa in falsetto, "why does our child have a knife?"

We remembered the dehumidifier. This memory triggered some swearing on the topic of remembering to return knives to the kitchen. And some swearing on the topic of remembering to remove keys from locks within child-reach.

Then we stopped swearing and wondered aloud if the paring knife was an olive branch. Was Ali now cooperating with verbal commands? Such a thing would be an exciting and unprecedented new milestone. 

Lifelines. 

"Ali, can you pull the keys out of the door?" 

"Biscuit."

"Please?"

"Nee. Da. Bis. Cuit."

The guys had the handle off the door now. But they found the key in a half-turned state, which made it difficult to push out. Papa dashed to the kitchen. Faced with a distinct lack of paring knives, he returned with the European substitute: a fondue fork. 

Two fondue fork jiggles later and pop - out came the keys.

Realizing that we had run out of biscuits, Ali changed tactics.

"Here you go," she said sweetly, pushing the keys under the door.  

Click: the door flew open.  Papa swooped in to scour the landscape for any sharp objects in a fifty mile radius. 

"Mama!" said my sweet, smiling cherub. 

"Ali!" said her gullable mama. 

"...Biscuit?" 

23: The Office of Christmas Present

Jobsworth. 

Day 23.  

We have resorted to bribing the gate-keepers of Christmas with candy.

18: Papa special

End of the breadcrumb trail. 

Day 18, and we are trying not to devour Papa and Ana's new creation.

16: Adventing on other calendars

World's most cheerful Grinch fan. 

And she, herself, located the roast beast.

7: Snowflake cake

With a light dusting of sugar. 

We are dreaming of snow and deep fried foods on day seven of Advent.

Thankfulness pie

Auntie A is one of my longest-serving friends. She is an exemplar of human kindness, which goes a long way to explain why she's remained my friend all these years.

But the greatest of these is pie. 

Auntie A gave me a wonderful book last summer called 14,000 Things to be Happy About. The writer, Barbara Ann Kipfer, as you may have guessed, is American.

It's a lovely book. I recommend it to anyone suffering from chronic grumpiness syndrome.

It being Thanksgiving and all, I'm going to invoke a time-honoured yankee tradition that causes at least three Britons at American tables to spontaneously combust every year. I mean that part before dinner where everyone around the table is forced to say - earnestly - what they are thankful for.

As a warning, anyone who employs irony or understatement at this juncture will be DEPRIVED OF PIE.

Barbara Ann Cheerfulness Kipfer, being an expert in such matters, may go first. Over to you Barbara:

• Sunlight streaming through trees 
• Dilbert
• The whack of a bat against a baseball
• A baby's yawn
• Fiber optics  

Well done Barbara. You may have pie.

Me? I am thankful for love. Family. Friendship. Health.

I am thankful to have this brief moment of wakefulness, like a butterfly in wintertime. I reckon time has transfigured the words of Philip Larkin into truth: "what will survive of us is love."

Now there's your pie, and here's your bucket of water.

Stop cringing and be thankful.

Candy and strangeness

Never trust a grown-up.

A grown-up is just the sort of person who will come bounding home from the shop with four pumpkins, grinning like a loon.

Smashing pumkins. 

A grown-up may then neglect her responsibilities and devote an entire afternoon to carving giant robot jack-o-lanterns with you.

A grown-up might put on Thriller and dance all over the sofa in a most un-grown-up-like fashion.

Any grown-up worth her salt will then cut holes in an old white bed-sheet so that you can run around the house like Casper, clocking the walls with your forehead because you've got the eye-holes on backwards.

A grown will bring you a cobwebby Halloween witch hat. And when the excitement reaches fever pitch, a grown-up will take you by the hand and lead you out into the gathering Halloween darkness.

For candy.Your one true love in this life. Your first thought upon waking, and your last thought before sleep.

Not a turnip. 

A high quality grown-up will make sure you get plenty of candy. She will then take you home and attempt to thrust your now candy-explosives-fueled self into pajamas. This act will look like a clown trying to squeeze a rabid lion into a jam jar. Sometimes your grown-up is a turnip.

You will break free from your now slightly twitchy grown-up and  run to kiss your  magical giant robot jack-o-lanterns goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the robot bugs bite.

Pacified and straight-jacketed at last, your certified grown-up will hold you tight and sing you a song. She will tell you how much she loves you and plant kisses on each cheek. You will fall into a contented slumber, the memory of kisses warm and velvety on your cheeks, like melting butter over Saturday pancakes.

Fly my pretties!

At this point your formerly grade AAA rated grown-up will softly close the door and tip-toe to the kitchen. Here she will proceed to skin all four of your lovely giant robot jack-o-lanterns and turn them into soup.

This is why you should never trust a grown-up. In spite of the fact that soup is delicious.

As your grown-up stirs a molten vat of giant robot carcasses, she will hum 'Thriller' contentedly to herself. She will think silly thoughts in the quiet of her cozy post-bedtime world. Thoughts like: 'First of all, it was October, a rare month for girls...'

You will eat the soup for lunch tomorrow and never suspect a thing. Which is another reason.

Rolling

My favourite people come in two flavours: the ones I miss because I moved, and the ones I miss because they moved.

A&E Mum belongs to the latter, although I moved away from Metroland shortly after she did. We became friends by giggling, passing notes, and otherwise behaving poorly in ante-natal class while heavily pregnant.

In particular we bonded over a surreal labour induction presentation, which rather unusually was demonstrated on a man. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a successful induction. It escalated into a full-blown cesarean demo, which was also an appalling failure both in medical and demo terms.

I'm pretty sure fake male inductions are a felony in Alabama. But the man in question is now leading a fairly normal life under a new identity.

Innocent when you dream. 

Nothing since, not even childbirth, has been half as scary or bonkers as ante-natal class. So in a strange way it really did prepare A&E Mum and I for having children by increasing our surrealism threshold.

A&E Mum has just reminded me of our early days in suburban babyland, cloistered off from the grown-up world. We ate cake and discussed weaning while our babies scrounged for muddy worms and damsons in the back garden.

This memory has left me alternately giggling and weeping into my Hovis. You see, I suffer from a crippling case of postpartum sentimentality.

Moving on is part of growing up. But I regret that I don't get to watch the A&E family grow up alongside my kids.

There was something wonderfully innocent about our days in deepest, darkest Metroland. It was not so much the babies, but rather us mamas and papas who were innocent. We thought weaning was complicated.

I suspect eventually my children will grow into movers and inherit my burden: they will miss the people they love.

Two years ago I read a piece on being and foreignness that really sums it up: 'It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility.'

To a mover, places cease to exist in geography and instead become points in time. For instance, New Mexico is my childhood. California is my youth. Metroland is when I had my babies.

For that I forgive Metroland its various other faults.

This week at Chaos HQ

We are surrounded by an abundance of warmth and food. I'd blag on about abundance more, but it's two months till Thanksgiving and the global economy continues to be in the toilet.

From Bedfordshire with love. 

We are currently munching on these green beauties courtesy or our favourite chili farm. And we are scheming up delicious plans for some lovely NoCal reds from Truffle.

All this, and we are still feasting on chilies sent by my lovely mama, who turns sixty this month.

I am roasting the Bedfordshire greens under the broiler. Skinned and bagged, they will live happily in the freezer for the next year, crucially getting Chaos HQ through the dark winter months via the trusty medium of enchiladas.

Doctors in Britain don't tend to prescribe capsaicin for Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I just find sad. So in the wacky homeopathic self remedy department, I've taken to blathering on about the heavenly qualities of chili at all times and to anyone who will listen. It's my own clumsy, gluttonous form of The Secret. Judging by this week's catch, my strategy has born fruit.

September sees fiestas in Santa Fe and a chili harvest in Hatch. Home is on my mind.

You can't easily get there from here. But the worrying black cloud of chili smoke wafting in my kitchen makes me feel closer to there. I can almost taste the fry bread and feel my hips magically balloon with each imaginary bite. And if I cock my head towards Camden, I can just about hear Zozobra groaning tiredly as a troupe of camp fire dancers yap at his toes for the umpteenth time.  

Of the twelve months to be there, this is the one. It is hard to beat calabacitas and yellow aspen leaves - covered in an early dusting of snow if you're lucky - under a harvest moon.

Happy birthday Mama.

Sticky confession

I am addicted to making jam. Unlike everything else I've written here, this is actually true.

Every summer I swear up and down to my loved ones that I will quit. But at some point every year they come home to find me covered in jam spatter and knee-deep in sterilised glass.

I only embarked on a jam habit in the first place to avoid wasting fruit in the backyard. As any sufficiently lapsed Lutheran will tell you: wasting food is nearly as repugnant as speaking earnestly.

I nearly made good on my promise this year. A move from the suburbs to a gardenless urban flat seemed like the cure.

But an innocent bystander foiled my plan to quit by  introducing me to a damson plum tree in a park around the corner.

Sugar coating. 

I kept an eye on the tree. The damsons were getting perilously ripe. I was beginning to speak earnestly. Something had to be done.

And so it happened again: August found me hovering contentedly over a molten vat of damson jam that smelled and looked like heaven.

When I confess my jamming habit to others they generally ask me if I am their great-grandmother or if I live in 1954. Jam just ain't cool.

But I reckon a jamming habit is actually a little transgressive - stop laughing and walk with me for a minute.

Jam begins with a load of wholesome fruit that you could take home to your mother. But then you drown the fruit in a quantity of sugar so vast it can be seen from space. Truly, it is an amount of sugar is so profound that the jamming pan instantly develops type 2 diabetes on contact.

Jam is the art of consuming unholy amounts of sugar. The fruit is merely a Trojan horse for the sugar. Watching sausages get made may not put you off eating sausage, but watching jam get made should put you off eating anything for the rest of your life.

One of the funnier things about becoming a mother is that everyone suddenly thinks you are some kind of dribbling moron with pencils stuck in your nostrils going 'wibble'. Or at least my research indicates this to be true, as evidenced by the bombardment of uninvited parenting advice I've received over the past five years.

Food is a popular genre for uninvited advice. I've had everyone from the midwife to the bus driver tell me how to eat and what to feed my children. So I fight back by sticking pencils in my nostrils, wibbling loudly, and eating what I want. Most of the time what I want is jam. So there. Wibble.

I do understand that most transgressive behaviour is more exciting than this. But I am very addicted to sugar and rather short on ideas.

That said, making jam is a total pain in the neck and a complete mess. Much as I love it, I really hate it too.

Maybe next year will be my lucky year. Maybe next year I'll quit for good. So if you happen to know of an excellent fruit tree going to waste, please do don't invoke my inner Lutheran by telling me about it.

Rambling

There is a footpath from Salisbury to Winchester called the Clarendon Way. It is about thirty miles from train station to train station, which means it can be walked in one day if you set out early around the Solstice and walk briskly.

Walking blues. 

Papa and I discovered the Clarendon Way several years ago BC* when we were time-rich and cash-poor, which is very fertile soil to plant the seeds of a lifelong rambling habit in.

The Clarendon Way begins where Salisbury dissipates into a farmer's field. The field is splayed across a clutch of smooth chalky hills that fold into woodland at the creases. Hills like these appear strangely symmetrical to a girl from the Rocky Mountains: like those drawn by a child, or the curves of an egg batter folding in on itself.**

The farmer's field leads upward to the ruins of Clarendon Palace on a hill, where cows graze on tall weeds around the few remaining stone walls of the structure. From here the path meanders off off into deep gruffalo wood, where you can easily get lost if you are not paying enough attention.

Eventually the path disappears in a tiny confusing village, where the local pub is a little like the Slaughtered Lamb. The village has a beautiful name: Winterslow. I suspect it means 'place of many lost ramblers' in old English.

Foraging for mischief. 

All fairly bog standard stuff, if you come from England. In fact, you have probably dozed off by now if you are English, or tottered off for a pint at the Slaughtered Lamb. But the first time a Nuevo Mexicana sees such a landscape, she can be forgiven for being filled with wonder and thinking that perhaps she's stumbled upon heaven.

Papa and I both grew up in the high desert, so we were entirely unprepared for what we saw along the Clarendon Way: a gazillion blackberries. The hedges were buckling under the weight of them, and no one else seemed to be stopping or taking notice except for us two. We ate hundreds - possibly thousands - giggling like little kids. Our tongues and our hands were fuschia. Our entire insides must have turned purple. We ate until we could eat no more.

Youthful memories tend to get sealed in saccharine laminate as time goes by - glossed over and folded into the egg batter narrative of life.*** But there are these little moments of intense sensory discovery that stay fresh and really stick to the mind like cockleburs.

Hedgehog. 

We look for blackberries every year now. When Ana came along, she joined the summer pilgrimage, and Ali has been inducted too.

This year we scavenged on the Heath, and turned what remained of our loot (after taste testing) into pear and blackberry crumble.

I have learned that it is dangerous to return to the actual location of your happiest memories. For this reason, I fear the blackberry way has become more a place in time than in actual geography.

So we will forage wherever the wind takes us. Who knows? Maybe the wind will take us back to Salisbury again someday.

Blackberries grow on thorny indestructible vines - essentially barbed wire - with the sort of scary lust for plant life that is only matched by kudzu. And they did so long before riots went digital.

I suspect the organic not electronic form of my favourite berry will long outlive us mere humans, kept company by twinkies and cockroaches.

*Before chaos.
**As a lapsed Lutheran, I can only visualise things in terms of casserole.
***As above, I blame my casserole genes.

Bonkers in-depth analysis

'The bomb Rupert, the f-bomb.'

For remotely relevant commentary on phone hacking, pillaging and other quaint London pass-times please refer to blogs written by actual grown-ups with intentional hairstyles.

Otherwise, please check out my post on phone hacking for amateurs over at In The Powder Room. This is the first time Chaos HQ has caused major disruption at the illustrious ITPR, and we are currently toasting our excitement with (non-looted) fruit shoots.

Speaking of guest posts, Chaos HQ recently sang the praises of capsaicin to Working London Mummy. Please have a good look around her delectable blog.

As no one seems to have lit Chaos HQ on fire overnight, we will have a cup of tea and carry on posting.

This week at Chaos HQ

We are cooking up mischief.

Sugar, spice, dynamite. 

And poking penguins in the eye.

Take that, smug chick.

Babyzilla and Kid Kong are preying on London.

All your museums are belong to us.

 And pushing all of Mama's buttons.

Where is the 'eject to outer space' button, boss?

This week, last week, next week, and onwards, we find ourselves deeply lost in the belly of the summer holidays. And we are feeling rather less optimistic about the prognosis than Jonah did. All bets are off.

Stay tuned for more civilised weeks to come. In the meantime, duck and cover.

Squashed tomato stew

Chaos HQ is currently lobbing tomatoes at unfortunate pedestrians from the window of Truffle's previously immaculate grown-up flat. Which is to say, please check out my gazpacho guest post over at Cinnamon & Truffle!

Cure for the summertime blues. 

But as a warning: don't try to read C&T on an empty stomach. I tried this recently, and now my keyboard looks like a surfboard that's been through shark-infested waters. Although in fairness this may have more to do with mt sharp-toothed pair of short people.

Bon appetit!

Gremlin

Recently someone replaced my sweet little angel with a gremlin. Possibly a gremlin from another planet.

I first noticed something was wrong when the creature I thought was my child scaled a dining room table in a nanosecond and pelted me in the eyeball with an unripe avocado. Followed by a grapefruit. Having never previously been the victim of unripe fruit, I was unsure of the appropriate response. So I stood there like a lemon while the gremlin casually dismounted the table and proceeded to convert all household items into weaponry.

I think this gremlin may be in league with an evil government spy agency. It must be a poorly-funded evil government spy agency from a crap country as the gremlin only appears to have a primitive notion of local custom and language - for instance it seems to think 'NO!' is a polite form of greeting and an adequate response to instructions.

The gremlin has a horrible fascination with crisps - known as 'LULAS' in its native tongue - which led me to initially presume a Brazillian connection. It has repeatedly held the entire family to ransom for these. It can scale any surface, split eardrums with its screams of rage if interfered with, and assume a thrashing, gnashing protest at a moment's notice.

Short of a never-ending avalanche of LULAS, there appears to be no way to negotiate with it. I cannot suss the creature's motive, except perhaps world domination. I have no idea what the crap evil spy agency hopes to find in this house - perhaps lost piles of washing to fund a fledgling space program.

So should you happen to be a representative of the aforementioned crap evil government spy agency, would you please return my darling little cherub at your nearest convenience and remove your chaos agent. Call now and I will even throw in a pack of LULAS.

Under warranty

Dear reputable manufacturer of quality babies,

I am a loyal customer - I purchased two model CHAOS babies from you in under two years. I am writing to request that you collect my most recent purchase for repair, as I think it may have a defective fuse.

I was alerted to a problem this morning when eating breakfast became impossible due to a sudden lack of bowls. Perhaps foolishly, I then attempted to exit the house with both my models, and was thwarted by an absence of raincoats and shoes.

This afternoon, after a rather soggy morning, I located a stash of bowls, shoes and raincoats in the rubbish bin. Under precisely one ton of soggy coffee grounds. Your model appears to think that I am a total turnip, and claims to have nothing to do with it (and might I just point out at this juncture, that my coffee consumption habits are not the issue here).

As per section C, sub-clause RAP of your warranty, please do collect my model CHAOS baby at your nearest convenience for repair. I understand that sorting out a faulty bin-restraint mechanism may take time, so please don't feel compelled to return my model for say, eighteen years or so.

Regards,

Mama

PS: Please don't try to tell me that by taking my model CHAOS baby out of the box and actually engaging it with the outside world, I have somehow managed to void the warranty.