Tangerine floors

Do you know those ready-in-2-hours jelly packs? You stir the powder with hot water and stick it in the fridge and 2 hours later, you have your jelly ready? Well, they don’t always need 2 hours to be ready…

Yesterday night, I was making dinner and realized that I have 3 unopened packs of jelly. A dessert in 2 hours? Sure! Easy! I’ve done it before. Well…

I boil the water, put the powdered jelly in a bowl, add the water, mix everything. The smell of tangerine is great, really sweet! “I think I can still eat some after dinner,”, I innocently think. Then, I notice that the Tupperware where I had poured the jelly into was on the kitchen stand where I wanted to continue preparing dinner. So I just thought, very innocently again, “Well, I could move the Tupperware from the kitchen stand to the table and I’ll have more space to continue with my dinner preparations [fish pudding].” (do you see a tragedy coming?) Little did I know.

And so, very carefully, I move the Tupperware to the table. And then, a catastrophe occurs! The bottom part of the Tupperware fell and along dropped 1 l of tangerine jelly on the kitchen floor! Plok!! The floor, once white, was now orange.

The nerves! The panic! My God! I stopped everything I was doing and got down on my knees and started to frantically clean the floor. By the time I got to the jelly near the wall, this one was almost ready/ solid. What a nightmare! (I think I now understand why those jelly wrestlings are so difficult and slipery).

By the end of it, I had jelly on my slippers, socks, trousers, legs, knees, face (!) and coat.

I therefore recommend that jelly manufacturers include a warning on the jelly packs: instead of writing “ready in under 2 hours”, it should read ”ready in under 2 hours on the fridge and in 5 minutes, should it fall on cold ceramic floors”.