The stuff from before on NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown ...

A Smashing 1st Birthday

Hoorah, we are one year old. To celebrate this momentous event we held a 2 day long festival of tea drinking and biscuit eating at NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown HQ. A special thanks to all those who came along and made our celebrations extra lovely. Also our thanks to all of our readers who have emailed us over the year with ideas and suggestions or just aimless ramblings, we love it all.

One of the highlights of the festival was the oversize Marrow smashing, using nothing more than a heavy sledge hammer, the sort you might use for breaking rocks up.

Several Marrows were harmed in the making of this film (1.5Mb) and had to be composted.

Fox's biscuits have also kindly contributed to our celebrations with a consignment of their new biscuit ranges, some of which are so new we've never heard of them! They also popped in a packet of Sports biscuits, Hoorah. Expect some reviews soon.

Biscuit Tin Awareness Week

This week we are discussing biscuit tin issues on NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown. The biscuit tin is to biscuits what the teapot is to tea, and plays a pivotal role in most peoples biscuit eating. However, we may be in danger of seeing the biscuit tin sidelined by todays advanced biscuit packaging. Already biscuit barrels, are being reported as scarce or hard to come by. This is the NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown biscuit tin. Show your support for biscuit tin awareness by sending us a picture of your favorite biscuit tin, or by telling us about your biscuit tin experiences. Hoorah! Update biscuit tin awarness week has been such a success we've made this biscuit quiz to celebrate. Test your biscuit recognition skills.

Horses, what's going on there then?

A NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown special report

A horse, quite close up Fullsize image

We're not ones for shying away from the serious issues, so this week we've been thinking about horses, and why they are a bit crap. Horses as everyone knows have largely been been redundant since the introduction of the internal combustion engine in 1894. They should have known they were up for retirement when James Watt started rating his new engines in horsepower. Up till then horses were gainfully employed by mankind for a few thousand years.

So what were they up to in the 55 Million years prior when proto horsey Hyracotherium (Eohippus) was scampering around the Eiocene forests? Well not much, appart from evolving ever bigger teeth with which to eat grass, and ever fewer toes with which to trample it flat. Mind you, your horse unlike your cow will quite happily suppliment its diet with other foodstuffs given the chance, lets compare shall we?

Cows Horses Grass Hay(dry grass) Silage(grass thats gone all yucky) Grass Hay (OK the same as cows) Polo mints (even the new ones) Kendal Mint cake Biscuits (the're not fussy) Apples Sugar cubes (Obvious) Oats (Of course) Hats (Occaisonally) Carrots Ice cream cones Cornflakes (thats a guess) Frosties (they are like Cornflakes) Cushions (OK I'm making it up now)

Thus horses with their more nutritionaly rich diet don't have to work so hard at digesting it, and need far fewer stomaches and complicated internal plumbing than cows. In fact a cows internal plumbing is even more complicated than an antiquated French hotel. This frees them up allowing for leisure time which they mostly squander away standing around looking at stuff, whinnying (that's horse noises), or with the very occaisional game of chase.

When the Apaches in western movies used to round up the wild horses, most of them wanted to get caught, especially the ones at the back, as they were bored rigid just standing around all day long.