It’ll be no surprise to you that I’m not exactly Robin Thicke’s greatest fan. But y’know something? That disgusting, rapey excuse for a song? It’s catchy. Way too catchy. Is there anything worse than finding yourself humming along a heyheyhey when you’ve just spent the past 20 minutes giving out about the damn thing? As irritation goes, it’s at the level of being woken up by your neighbour’s alarm clock at 7am on a Saturday morning. Flies that sit on your window until the second you open the thing to shoo them out and then take up residence in the one corner o f your ceiling you can’t get to. People taking up both of your armrests and leaving you stuck with no comfy arms perched in the middle of your seat.
Y’know. Annoying things.
In the interests of having cake and eating it too? Have my favourite parodies and responses to Thickery.
There’s the (genuinely) sexy:
There’s the direct approach- a bit on the NSFW side, this one, but so worth it:
And finally? There’s the goddamn fuckin’ legendary:
Enjoy! Which is your favourite? And what have I missed out on?
I took a bit of a holiday last month. Visited wonderful people in London. Went to a wedding. Cried, copiously- who doesn’t love happycrying? Not me! Popped back home to see if the office had burned down. It hadn’t, by the way. Visited wonderful people in Scotland. Finally watched Totoro. Experienced Feels.
And all the while, my garden was left alone, my plant watering instructions to my housemates forgotten. In fairness, they were ill, and I wasn’t exactly reminding them, as I was far too busy lazing about in the sunshine and climbing trees and going to workshops and giving out about the ways in which people are terrible with people who are wonderful.
Then I get home. Two things have happened.
My strawberries have.. not quite thrived. This is Sad, but I managed to rescue one or two sweet, juicy, delicious morsels so all was not lost. But my zucchini (pronounced “courgette“) plants? Oh, wow. Oh boy. Oh my. Like baobabs in a Little Prince moon, those leafy monstrosities (moonstrosities?) have taken over.
Picture of baobab (one of the image from “the little prince” by Antoine De Saint-Exupery) (Photo credit: Robert Scales)
A quick note, by the way: I have never grown courgettes before. My entire gardening experience, up till this year, involved windowboxes, herbs, some spring onions and the odd round carrot. I picked up some courgette seeds at Lidl a couple of months ago and figured I’d chuck ’em in the ground and see what happened. I did not quite know what to expect.
Also relevant: my courgette plants weren’t the only enthusiastic thing in the garden. I disappear for a couple of weeks, come back and weeds as high as my butt have appeared out of nowhere. Finding out what was going on in my vegetable patch was less obvious than one might initially think. Far less obvious.
Here’s what I saw last week when I made my first exploratory investigation into the tangles of green. Two relevant facts: Yes, my hands are quite small (I prefer to go with ‘fun-sized’, though, ifyaknowwhatImeanandIknowyoudo). Also, though, the ngle I took this photo from does not do the size of that monstrosity justice. At all.
What did I do then? I did what anyone would do. Posted on Facebook about the size of my giant marrow, and left the thing in the ground to grow. For one thing, I already had a bunch of courgettes in my fridge thanks to Gardener Friend. Mainly, though? I wanted to see what would happen. Who doesn’t want to see how damn big a thing will get sometimes, y’know?
Here we get to this morning. I’m going to go outside now and take another picture.
…
Oh. My. YOU GUYS IT IS HUGE. Look!
Apologies for the awful picture quality. It was tough getting an angle that did it the slightest bit of justice while also not getting attacked by prickly courgette leaves. Also, not in the picture it its also rather sizeable sibling, which, while not having achieved quite the same girthiness as this one, is impressive in its own right.
And here we come to the question. What on earth am I going to do with that? Should I leave it to grow and see how much bigger it will get? Should I pick it now before my garden becomes nothing but marrow? And how should I eat the thing? Should it become soup? Should I gut it and stuff it? With what? How many of my friends should I invite over to eat the thing? Should I start making new friends so we’ve a hope of getting through it? How many friends do I need for this, and so I need a bigger house to put them in?
