I Am Not A Babushka. Ergo, I Don't Like Them.

So Style.com says babushkas are the best new headgear around....which I'm finding just a wee bit difficult to digest, since they remind me rather unpleasantly of the headscarves I used to wear to church. And from years of experience with the blasted things, I can confidently state that they are the most unflattering bits of cloth of all time if worn the normal way, which covered all my hair, knotted under my chin and ended up making me look a little like Moon-Face from Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree stories. And since chic is anyway not a word that can be used to describe me, I don't care to have it brought into my cupboard via this.

It's odd, really. I have no objections to any other forms of head coverings, with the possible exception of baseball caps because my outsize skull and mad hair have yet to fit under any baseball cap ever made. I adore hats and hairbands of all descriptions, and the headscarf-as-hairband trend was something I had quite a lot of fun with on bad hair days. But this I just don't like, in a way I'd describe as visceral if I were of a literary bent of mind. And it's not even as if the wearing- scarf- like- hood- and letting- hair-peek-out thing can work for me, if I know my babushkas they'd just slip right off and then where would we be?

There's only one kind of babushka I do like...ingredients being as follows

1) small quantity of rum/vodka/gin/brandy (choose one)

2) 1 bottlecap

3) Matchbox and matchsticks

HOW TO MAKE IT

1. Pour alcohol into the bottlecap, taking care not to spill any over the sides (this is important). You don't have to fill the bottlecap completely, though.

2. Light a match.

3. Touch the flame to the stuff in the bottlecap, WITHOUT bringing the head of the matchstick in contact with it.

4. As soon as you see a flame appear over the alcohol, pick up the bottlecap and down it in one. It won't burn you, and it won't burn your fingers if you haven't spilled the stuff.

Apologies to anyone who's underage and reading the above...I do not intend to corrupt you.