Caroline Verdon: I'm not the only one who does stuff just for show

Why, when people come round, do we pretend we're posher than we are?
Why not take your mum for afternoon tea?Why not take your mum for afternoon tea?
Why not take your mum for afternoon tea?

Last weekend we had some friends come to stay. They’ve been my friends for 17 years since I started at university and we’re pretty close. They live in Birmingham so usually seeing each other involves lunch and a farm park at a half way point but this weekend they came to stay at our house and I pulled out all the stops.

Whenever we have guests it’s like I feel the need to pretend that nothing I own comes from a packet – everything goes in a bowl, even ketchup and brown sauce. When it comes to crisps, there’ll be no standard Walkers, it’s all Kettle chips and wasabi peas served (again) from some sort of china receptacle.

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Don’t get my husband started on breakfast – there were multiple cereal options, a fruit salad, different types of breads and spreads, pastries and hot food that included three different varieties of sausage. Picture a buffet at a Holiday Inn and you’re halfway there. But why? Why do I do that when normally it’d be a slice of toast eaten whilst hovering over the sink and slurping tea out of a cracked South Park mug?

I’m not the only one who does stuff for show – my mum does it. When I was a kid and friends came round she’d start warming plates in the oven as though that was normal Tuesday night behaviour and by plates I don’t mean the ones we’d usually use for our tea, I mean the ones that usually sat in the glass cabinet looking pretty.

The posh crockery, the white plates with the blue willow pattern on that she’d saved up the Safeways supermarket tokens to go and get. We’d also never have pizza and spaghetti hoops when we had guests, we’d have boeuf bourguignon followed by a Viennetta and if anyone stayed for breakfast it became abhorrent to think that toast could simply sit on a plate – only a toast rack would do.

Danielle called us as she was on her way into Leeds and confessed to be far more showy than the pair of us put together: “When my son’s friends from school come round I buy cookie dough and put it in the oven so the house smells like I’ve been cooking and I get the rolling pin out and sprinkle flour over the worktops so they think I’m like Delia when actually it came from a packet”.

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Danielle went on to admit that she’s been with her husband for eight years and that her ‘for show’ habits have led to them living nothing short of a lie: “He loves my homemade carrot cake. The thing is, my mum makes it instead and he has no idea. Every month she mixes the ingredients and puts them in a bun tin and brings it over and I cook it”. That is ‘for show’ living to the extreme!

Will in Bramley let a shocker slip: “My wife and I like bubbly and buy cheap prosecco whenever it’s on offer however we have a selection of expensive empty champagne bottles and when guests come round I decant the cheap stuff into the posh bottles – no one has ever noticed”. Sarah in Morley admitted that she’s never ever cooked for guests when she’s had people over: “We entertain a lot and I always just buy food from Cook on Harrogate Road and pass it off as my own. I pick something rustic looking and decant it into my own bakeware before I cook it.” That’s definitely an idea I’ll be stealing!

But it still begs the question, why do we do it? Is it keeping up with the Jones’? Some sense of desire to have the upper hand? For me I don’t think it is. For me it’s more about an unnecessary search for perfection.

A desire to make sure my friends have a perfect weekend even though I know they aren’t there for the crockery or the Kettle crisps and crudites so next time we have people to stay I’m going to try and keep it a bit more real – anyone fancy a chippy tea?

The search for true love

Ant and I met our other halves in seriously boring ways.

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I met my husband on match.com and he met his wife-to-be at work. Dull.

On Friday we started a search to find a couple with an altogether more interesting story and we were inundated.

Gemma in Pontefract met her boyfriend at a Beagle play party in Rotherham. She took her puppy, he took his and the four of them hit it off and now all live together very happily.

Ben in Seacroft met his wife when she arrested him for drunk and disorderly!

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Josh in Belle Isle met his partner in Magaluf – he’d gone over with his brother who had put on a club night and they were on a boat party:

“My brother gave me a bottle of champagne and I decided to spray it everywhere and I covered this girl and she was furious. Fast Forward a year and we’re living together and expecting a baby”.

And then there was Karen in Kippax who has my absolute favourite love story:

“I met my husband in a World of Warcraft game online, we’d go raiding together and after three years we finally met up in real life and it was love at first sight.

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“We married two months later and have been together now for three years.”

Where are the morals

We were chatting this week about what you’d do if you found £50 in an empty street. Everyone in the office apart from me would keep it.

We had a tonne of calls from people agreeing with Ant and the not remotely legal stand point of “finders keepers losers weepers”.

I’m still shocked now! Maybe it’s the hangover of Catholic guilt from my childhood but hand on heart I would hand it into the police station.

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I just think what if it belonged to an old lady who was using it to pay for her central heating bill and I then can’t get the image of her sitting in a dark cold house desperately trying to keep warm out of my head.

What if it belonged to a family and it was their only money for food for the week?

Sure the chances are if you hand it in to the police no one will contact them to collect it but then you’re a double winner – after six months they’ll give it back to you and you’re £50 richer and guilt-free!

Caroline Verdon is one half of the breakfast show on Radio Aire. You can hear Caroline and Ant between 6-10am every weekday morning.

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