pick me up

A few years ago I was completely addicted to reading this magazine. My sister loved it too. We both loved it so much that I even got her a year's subscription to it for her first (paper) wedding anniversary. Eventually I had to go cold turkey on Pick Me Up because it was actually making me depressed.

So I don't buy Pick Me Up any more and my life is infinitely better for it, but I do still like to flick through certain features when I see it on the shelves of the supermarket. The tip-offs page is always my first port of call, full of useful and useless tips. I think the useless ones were probably my favourite. But look closely at the tip-offs page above. Do you see anything you recognise? My kitchen table perhaps?

Here it is! Yes, I went through a phase of actually submitting tips to Pick Me Up and had a few of them featured, which was great because a) Kerry and I found it absolutely hilarious to see my blurry photographs (I only had a disposable camera) and ridiculous tips appearing in the magazine and b) Pick Me Up sent me a cheque for £25 every time they used one. Woo hoo! I should confess now that I have never tried putting wine through the Sodastream to make "champagne"... but I do know someone who has!

One of my other most amazing tip-offs to be featured was my discovery that if you burn something to a pan so badly that it is completely black and will not come off, all you need to do is heat some tinned tomatoes in said pan and then the black marks will clean off easily. I had missed buying Pick Me Up the week that was featured (about the only issue I did miss back in those dark days) but, thanks to my sister's annual subscription, I did get to hear about it after the fact.

This issue of Pick Me Up also held something very exciting.

It's somewhere on this page and it gives a little nod to my tomatoes tip-off. Can you see it?

It's a poem by my sister all about the tip-offs page. If you're having trouble reading it, you should be able to click on the image to see a larger version. Believe it or not, every one of the tips she references in the poem was genuinely found in the pages of Pick Me Up, even the one about using sanitary towels as slippers. It gives you a good idea of why we found Pick Me Up so hilarious, I think. However, five years later and my sister is still waiting for her promised payment. Shame on you, Pick Me Up!