Tupperware 'tard for hire.

I am pretty much rubbish at being female. I have spoken about this before, and generally I can glide through my life being blissfully unaware of this trait, but then there are those days when it is patently obvious just how much of a disgrace I am to my gender. I am eternally grateful to the fact that I wasn't about in the fifties, it would have been either the asylum, jail, or chugging large amounts of valium for me.

Cooking for example, my sister is a superb cook. She cooks all manner of things, sweet, savory and all to an exceptional level. I think her four and six year old are more clued up on the mechanics of baking than I am. I know that biscuit mixture tastes better than cake mixture, and fudge mixture tastes the best of all - but that's about the sum total of my sweet cooking repertoire.

My brother is also a great cook (okay, so maybe I am not such a disgrace to my gender, just the human race in general). I work with a guy who reckons you can categorise cooks into one of two types, the sweet cook - needs to be able to follow recipes, and the savoury cook who has more of a surfing approach to cooking. My brother Sunshine, while cooking both sweet and savoury, is very much a surfer mentality. He attempts to follow recipes but just can't help but make his own improvements. On the rare occasions that I do cook, I am on his team but it appears that when cooking genes were being handed out, I got the worn out hand-me-down. It's not that I can't cook. It's just that I can't be arsed cooking. (Please note, I generally break this rule when I have friends over for dinner or lunch).

Anyway, the other day a friend rang me and said, 'Do you fancy coming around for some nibbles and a glass of wine on Tuesday.....?' Naturally, she had me at 'nibbles and glass of wine' and I stopped listening after that.

Which was a little silly as the rest of the sentence could have been, 'because I've sold one of your kidneys and I'd like to whip it out' or, even worse, 'because I'm having a Tupperware party.'

Oh that's right, that's what she did say.

And that's exactly how I found myself at a Tupperware party.

Okay I am making a bit of a good story of it and to be fair to her she did say, 'But you don't have buy anything.' What she actually meant was, 'And I know you won't buy anything or have a clue what to do with most of the stuff that is for sale, but at least you'll get some food.' Anyway I figured, how bad could it be? I would be getting a glass of wine and she always does fantastic nibbly food, so that would be dinner sorted, all I needed to do was turn up and kick a few plastic containers around the room, surely?

Oh, I wrong I was. Nobody told me that I was going to have to listen, that it was going to be interactive or that I wouldn't be able to pretend I wasn't actually at a Tupperware party.

I began to get a sense of just how out of place I was when I walked in and a friend looked at me and said, 'What are you doing here? You don't cook!'

Anyway I won't bore you with detail here but let's just say in the space of about two minutes it became patently obvious to everyone else in the room as well as myself just how much I shouldn't have been at the Tupperware party. I was a fraud. The freeloader. The class clod. And I didn't set out to be an idiot, either. It happened quite by accident through kitchen utensil and baking ignorance.

Sigh.

Fortunately for everyone else I did have a pile of work I had to attend to that evening so there was an legitimate excuse for me to leave the party. Otherwise I am fairly confident that, at the very least I would have been sent to sit in the corner with my hands on my head or, failing that, sent home early.

Since the party I have heard conversations, 'Oh my god, I haven't told you about Kate at the Tupperware party!!!'

I am going to look at it with a positive frame of mind, for a bit of food and and wine I provided them with a little entertainment.

I think I am on to something, if anyone needs a retard to come to their Tupperware party, I have no shame, I am willing to be bought.