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Dear Blog Readers,
I am afraid Nanny Piggins is unable to write her own blog entry today, because she has been arrested for “borrowing” a bus.
Fortunately she was able to send me a coded message in the form of cookies, baked in the shape of letters from the alphabet. (Apparently the Police Sergeant was kind enough to allow her access to the police station oven as well as large amounts of sugar, butter and flour).
Anyway, Nanny Piggins message reads…
Dear R.A.,
Please please please do something about your hair. The last time I saw you, you looked dreadful. If you won’t get it cut, the least you could do is buy a hat – a big one, with ear flaps, to make sure everything is entirely covered. Then when you have done that, get me a lawyer, a good one (ie. Not Mr Green).
Your Glamorous Muse
Nanny Piggins F.P.
I’m sure Nanny Piggins would have gone on to say how sorry she is not to be doing this last blog entry herself, but she ran out of letter-shaped cookies. So thankyou to everyone who has read her blog this week.
If you want to know more about Nanny Piggins opinions, attitudes and adventures then don’t wait for her to blog again (It may be sometime. The cheeses at Random House have been muttering words like “banned”, “unnecessarily hostile” and “disgrace” when the topic of her blog comes up). So instead you can read my books, I do try to copy down everything Nanny Piggins says verbatim (otherwise she bites my shins).
Kind Regards
R.A. Spratt
PS. I’m sure that the rumour Boris started about Nanny Piggins deliberately getting herself arrested so that she would not have to write another blog entry are entirely untrue.
PPS. For further information about me or Nanny Piggins you can visit us at http://www.raspratt.com
Dear Blog Readers,
Well the Big Cheese at Random House called me last night. Apparently my opinions have been too opinionated. So I have been firmly ‘requested’ (publishing-speak for ‘ordered’) to simply post a recipe today.
So against my own principles I have attached a recipe below. It is a dangerously delicious one, so if it triggers a world-wide outbreak of obesity, all I can say is “I told you so”.
Yours Reluctantly
Nanny Piggins F.P.
The Boris (Chocolate soufflé with a piece of honeycomb stabbed in the centre)
This is the dessert Michael and I invent in chapter 8 of “Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion”. Soufflé has a reputation for being very difficult and tricky to cook. This is not at all true. Soufflé is only difficult if you cook for a dinner party and the guests ruin your preparations by ringing the doorbell, talking to you or trying to get you to make eye contact. If you do what I do and cook soufflé as an afternoon snack, when there are no distracting guests to bother you, or pesky vegetables or soup courses to cook at the same time then you won’t have any difficulties.
If you are of a social disposition and you insist on having friends to visit, then I recommend not inviting them to dinner. Instead invite them to watch you cook and eat a soufflé. The result will be much more educational for them and satisfying for you. If your guests complain of hunger you can order in a pizza, but only after the soufflé has been given the proper respect and attention it deserves.
Ingredients
Method
10. Now pour the chocolate and yolk mixture onto the egg whites and fold it in carefully with a wooden spoon. You want to retain as many air bubbles as possible. So don’t worry if there are a couple of unmixed patches.
11. Pour into the buttered oven dish.
12. Pick up the tray with the dish and put it in the oven.
13. Bake for 25 minutes.
14. As soon as it comes out of the oven stab the piece of honeycomb into the centre. Then serve (or eat yourself).
Dear Blog Readers,
Well it’s Wednesday. Or as those insensitive to the feelings of camels call it ‘hump day’.
It was suggested to me today that I should use this blog to discuss a serious issue. Apparently some people do not feel that my opinions on author’s hair styles are a serious issue. (Which is ridiculous because let me tell you, the only thing standing between Tim Winton and the Nobel Prize for literature is his hair cut.)
But anyway, today I am going to write about the biggest issue currently concerning the nation – Health Care. I know the Prime Minister, and the man who wishes he was Prime Minister, have been droning on about it for weeks. So to silence them both, I will now give the definitive opinion.
All the health care problems in the country could easily be solved if the government would only invest millions of dollars in cake. As anyone who has ever spent time in a public hospital knows, the food there is dreadful. If you weren’t sick when you arrived, the gloopy stews, watery soups and limp salads soon depress you so much that you begin to wish you had a serious illness just to take your mind off what you are having for lunch.
If the government would only fund hospitals properly so they could afford to serve top notch cake to their patients, as little as fifteen or twenty times a day (and I mean real cake, with lots of butter, sugar and non-wholemeal flour) then patients would be bursting with energy! They would be so full of the joy of life they would bound out of hospital days before their scheduled release, just so they could spend more time enjoying life.
In fact, now I think about it I realise, when all these doctors and politicians talk about the need to increase funds to hospitals, they have got it entirely wrong. What they should really be doing is increasing funds to bakeries and chocolate shops, then installing hospital beds there! Just imagine how much happier patients would be if they received their health care in a really excellent patisserie where their ailment could be treated with the very finest pastries, tarts and chocolaty delights.
Really, if you had hospital beds in cake shops you could get rid of doctors entirely and allow the bakers and confectioners to do the prescribing. They are much more qualified. When Hans the Baker says to me, “Nanny Piggins, I know what you need – a big slice of chocolate cake!” he is always absolutely right.
So that is my opinion. If you are the Prime Minister and you happen to be reading this, you are welcome to steal my idea and claim full credit.
I’m going to go now because I’ve written my 200 words. Enjoy your hump day (unless you’re a camel. In which case I know Wednesdays are always painful).
Kind Regards
Nanny Piggins F.P.
Dear Blog Readers,
Well the pernickety-pants at Random House have insisted that I be less abusive (i.e. less honest) in my blogs from now on. So I apologise in advance if I am boring today.
They had the audacity to suggest that instead of complaining about having to write a blog, that I should post one of my many world-beating cake recipes.
After I stomped hard on the publicist’s foot for this insulting suggestion, I explained to her that a Piggins does not just give away her best recipes willy-nilly. Yes, I may, from time to time, share one of my simpler recipes. But my best recipes are not for public broadcast. It is like learning taekwondo. When you’re a white belt you learn the front kick. It’s not until you’re a black belt that you get to focus on smashing your spinning reverse side kick through six stacked roof tiles.
And when I rang R.A. Spratt to complain about not being allowed to complain (since she was the one that trapped me into this blog-writing fiasco in the first place), I discovered that she was not at home. A rare occurrence indeed. As poor R.A. suffers from a terrible case of fridgeaphobia. (She has a dread fear of being more than 50 metres from her own fridge.) Apparently, she has bought a shed, had it installed in the bottom of her garden and locked herself in it. And if anyone knocks on the door she yells, ‘Go away! I’m working!!’ (And not in a pleasant ladylike tone of voice, let me tell you).
You see, R.A. has six months to write the next instalment of my biography and she seems to think that ‘if she just had some peace and quiet and everybody left her alone’, it would help her write.
But I’m sure she’s not really working in that shed. She’s probably either taking a nap or eating chocolate. From what I can see that’s all that authors do. They certainly don’t spend their time visiting the hairdresser or clothes shopping. (While I’ve never actually caught her doing it, I am convinced that R.A. gets her clothes by climbing in to the donation bin outside the St Vincent De Paul shop).
Anyway, I’d better go. The people at the Apple store don’t like it when I hog their computers for three or four hours at a time, and before I get thrown off, I want to buy some illegal online Canadian chocolate.
Kind Regards
Nanny Piggins F.P.
Well, as you can see, those scoundrels at Random House have tricked me into writing their ridiculous blog yet again. (These publishing people are very cunning. They are even more amoral than trapeze artists, and as anyone who has ever been dropped by one of ‘The Flying Yap Brothers’ knows, they haven’t got an honest bone in their bodies. The words “I’ll catch you” mean absolutely nothing when they come out of a trapeze artist’s mouth).
Obviously I would never willingly agree to such an onerous chore. So instead the Random House people seduced my weak-willed biographer, R.A. Spratt, by filling her full of chocolate crackles at her own book launch.
Which, by the way, was a wonderful event. R.A. Spratt was marginally less boring than usual when she gave her speech. And mercifully she followed my advice (I threatened to bite her shins if she did not) and introduced ballistics into her presentation. I can guarantee that the children who were at the launch of Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion will not remember a single word she said, but they will forever remember her trying to hit her own mother in the head with a rocket launched from an air bazooka.
But soon after that things turned sour. While R.A. Spratt was brain addled from sugary treats and receiving compliments, they suggested she write the blog to help promote Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion, the third instalment in the fourteenology about my life.
Does a book this splendiferous need me to write about it? It is obviously the greatest book ever written (narrowly beating The Adventures of Nanny Piggins and Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan), largely because it is about me. But also because it contains death-defying stunts, ingenious crime fighting and ferocious African wildcats, which is a lot more than you can say for any of those tedious books written by that Jane Austen woman.
Anyway, when R.A. Spratt woke up the next day with a post-sugar-high headache and realised what she had agreed to, she immediately burst into tears.
As she sobbed into the phone when she called me, ‘How could anybody as boring as me – an author who stays home all day and never leaves the house – how could I ever find anything to write a blog about?’ So she begged me to do it for her. Begged then bribed. She promised if I did this for her she would buy me all the frozen cheesecake I could eat. So after I had witnessed her take out a second mortgage on her house so she could afford to pay for this outlandish promise, I set to work.
And so here I am writing this, when there are cakes that I could be making, cockroaches I could be catching, cockroaches I could then be inserting into cakes I had already baked, icing over the hole and giving it to somebody really irritating like Nanny Anne or Headmaster Pimplestock, or those scoundrels at Random House. A much better use of my time.
In fact, Piffle this! I’m going to stop writing right now. I’ve just seen a very large cockroach scurry under the curtains by the sideboard. And I think it would team nicely with my new coffee cake recipe.
Bye for now Nanny Piggins, Flying Pig
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