Muesli

I've started eating Muesli again. Vile stuff. I had started buying the most expensively packaged box. It seems that I believed it would somehow make Muesli alright. It was the most beautiful packaging I've ever seen. It came in a lovely duck egg blue matt cardboard with a stylised leaf motif pattern entwining it. It is recyclable, organic, dust-free (whatever that means), toasted leaves of corn, whole hazelnuts as opposed to unfulfilled ones presumably, slivered almonds blah, blah, blah. It has an essay on the back in a trendy silver embossed typeface singing its own praises. In the end though, I am a mug, and its just Muesli. Could have made it myself of course, but, oh that box! All the boxes are exquisitely designed, I even bought the cranberry one because I liked the colourway but the contents were still vile. Between you and me I've tried all the different colours. The Chocolate and orange box, with the inevitable juicy raisins and succulent dates smattered with golden sultanas. There is a whole array of Farrow and Ball paint pallette colours and absurdly sensual adjectives for what is basically and heap of shrivelled fruit, shiny bald nuts and chaffinch food. I got through most of them to spite Mr B who ridicules me everytime I try Muesli again. He sees me approaching the cereals because I've "...given up bread" (again) and groans. It is on an equal footing with my porridge fantasy. In the wake of my intended porridge regime (my Mum swore by it) I always have so many different types of oat left that I have to make massive batches of flapjacks to use it up. Before we left for France I had almost eaten my way through all the different colours, and had decanted them into some beautiful glass preserving jars. The same jars beloved of designer Terence Conran in the Essential House Book, but as you will quickly have realised I have unconventional ideas about what is Essential, and what isn't. Anyway the Muesli family looked pretty lined up together on my Habitat shelves. I was pleased with its 'rustic' appearance. With one jar left, the decanted hazelnut one from the duck-egg blue box I was feeling pleased with myself. I had started gloating at Mr B. He hadn't believed I could do it, I had passed the Muesli barrier, hadn't he seen that all the colours had been eaten, etc etc until his ears bled. But there has been a set-back.
The set-back is crescent shaped and made almost entirely of butter the scent of which would reach us in our Burgundian apartment before we had even opened the wooden shutters. For all its romance, living above a French Patisserie, even for one week had its disadvantages. It makes even expensive designer Muesli for middle-class toffs look like horse food all over again. When you've languished in your husband's elegant pyjama top on the balcony tearing the gentle downy dough of a fresh -from -the -oven croissant. When you've slathered hand-made confiture into its folds and then torn into an artisan loaf of bread, lyrically called a 'flute'. When you've discovered Creme de Marron, which predictably sounds dreadful translated as Chestnut Jam (Mr B viewed it with suspicion, but then he is from Norfolk)...Muesli no longer seems like an option. Its like dreaming that you are stroking the pectorals of one of the delectable Olympian swimmers and biting his biceps and then waking up drooling on a greasy pillow wearing the pyjama top of your bed-mate for fourteen years. The fourteen years referring to the sharing of the bed with this particular mate and not the wearing of the infamous pyjama top or even drooling on a greasy pillow for well over a decade.