yonmei

10:50 pm: Aliens attack!
I was sitting eating the first course of my tea (mushroom kasha, yum) watching Jack, the Doctor, and Rose exchange their final kisses, and (understandably, I feel) did not register a popping sound from the kitchen as anything I needed to pay attention to.

When I had cleaned my bowl of kasha, and Jack had begun outlining how he and Torchwood would fight off the Daleks while the Channel 4 morons stayed safe and quiet on floor zero of the BBC, I pressed the stop button and went back through to the kitchen to make myself a bowlful of salad. I'd made the salad before the kasha, and I had planned to try it with a spoonful or so of raspberry-mint salad dressing that I'd bought from Scotmid earlier in the day, but when I tried to open the little container it frothed up most impressively and I realised I was going to have to take it back to Scotmid and get my money back after tea. So I had leaned it up against the wall behind the sink, where it couldn't fall over, and gone back to watch Dr Who.

In the interim, my kitchen had been attacked by red splattery aliens:


Of course, it didn't take me long to realise how the aliens had
infiltrated:


It was salad dressing splatter-punk:


There wasn't much of it - it was a titchy little 200ml bottle, and there was at least an inchful left when I took it back to Scotmid for a refund - but it was everywhere:


There were little red flecks all over the kitchen. I'm glad I wasn't in the room when it went off: I'd have looked like I had either committed murder or been murdered. (Bob was in the sitting-room with me, either watching TV or trying to induce feed-me guilt. Hard to tell. So she escaped being traumatised by salad-dressing, too, for which she ought to thank Bast. It might have been necessary to bathe her.)

I rang the Scotmid customer helpline once I'd wiped it all up. It took half an hour and a lot of reddened rags (and teacloths and cloth shopping bags that had got in the way of the 'splody alien) went into the washing machine. After all that, I decided just writing this journal entry (and getting my money back at the Scotmid where I bought it) wasn't enough. So I explained I'd bought this bottle of salad dressing, and yes, it was on its last day, but yes, it was inside the use-by date, and yes, it had exploded all over the kitchen, and yes, I'd been able to clean it up. I was unable to avoid sounding amused, especially as the person at the other end remained completely robotic throughout, especially when delivering the scripted apology and promising to send me coupons.

Then I had the rest of my tea and walked back to the supermarket and returned the remains of the salad dressing, explained what had happened, and got my 99p back.

It had stopped raining.

Update, 11th July: I got a formal letter of apology and two gift vouchers for £10 apiece. Never say it doesn't pay to complain...