Ariane Sherine

I forgot to blog yesterday and today. John, one of my two closest friends, has been taken to hospital having had a suspected stroke. Fortunately, they discovered he hadn’t had a stroke; unfortunately, he has some kind of kidney failure, so they’re keeping him in overnight.

So yeah: I’ve had other things on my mind. I really hope he’s going to be right as rain soon.

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Aragorn Strider, Lucy Spencer, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Mark White,  Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

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Another birthday today of another stunning writer friend, the supremely talented Kia Abdullah! She’s packed so much into 38 years: writing for the New York Times and the Guardian, securing a two-book deal with HarperCollins for her crime thrillers (her first, Take It Back, is currently sharing supermarket shelf space with John Grisham) and setting up travel blog Atlas and Boots with her boyfriend Peter, meaning she gets paid to travel the world (she’s been to an impressive 60 countries). Oh, and she’s just started Asian Booklist, a site promoting books by British-Asian authors. I don’t think she ever sleeps!

Happy birthday Kia-Ora. Have a great one.

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Aragorn Strider, Lucy Spencer, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Mark White,  Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

Happy 37th birthday to my wonderful friend Emily! She’s kind and loyal, an amazing mate and a beloved aunty to Lily. She was the best woman at my wedding and also my editor at The Spectator, effectively restarting my journalistic career when she commissioned me, and always gave such generous and thoughtful feedback on my work. As well as being a great editor and friend, she’s also an extremely talented writer (you can buy her short story collection Bad Romance here) and broadcaster. Oh, and she’s stunning to boot. Some girls have all the luck!

I hope she has a birthday as lovely as she is.

Photo credit: Daily Mail

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Aragorn Strider, Lucy Spencer, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Mark White,  Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

 

I used to think chocolate truffles were snuffled out of the ground by pigs. I’ve never seen my daughter’s dad laugh harder than when I told him!

Inspired by this and a few other misunderstandings, I tweeted about it.

I got a few misunderstandings sent to me from my original tweet, my favourite of which was from a Chinese professor:

My friend Charlie Brooker then saw the tweet and replied to it about the KFC logo:

Excitingly, he then quote-tweeted it to his 1.2 million followers:

The misunderstandings came in thick and fast. Here are some of my favourites:

And my favourite misunderstanding of all:

I feel so much less alone now!

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Aragorn Strider, Lucy Spencer, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Mark White,  Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

 

 

 

Feeling very melancholy thinking that I may never see my beloved Nana again in person. The care home almost certainly won’t allow me to see her until a vaccine is found (and understandably so). The problem is that we don’t have time to wait – she’s going to be 95 next month! And she’s deteriorating a lot from lack of human contact. She’s become withdrawn and quiet again on the phone.

I miss her so much.

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Aragorn Strider, Lucy Spencer, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Mark White,  Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

Hello to Guillaume, John, Thomas, Keith and all other readers,

I hope you had a lovely long weekend. I spent mine with the nine-year-old. Looking after her has brought me so much joy, so much happiness, but it’s also exhausting! She has now gone back to her dad’s and I am knackered, so I hope you’ll forgive me for phoning in this blog before I collapse.

In the photo above, she has tucked her toy husky dog inside her beanie hat and is finding this very funny. She is adorable and hilarious and I’m very lucky, but now I have to sleep.

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Aragorn Strider, Lucy Spencer, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Mark White,  Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

 

The nine-year-old is back with me today, and as well as spending the weekend playing Rummy, we’ll also be playing a card game called Set.

It’s a fascinating game all about visual perception. You have to spot sets of cards with the same characteristics – shape, colour, number and shading – or a set of cards with completely different characteristics to one another! The person with the most sets at the end wins.

Being a visual game, it’s very hard to explain, but you quickly get the hang of it and then it’s addictive. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes card games.

Don’t play the nine-year-old, though. She’s the undisputed reigning champion and will definitely beat you!

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Aragorn Strider, Mark White, Lucy Spencer, Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

 

I’m so impressed with the nine-year-old. She’s made a 3D model house out of cardboard and paper! It only has two rooms so far but it’s a great start. This is the other room:

‘Work hard and be nice to people’, indeed. I’m proud of her for doing both.

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Aragorn Strider, Mark White, Lucy Spencer, Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

I just taught the nine-year-old the card game Rummy. One of my happiest childhood memories (thankfully there are a few) was staying with my loving grandparents in Leicester, where my wonderful Nan would play Rummy with me. I remember her bangles clicking and her long hot-pink-painted fingernails clacking as she rearranged her cards.

She usually won, and it turns out that the nine-year-old has inherited her talent. We played a ‘best-of-three’ set yesterday, and she beat me by winning two games in a row, meaning we didn’t even play all three!

Maybe Rummy will become one of her happiest childhood memories too. I hope there will be thousands of sweet memories for her to choose from.

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Aragorn Strider, Mark White, Lucy Spencer, Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.

The nine-year-old has been amusing herself by doing more arts and crafts. Above is a toilet roll unicorn she made. John joked, ‘That’s a very expensive unicorn!’

She’s also been writing a diary. Apparently people can die from boring homeschooling! Who knew?

This post has been made possible by my awesome Patreon supporters Peter Weilgony, Ricky Steer, Charlie Brooker, Mary and Tim Fowler, Steve Richards, Alan Brookland, Mark Ormandy, Oliver Vass, Keith Bell, John Fleming, Mark Bailey, Rebekah Bennetch, Matthew Sylvester, Brian Engler, Jack Scanlan, Dave Nattriss, MusicalComedyGuide.com, Aragorn Strider, Mark White, Lucy Spencer, Shane Jarvis, Emily Hill and Marcus P Knight.

If you enjoyed this blog, please support me on Patreon from just £1 a month and you’ll get to read a lot more of my writing.