Of course, I know that pancake day isn’t until a week on Tuesday, but Mark looked it up on the web, and somehow convinced himself it was this week instead.
So, that’s why we had the annual Tossers Ahoy party this afternoon.
After last year’s disasters it actually turned out distinctly un-messy, despite the fact he’d spread old bed sheets across the kitchen floor to catch any poorly-targetted tosses that send hot wet batter flying across the room. Even Rick, who last year managed to produce something akin to a white dog turd in the middle of a gleaming frying pan, and Ystabub whose pancakes looked like the mask from Scream produced perfectly flat, almost round creations of suspicious quality.
We all convinced ourselves that it was only a bit of flour, milk and egg, and so could be eaten in unrestricted quantities without any feelings of guilt, and so got to the point where we could do nothing but crawl slowly towards the settee, unable to stand up through sheer gluttony.
We worked it all off laughing at a bizarre video of a New Years’ party from 1989 going into 1990, which fizzed out into what had been on the tape before: the Christmas 1973 edition of Top of the Pops presented by Tony Blackburn and Noel Edmonds. It was authentically dreadful. Drummers pretending to hit cymbols that don’t even move; singers who clearly don’t know the words to the songs they’re mouthing along to; Pans People with a tragically literal interpretation of a song that required the presence of 5 dogs on stage to work.
It would have been fine if the fifth dog hadn’t wandered off at the end of the first verse, leaving them one hound too few (or one Pan too many, depending on your point of view).
Slade was at Number 1: Merry Christmas Everybody. I wonder if they could possibly have known back then how much money that would have made them in the next 30 years.
No related posts.

Er, Pancake Day isn’t until a fortnight on Tuesday. Just in case you were accidentally planning on tossing prematurely again…