Sometimes I have good ideas; sometimes I have brilliant ideas; sometimes I have ideas so utterly fantastic and ground-breakingly innovative that people actually gasp in wonderment and prostrate themselves on the floor in front of me. And much of that sentence is true. Earlier this week, however, I had a bad idea – one that seemed good at the time – but turned out to be a bad one, a stinker, a shocker; possibly, in fact, the worst idea I have had since I decided to ride my bicycle no-handed on a beach side path with a passenger on the back and the bottom of a cliff immediately to my left. I decided – as there were two 200g tubs of Twiglets in the house (it had been my wife’s birthday) that I should keep them in the kitchen, out of harms way, where I wouldn’t just sit and munch them, as I had been expressly instructed not to eat them all. Here are seven reasons not to keep your Twiglets in the kitchen.
1. Measuring Them Seems Easy. You will fill your hand with Twiglets every time you go to the kitchen. It’s simple: The Twiglets are a long way away from you in a room you’re not going to visit very often, so having a handful of them every time you’re passing will mean that you will consume a negligible amount. It won’t even register that they’ve gone. Unless, that is, you have enormous hands. A fact you will conveniently forget.
2. It Makes Them More Tempting. Is there a temptation greater than forbidden fruit? A philosophical question that has been asked throughout the ages, and now there is an answer. Yes. It’s forbidden Twiglets. It’s like the prohibition era or being told not to tie your younger brother to a lamp post. The more restrictions that are placed on doing something, the more glamorous and fascinating it becomes. You may be sitting in the living room ostensibly watching a film, but your increasing fixation will cause your every pore and sinew to be strained, consumed as you are with longing and desire for the Twiglets.
3. You’ll Become Devious. In the grip of Twiglet-fever, you’ll begin to make excuses to visit the kitchen: “Oh, I seem to have run out of beer,” you’ll say, before popping back to the kitchen for more beer (and Twiglets). A few minutes after having returned, your lust for those Twiglets will rear its head again and you’ll down another beer: “Oh, I seem to have run out again”, you’ll announce blithely as you head once more to the kitchen. This is a pattern that will repeat itself during the course of the evening until eventually you will find that you feel bloated and rather tipsy. Not much room left in my stomach, you’ll think to yourself and with abject brilliance you’ll decide that this is because the beer is taking up too much of it and that now is the time to switch to shorts. But it turns out that drinking a beer for every handful of Twiglets is rather sensible when compared to drinking a whisky for every handful. You’ll find that you’re soon going to the kitchen for Twiglets three times as frequently as you were before but it’s taking you four times as long to get there. And the kitchen door’s suddenly become really complicated.
4. Your Hand Will Become Brown. Your hand is dark brown. In fact, your hand is exactly the same shade of brown as a Twiglet. Your chin is also brown as, in fact, is just about everything you have touched. This is bad, as you will make this discovery while using the toilet. On leaving the bathroom, you head back to the kitchen to wash your hands and to stock up on Twiglets.
5. It Will Make You A Bad Person. The Twiglets will make you tell untruths. If they were right there in the living room with you, you wouldn’t be in their thrall, gripped by a seemingly insatiable Twiglet-mania, but they aren’t and you are. “Have you been eating the Twiglets?” “No!” “Are you sure?” “Yes.” The Twiglets have made you fib. If the Twiglets were in the living room and everything were out in the open and you were in a relationship based on complete Twiglet-candour you wouldn’t have to resort to lying about them but they aren’t and you’re not. You’re a big, fat liar with a brown hand. “Fancy a glass of wine, darling?” You enquire as you head toward the kitchen, pants blazing merrily away behind you.
6. It Will Upset Your Children. Eventually, as is usual, you’ll hear your baby begin to stir. “I’ll go”, you’ll will shock your wife by saying, as you head to the baby’s room (via the kitchen). It turns out that he’s not hungry and he doesn’t need changing; he just wants to play. As you play with your teething baby – who is going through that stage where he just wants to suck everything – he will grab your fingers for the umpteenth time that week and shove them into his mouth. Slowly, the delighted expression on his face will change. The new face is a little difficult to describe: Try to imagine Geoffrey Boycott sucking a lemon-flavoured wasp. Now try to forget that. Difficult, isn’t it? Then he will begin to scream inconsolably and loudly for a very long time. After a while, your wife will appear: “What’s up with him?” she’ll enquire. “I don’t know”, you’ll state, “he won’t stop crying. Would you like a turn?”. Handing the baby to your wife, you’ll head back to the kitchen for Twiglets.
7. It Has Consequences. The next morning you won’t feel so good, you’ll have brown hands, the mother of all hangovers, an angry wife, a wary baby, unaccountably slippery kitchen door-knobs, a higher salt content than most seas and, most irritatingly of all, no Twiglets left. If only you’d kept them in the living room.
