#Though these instant packet kinds can be too salty (for my tastes definitely)

[don-dake]

BJ got his favourite meal today! 🍵🍚

*お茶づけ (ochazuke) — tea on rice

[sarasmallmanwrites]

A-Level Playing Field

Nobody wanted my opinion on this, but it’s hard growing up poor. 

1988. It’s that damp kind of evening outside, clouded by condensation on the single glazed windows, and the smoke from my Nan’s Benson and Hedges. We’ve just had tea – this is North, of course – and everything is accompanied by slices of springy bread heavily lacquered in ‘soft spread’. The gold foiled butter is, usually, saved for my grandad, who works at a fibreglass factory. It’s a very long way away (actually 3.7 miles) and he leaves on his bike every evening with three rounds of tinned ham sandwiches in his bag. Tonight, my mum is out until half nine, working in the care home in the next town, picking me up at ten-ish, depending on how fast she walks. My mum is 27. Five years out of a loveless marriage, living in a council house, she has no qualifications but is working for her City and Guilds and her English ‘O-Level’, GCSEs haven’t hit our vocabulary yet, and won’t until my second cousin Mark does his two years later.

Tonight is Thursday. Nan goes out on a Thursday, which means she will leave the house at half seven in a haze of Vitapoint, Elnett and Lily of the Valley, to play Bingo at the local club. I am being looked after by Alan, my mum’s younger brother, living at home, working in the Mill that overlooks the town below like a stern Victorian overseer. He’s always grumpy, stuck in a town that has no opportunities, and no visible exit. The eighties have been cruel to young, working-class men. The vehement cry of ‘get the fuck out’ hasn’t reached our town but will do in eight years time, on a wave of Britpop, New Labour, cigarettes, and alcohol.

My uncle looks to the television for nightly escape. Thursday is Blackadder, it’s Not The Nine O’Clock News, it’s Comic Strip, it’s A Bit of Fry and Laurie, it’s Red Dwarf, it’s shipwrecked and comatose, and me engrossed on the couch, not sipping mango juice, but milky tea (the North!), as my uncle laughs his head off in between cigarettes. My mum returns, smelling like TCP and the outside, with salty, vinegary chips, and we eat them as we walk the newly tarmacked paths under the orange street lights. I ask her what a goldfish shoal is. She tells me to shush.

I decided that weekend that I wanted to be funny. I mean I could make people laugh when I did my Cilla Black impression, so surely that was a start, and thank to Carry On films I was brilliant at ‘Infamy, Infamy!’, I knew this because my grandad (the cleverest man I knew) had told me so. Even though I was only in Junior One, I knew that you had to be taught how to be funny, that there was definitely some kind of class that you would have to take to learn it, because I had never really been a natural at anything; apart from whistling, which I did with gusto in shrill, high- pitched tones wherever I could.

I read a lot, especially the paper – particularly the Daily Mirror, which probably explains why I am always heavily weighted to the left, and not just because of my ineptitude in heels – and found out that Hugh Laurie, who is obviously the funniest man I have ever encountered, went to Cambridge and was in something called ‘The Footlights’. Then was it, I decided. I was going to go to Cambridge and join ‘The Footlights’ and be funny like Victoria Wood and Dawn French. I imagine ‘The Footlights’ to be a rag-tag theatrical group living on their wits, humour, and more importantly, Pot Noodles. I tell my Grandad that I want to go to Cambridge. He tells me not to be daft.

Now, when I think about it, wanting to go to Cambridge was not a preposterous idea for any child at the age of seven; you are at the start of your education journey. There is plenty of time to get better at things, to practice, to be coached, to improve yourself; but for a working-class girl, who would eventually be the first member of her family to go to university, I might as well have said that I wanted to fly to Mars on fairy wings. But, children who attend private schools are told from the age of four that Oxford or Cambridge are the end goals for their education, with any of the higher-performing Russell Group universities being something that they could settle for, at a push. I didn’t even know what a Russell Group University was until about three years ago, and why would I? For me, in my small artsy primary school with forty children across four year groups, a dismissive attitude towards formal English education, and a liberal fancy for devoting the whole of the summer term to the end of year show, this was not something that was even thought about. Oxford and Cambridge were places printed on the back of books, they weren’t places that you went to university. In fact, most of my primary school teachers hadn’t even been to university but received their qualifications at the local teacher training college; the only exception is a brown jumpered gentleman with a penchant for using cupboards as a disciplinary technique. 

We’ll skip forward a few years later, and high school is a vigorous mixing bowl of talents, it takes until at least year nine before anyone even notices who I am amongst the squall of kids churning about in KS3. Dinner is pink sausage meat wrapped in a translucent puff pastry duvet, a treat even on the hottest days when the fat sticks to your lips; and the terms pass in a haze of cheap cider (the kind that tastes like sick), the floral pout of Cherry Lypsyl, and Chris Evans on the Radio One Breakfast Show; who is hastily snoozed every morning before I smell the lukewarm coffee my mum has left by my bed before she goes to work.  At this point my mum is a newly qualified nurse at the hospice two towns over, her fingers raw from hand sanitiser, but with rolls of antiseptic scented micropore tape that I use for a cacophony of projects. She is on nights right now, spooning gravelly granules of instant coffee into a mug, blurry from sleep, I am cobbling together a mask out of old Cornflake packets, stuck together with nursing supplies and painted with nail varnish that went past its best around the same time as the Thompson Twins. It is 1995, and the country feels like it is on the cusp of something.  I don’t know what, but I’m looking forward to the Year 2000 because I will be fully grown. Well, nineteen.

But what about Oxbridge? Well, for starters, if you attend a state school you have to be so immediately impressive to your teachers that they discuss you in the staffroom. It’s not enough to be good at one particular thing, you have to excel across the board. You have to be so amazingly shiny, that even the most jaded teacher in the school cannot fail to be dazzled by your brightness. For state school kids, Oxbridge is not something that they suggest to the average 10 A*-C kids, it’s not something that they even dangle in front of 10 A*-B kids who are pretty good. At state school, you have to be exceptional for your teachers to even consider you as a candidate, and then you have to achieve enough A*s in your GCSEs that you might as well open a Planetarium. Even then, all they can really do is say ‘I think you could go to Oxford or Cambridge, you know’, or flag you up to the local authority careers service as ‘potential Oxbridge’. There is no Oxford Fast Track programme in state schools, even for exceptional kids.

In a recent social media fracas, one lady proclaimed that if you gave kids a level playing field then poor kids would always triumph because they were more resilient - all those Crispy Pancakes, surely? But for children from a working-class background, we’re not even on the playing field yet; we have to borrow trainers with non-marking soles, scrape around for a quid for the bus. By the time we get to the playing field, we have already been running around for half the day trying to get there, we miss the warm-up because we were late and, honestly, by this point, we’re just knackered because we’ve had to work so much harder just to get there in the first place.

The warm-up is a given to those whose parents have been able to pay for their education – they even get complimentary orange slices for afterwards, just for extra pep and vigour. There are Oxbridge prep classes, extracurricular activities slanted towards the Oxbridge admissions interviews, and chances to take unpaid internships during the summer using family connections. It’s not just that though... it’s little things like knowing it’s pronounced ‘Barkshire’, not Berkshire, it’s when you use a napkin, it’s spending a week skiing at Courchevel. It’s olives. 

In 1998, I don’t know any of these things and, even if I did, my accent with its flat vowels and its Lancashire intonation would give me away in a heartbeat, because I sound like I’ve fallen off a pit pony on my way back t’mill. Things change quickly though. My mum has a baby. A screaming, mewling little boy born during The Simpsons on a Friday evening in October. Now there is absolutely no money for luxuries, and when our TV gets nicked, we end up using the small portable from upstairs. My Nan lends me money here and there to get to college, but it only covers the bus fare, and the small endowment that I receive  - supposedly to cover driving lessons - gets swallowed up with everyday things that seventeen-year olds shouldn’t have to pay for. I’m working for 4 hours a week in Woolies too, £3.10 p/h to stand around the toy department in a slippery polyester blouse the colour of synthetic mint ice cream, before skulking off to the bookshop to spend that money on things for college.  Nothing fancy but, by this point, I am well on my way to being a ‘Funny Girl’, studying a raft of ‘arty-farty’ A-Levels and English thrown in for good measure. The Cambridge Footlights hardly crosses my mind anymore, because Oxford and Cambridge are reserved for the kids doing the hard sciences, maths, law, politics, things that you need a calculator for. You don’t get into Oxford with A-Levels in Theatre Studies, Media, and Performing Arts, despite what they tell you about diversity.

Oxford or Cambridge do not offer a typical British university experience, and how can teachers who have never passed through the rigorous and exhausting Oxbridge admissions procedure be expected to offer any kind of advantage to their gifted and talented students? If you are a working-class parent relying on underfunded, underpaid and overworked FE lecturers to help coach your child through this, then you are immediately on the backfoot compared to a child whose parents can afford private tutors, admissions booklets, and interview coaches. This is no reflection on sixth form teachers in FE establishments across the country, who do all they can to nurture the kids with Oxbridge potential, but when some classes haven’t received new textbooks for two years, where students are encouraged to photocopy their own materials to save costs, you can see where the class difference begins to draw attention to itself without the need for neon yellow highlighters.

My UCAS book arrived in September; an impressive, thinly papered tome with a glossy black and white cover, University Colleges and Admission Services stamped across it in orange. It smells like a cross between the Argos catalogue and a phone book, which I feel is rather apt given that it contains the codes of institutions and courses that will break me out of this godforsaken town: a cypher that I etch out on the application form in black biro.

London

Southampton

Buckinghamshire

Preston

Liverpool

Manchester.

I don’t want to go to any of the bottom three, of course, far too close to where I came from to be relevant.  My second cousin Mark’s stint at Sheffield Hallam seemed to be an excuse for his mum to visit his ‘digs’ once a month with catering sized tins of Nescafe, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t quite looking forward to edging the lid off with a knife and stabbing through that ridged foil. My mum writes a cheque out in her secondary modern handwriting, crossing her fingers that they won’t cash it until after payday.

The discrepancies between low-income working-class families and those with a better income also show here too - this can be something as simple as slow internet connection, not having a working laptop and doing work on smartphones, access to transport, costs for travel to visit universities. Things like this are not included when factoring in costs for students from low income. How can you visit all the different university campuses, with all the travel costs and maybe even overnight accommodation, when your parents can barely afford to keep the lights on? There was only one institution that I wanted to go to. London Institute, a glamourous collection of art colleges that included the London College of Fashion, Central St Martins, and, more importantly for me, The London College of Printing.  The competition was fierce, but I was shortlisted for an interview in the capital with a former editor of the Daily Mirror. My house was showered in happy expletives that day. Even in 1999, tickets from Wigan to London were over £50 for a pre-booked return. My mum cashed in all of her Clubcard points for the ticket. But, just for me, because she hadn’t bought enough milk to cover the cost of two tickets. However, I must have impressed Tony Delano in that office in Clerkenwell, because he gave me an amazingly lowball offer meaning that my A-level results became a terribly graded self-fulfilling prophecy.

Oxford is different from usual universities in that there are colleges, thirty-nine in total. You might have seen them on University Challenge – Balliol, Trinity, Emmanuel, Brasenose – or from reading the Wikipedia pages of any of our last three Prime Ministers, including the incumbent Boris Johnson, who graduated with a 2:1 in 1987. That’s the other thing – you don’t study something at Oxford, you read it – you don’t start your studies, you matriculate, for which you need a robe. Now, I have been told by helpful and obstinate alumni via social media that Matriculation Robes are £25, ex-hire. However, I have also been told by a current Oxford student that the robe cost is £50 minimum, and no-one would dare wear a secondhand robe as ‘everyone would know’. It’s immediately singling yourself out as a Weasley in a room filled with Malfoys.

The accommodation costs are comparable to London prices; however, this does not cover the Christmas break, which means everything needs to be packed up and stored. Not only do you pay for the storage, but you pay for the boxes too. Much to my disappointment, no-one nips out for a Pot Noodle either, students are expected to dine ‘in hall’ (again, more cost!) where you can choose between an informal and a formal sitting – where your gown is required. I imagine for a working-class kid attending Oxford or Cambridge is very much like cosplaying on a Harry Potter set, but without the magic of a bottomless purse. There are balls too at the end of each term, formal affairs with ticket prices over £50. Again, said the former alumni, you don’t have to go! It’s not obligatory!

But let me tell you a harsh reality. Nothing ostracises a poor kid more than not being able to join in because they can’t afford it. Nothing. And we might have great friends who would all chip in and pay for our ticket, or lend us the money, but there is something very working-class about not wanting people to know that we can’t afford it. Surely we should not be asking these young adults who have studied and worked against all odds, to have a second class university experience because they know their parents won’t be able to help. You can’t even get a job to supplement your income either; the majority of colleges stipulate this, and as someone who had to work two term-time jobs at a much less prestigious university to live (even with the glorious student overdrafts of pre-austerity Britain), this really hit home at how much I would have struggled financially if I had gone to either of these institutions.

Recently my daughter applied for university. We get in the car and visit a university each week, driving miles up and down and across the country. We fight over choices and analyse each course based on employability, and whether or not she would like it. The process is completed in clicks and feels much more clinical than twenty years earlier, but rather than heading into unchartered waters, I have a map. It might be old and tattered, but I have a much better idea of where we are going now. My daughter believes that the meritocracy is a lie, and she tells me this in sharp, pointed tones as we receive her A-level results on a rainy Thursday morning. She goes to University in September and spends the autumn sending me videos of the Minster, or tutorials on how to swear in Japanese. She is only the second person in our family to continue on to higher education. I don’t just mean in her generation. I mean in total. We are the exception, not the rule.

One of the first questions someone at Oxford was asked by a fellow student last year was ‘private or state’, she replied ‘private’ and was met with a smile. There was no need to ask who the state school entrant was, as she queried the partridge and asparagus served for dinner – ‘this chicken is tough. Is that grass?’- and arrived for the formal sitting with her gown covering a denim skirt and shimmery top underneath. Private school teaches these things, no desperate faux pas for Isobel or Jeremy, whereas state schools do not have the resources or the knowledge to run classes on etiquette for the small number of their students that make it through the intense application procedures. This is not saying that low-income children should be discouraged – not at all – instead, it is saying that there is something inherently wrong with the system. At private school, you are disappointed if you don’t get into Oxbridge, whereas the state school child who gets in is an extraordinary anomaly talked about for years in hushed tones of reverence by the faculty.

And this is the issue with saying that children are on a level playing field, that everyone is measured on their own merit; because it is not true. For children on very low incomes, the odds are unfairly stacked against them, and the issues such as 2020’s disastrous A-Level results just add more bricks to an already near-insurmountable wall.

[redvelvetreel]

Red Velvet Reel 10.2: Hiper-Billirubinado

[Fic Directory]

Pairing: [Married] Spicyhoney (Underfell Papyrus x Underswap Papyrus)

Summary: What could be more romantic than letting your SO sleep in and make them a delicious brunch spread?! Edge can actually think of a lot of things, but if Stretch really wants him to eat these chicken and waffle things, then its his husband’s good luck he married such an accomodating, nice guy. 

Characters: Stretch (Underswap Papyrus) & Edge (Underfell Papyrus)

Contains: Mpreg/Skelepreg! (Implied) Mood swings! Very eager to please Stretch and very confused Edge! Domestic Fluff! Cooking and cooking mishaps! 

Rating: Teen and up! (I guess?)

Note: Title based on the Juan Luis Guerra song “Me Sube la Billirubina.”

Oye, y me trastearon hasta el alma They even poked around my soul Con rayos equis y cirugía With x-rays and surgeries Y es que la ciencia no funciona And it turns out science just doesn’t work Sólo tus besos, vida mía Just your kisses, my life

It was mortifying to be sleeping in. Ever since he was a child, Edge had always been an early riser. There was always so much to do, he sometimes wished he didn’t have to sleep at all! He was the one who woke people up! It was wrong on a cosmic level for Stretch, the king of naps and drowsy lazing around, to be awake before him. To be productive while Edge was still sleeping!

He was still trying to rub sleep out of his sockets, slippers padding on the wood floors quietly, when he entered the kitchen.

“Papí, no me-“ Edge shook his head, trying to focus on his words, “Don’t let me sleep late-“

Edge froze, taking in the sight of his kitchen. Used dishes and bowls all along the counter and in the sink, every single spoon they owned had different types of food stuck to them, and there were half-opened, half-used ingredients all around. The milk didn’t even have a lid on it.

“Good morning!” Stretch was cheerful and energetic, bouncing over to give him a hug. He was wearing a chef’s hat and that stupid  ‘Grill Sergeant’ apron. Edge would have appreciated that gift more if Stretch hadn’t also crammed every other food related pun he could find on the rest of the fabric. On both sides. “Did you sleep well, sweetheart?”

“Good morning. Too well.” Edge sighed, trying to force the irritation down by closing his eyes and focusing on the feel of Stretch’s arms around him. “Wake me up when you wake up, Papí.”

“If you’re tired, you should sleep. You obviously need it.” Stretch sighed, discreetly trying to  feel his forehead. With his oven mitts on. Mamerto. “The weekend is the one time you can do it guilt free, so gotta take advantage, no?”

“No.” Edge leaned up on his tiptoes to give his husband a quick kiss, taking the oven mitts off in the process. With growing trepidation, he looked over at the bubbling pot on the stove, “What are you cooking? It smells...” It wasn’t necessarily appetizing, but it wasn’t bad either. “Oil? Is that oil?”

“Yup! Your nose knows!” Stretch gestured to the stove by sweeping his hand, and Edge pulled his husband’s arm back by the sleeve before he could hit the handle. If Stretch noticed, he didn’t comment on it. “I’m making brunch today, and I wanted to give you the best, most underrated combination ever: chicken and waffles!”

It took all of Edge’s willpower not to grimace, “Waffles?” He squirmed away from Stretch to peer into the bubbling pot, “Pancake waffles? Honey and sprinkle waffles?”

“Exactly!” Stretch playfully bumped him to the side with his hip, picking up a plate with raw, breaded chicken. Edge crushed a hand to his mouth to keep from saying anything as some of chicken fell into the pot with a splash, sending oil spilling onto his nice, clean stovetop. “Whoops. I’ll clean it up later, don’t worry.”

Edge already had a paper towel at the ready, trying to push past his husband, “Move. Let me clean that-”

“Nope, I’m good!” Stretch gestured to the table just through the doorway, which was positively covered in food. “Go ahead, take a seat and dig in!” He put his hands on the small of Edge’s back, gently pushing him forward.

“What-?!” Edge started to protest, but reluctantly let himself be exiled from his kitchen. There were a variety of foods he recognized on the table: cornbread, pancakes, grits (ugh,) bacon and scrambled eggs (ughhh.) And a few things he didn’t recognize- Wait. Edge picked up a misshapen green lump with melted cheese starting to ooze out the side. Cautiously, he broke off a piece to nibble on. It was too salty, but the taste was unmistakable.

“Are these Greempanadas?” He called over his shoulder, picking up the light brown glass in front of his plate. On closer inspection, it was oatmeal that was starting to coagulate. “And Coolada?”

“Well! They’re supposed to be- I did my very best, called Red and everything!” Stretch yelled over the sound of frying chicken, and the repetitive ding of the oven. It was a struggle for Edge not to go rushing in there to deal with it himself. “I mean, I looked around but you don’t have any of your Underfell recipes written down anywhere!”

“Why would you do that?” Edge asked the easy question instead, rolling the glass around in his hand. The oatmeal remained stuck in place. Stretch probably just used that instant oatmeal packet. Menso. “You could have just asked me. I would have been happy to make them for you-“

“But then it wouldn’t be a surprise! And I wanted to try and make them for you!” Stretch finally turned the stove off, apparently done with the frying, and Edge let out a relieved breath he didn’t realize he had been holding. “Like how you learned to make grits for me, even though you don’t even like them!”

Ah. This was a guilt thing, then. Why? What had Stretch done that he needed to be forgiven? He wasn’t still going on about the other day, was he? Edge didn’t like surprises, especially the kind of surprises without a clear motive. Well, Stretch was a terrible liar, and his conscience would have him breaking soon. Edge could be patient.

“And Red told you to use this much salt?” Edge tried to nibble off a little more, but it was so salty. What had his brother been thinking?

The oven dinged one more time. “Sort of!” Stretch continued ranting from the kitchen, oblivious. “Your brother is super unhelpful! He was like, ‘Put as much salt as you want, but not too much!’ and ‘Just a little bit of sugar and a dash of pepper!’ And then he got all mad at me when I asked for clarification, all ‘You got a tongue, don’t’cha?!’ Ugh!”

Edge crushed a piece of the Greempanada on his plate, sprinkling the chunks around like crumbs. He wrapped four of them in a paper napkin, tucking them into his inventory for later disposal. “Yes, Red is the absolute worst.”

“Yes! Well, I mean-“ Stretch cleared his throat uncomfortably, backtracking immediately, “Maybe it’s very obvious for Fell monsters, but for Stretch monsters, it’s like he’s speaking to me in Flowey. Like, really angry, aggressive Flowey.”

Edge smiled despite himself, shaking his head fondly. Stretch made another sound of annoyance, “So, yeah, I tried. There were some other things he was telling me but I didn’t know what those were, so I substituted some stuff.”

Ah. That would explain the paprika. A moment later, Stretch came out with two plates exactly as advertised: fried chicken on a waffle covered in... something. He started to hand a plate over, before hesitating to fidget a little self-consciously, “I know I’m not as great a cook as you are, but... I hope you like it anyway.“

He put the plates down on the table with a sigh, smile anxious and strained, “This was one of my favorite things as a kid, so I wanted you to try it, ‘cause you’re always giving me all of this delicious things from Underfell-“ Stretch started worrying at his ring, “And I appreciate it, you know? I love your cooking and I love you, and I want you to feel as happy as I do when you share this kind of stuff with me, so I wanted to return the favor in a small way-“

Using the side of his fork, Edge cut off a piece of both chicken and waffle, swirling them in the sticky, brown sauce. Bracing himself, he carefully took a bite. The taste was... indescribable. He wouldn’t call it delicious- the sauce was too sweet for the chicken but too salty for the waffle- but he could feel the care that went into it. The love put into the dish went straight to his soul like a hug, and Edge could honestly look up and say, “It’s good.”

“Is it?!” Stretch was in his lap in a moment, arms tight around his chest as he knocked their skulls together, “Blue makes them with bourbon-maple glaze, but that has alcohol, and I didn’t wanna risk it. Yeah, yeah, cooking it makes the alcohol disappear but I’m not gonna take any chances with Pancake!”

Stretch was incredibly talkative today. Not enough to worry, not yet, but enough to definitely monitor. “Like, I want my kid to have this sometime too, but I figured it’d be better when they were born! Yeah, they can get some from symbiosis right now, maybe, but it’s not the same-“ Edge cut off another piece of the chicken and waffle, popping it into his husband’s mouth mid-explanation.

“Yes.” He agreed amicably, keeping his arm around his husband’s waist to keep him from fleeing. He put another piece of food against Stretch’s mouth before he finished swallowing the first, “I’m sure they’ll like it.”

Especially if it was one of the first things they tried, before they developed a firm sense of taste and could speak out against it. And Edge would have plenty of time to undo the damage before Pancake could develop their other father’s sweet tooth.

[ Incident 1 ] [ Incident 2 - Here! ] [ Incident 3]