Weekend frolics

At the risk of repeating what many others have already said: yay, woo, yarrrrr, fab and ace! What a corking day on Saturday at the meet, at The Mitre, or was it the mite at The Meeter? Anyway, it was great to see many people again and meet others for the first time, well, in the flesh, at least. In a way, we already knew each other, due mostly, if not entirely, to the Most Entertainingly Rubbish Website of 2005, and quite likely of 2003, 2004 and also many years to come. I was forced by Omally into given the signal honour of awarding Simon the prestigious trophy you see in the picture (next to the car-park bound Maltesers) - unfortunately, the cardboard platinum pigeon appears to have fallen off the top. As you can see by Simon’s expression, he cannot believe his luck! Sparkly and Jess look on in awe. Actually, during the award ceremony, I committed a cardinal sin and there may be a (very) small prize for the first person to mention it in a comment - not you, Henry and Trouty! I told you about it! Which brings me to another staggeringly exciting bit of news. I am officially a boat person! No, not the type that floats over here in a biscuit tin from some civil-war-torn foreign state with dodgy politics, no, a narrow-boat-type person. Yes, on the way back from the Oxford meet, Cap’n H N T Thirst let me get my hands on his rudder and his throttle AND I SAILED THE CHARLOTTE ROSE OUT OF A LOCK! Is that a staggeringly decent bit of intelligence or what? What? Oh, I see. So, despite leaving my digital camera at the restaurant we went to on Saturday night (I got it back the next morning), consigning Omally and Maddy to a fate worse than death on the railway line from Banbury to Southampton and committing the aforementioned cardinal sin, I am a thoroughly competent person in many ways. Well, sorry, but I had a fantastic weekend!

Upgrade

On Tuesday, as some of you will know, I flew up to Manchester from Southampton to visit my in-laws. This was an extremely effective exercise in time management, since the flight takes just 35 minutes. On the down side, it involved me getting up at 5.00am, an hour considerably earlier than 9.30am, and, as a result, has therefore been seriously detrimental to my metabolism. In my confused state, I’ll swear I passed Simon on his way to bed. Well, to augment a short story long, everything was booked online, including the hire of a car from Mr Hertz, who just happens to prostitute himself on the British Airways website and we took advantage of his blatant commercialism. Before you ponder on this possible extravagance, the cost of a day’s hire of a Ford Fiesta was £35 and taxis to and from Manchester Airport would have been £45. We would have transport throughout the day, so we could go out for lunch etc. Anyway, when we arrived at Manchester, we duly reported to one of Mr Hertz’s lovely assistants who informed us that they would have to change the hire car from a bright shiny Ford Fiesta to a drab brand new top of the range Jaguar XJ loadsmorelettersofthealphabet 3.0 SE Automatic. Just like this:- The last time I saw a dashboard like the one in that was earlier in the day when the pilot left his door open. We spent a good 20 minutes in the car park trying to work out what all the buttons did and it was a while before I discovered that you had to depress the brake pedal before you could set the gear lever to Drive, Reverse, or anything! So I told it that George Galloway could win Celebrity Big Brother and it worked! Hurrah! I pressed one of four buttons on the door which made my seat move backwards and I couldn’t get it to go forwards again. S found some knobs on the side of her seat and got out of the car to come round and fiddle with mine. Once my posture had ceased to resemble that of a hump-backed dwarf with a broken leg, I closed my door and started the engine. S then spent a few minutes banging on the passenger window as her door had inexplicably locked itself and I didn’t know how to reverse this procedure. I discovered this simply involved a slight pull on my door handle. S spent most of the journey to the in-laws reading out appropriate extracts from the Instruction Manual. Oh, and it even had a heated steering wheel! I'm serious! Now, I am not one of those people who drool over Lamborghinis, Porsches and suchlike; in fact, I find that kind of obsessiveness slightly irritating, but …… PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEIWANTONEOFTHOSE!

On reflection ......

So Jenny’s got Painter's Joints! Pah! My left arm, thigh, knee and whole back have been telling me for the last two days to stop installing convex mirrors halfway up the telegraph pole opposite the pub car park entrance, standing on a precariously positioned ladder with its feet in the road. I can only agree never to do it again.

The Spy Who Tagged Me

Jenny is only a spy for the purposes of the title because it seemed to work on a certain level and, since she has tagged me, it would be unchivalrous of me not to respond to the taggification! I will try and be honest about revealing 5 quirks of my behaviour to all and sundry. 1. Like Jess, I am, according to Lynne Truss, a “stickler”. Just read “Eats Shoots and Leaves”, you’ll get the picture. I am fastidious to the point of being obsessive about poor punctuation, spelling and grammar and I agree with her when she talks about the 'terrible abuse and disrespect' for the English language which is disappointingly all too prevalent these days. If, for example, I see a sign outside a shop which reads: "NEW POTATO'S FOR SALE", I will refuse to give it the benefit of my custom. I once saw an advertising poster in the mid-1970s outside the cinema (it was in Hollinwood in Oldham for you Lancashire folk) for a film called "Escape to Witch Mountain"; it encouraged you in unrepentant huge black letters on a luminous orange background not to miss "Escape to Which Mountain?" See what I mean? Makes you mad, doesn’t it? 2. I am enraged by other drivers who …… well, actually, I am just enraged by most other drivers! 3. If people hesitate whilst speaking to me, I try and finish the sentence for them in an attempt to wring some humour from the conversation. You might remember a sketch from "The Two Ronnies" where two blokes in a pub were doing just that. I don't do it to everybody but it's as well to be forewarned! Actually, the habit has rubbed off on one or two friends so now I am careful not to linger too long over my side of a discussion! 4. Victor Meldrew was my absolute hero! I cannot understand why people do not empathise with his sense of fair play and just treatment by being vociferous in upholding those principles. A brilliant comic creation. 5. I don’t really avoid cracks in the pavement, do I? No, I think you are mistaken about that! Well, there you go. I think you were probably right all along!

When is Page 123 not Page 123?

Answer: when you read the unstructured thoughts of a short fat bearded bald bloke! As a few others just left comments on Gottle’s latest blog, despite his explicit instructions, I thought I would go the whole hog and write a blog as directed by that fine chap. Actually, I wish I hadn’t used the hog saying (did you know, by the way, that it originates from the fact that ‘hog’ used to be slang for a shilling and ‘going the whole hog’ meant spending the shilling all in one go?); it brings back painful memories – we could almost have revived the last real one I encountered so it could sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with the rest of the pub. Fortunately, we ate it before it could get a foothold on the edge of the spit. Anyway, I digress. The nearest book to me when I read Gottle’s blog was called “A Thousand And One Limericks”, which is a book containing, er, a thousand and one limericks. I like limericks (did you know that?) and I treated myself to it a couple of weeks ago. I duly turned to Page 123 and then found myself in a quandary. Upon the page were three limericks (actually, they’re still there) and the aforementioned instructions clearly state that you must identify the fifth sentence on the page. Now, the question is, is each line of a limerick a sentence, or is the whole limerick one sentence? I favour the latter, unless the nature of the verse requires appropriate punctuation, in which case, it could be more than one sentence. So, armed with this theory, I counted the sentences on the page and have concluded that the first limerick is one sentence, the second consists of two, and the third also one. Can you see where this is going? No, nor can I. Well, if there isn’t a rule about a page not having five sentences, there should be. Amazingly, the fifth sentence on Page 123 of my nearest book is actually on Page 124! This could affect the time/space continuum, as you might imagine. Still, undaunted by this potential threat to life and limb, I reproduce here the fifth sentence on Page 123 (*coughfirstsentenceonpage124*): A minister up in Vermont Keeps a goldfish alive in the font; When he dips the babes in, It tickles their skin, Which is all that the innocents want Isn’t that nice?

At last - a blog!

Now, I could go overboard and fill your heads with swathes of mundane rubbish about my Christmas and New Year, but then you would be overbored. Haha! See that? So I won’t mention that, on the Thursday night before Christmas, the pub was so full that people were walking out of the front door and coming back in via one of the other two doors to get to other parts of the pub, or that on Christmas Day lunchtime, the place was packed to the rafters with people you've never seen before, although possibly, you did see them last Christmas Day lunchtime (don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining) or that, on New Year's Eve, even after 8 hours, the term hog roast was, for a while, partially disingenuous (it wasn't the 'hog' bit) and, via a human conveyor belt (me), piles of carved pork were being taken to the minuscule kitchen and finished off there – you could hardly hear the music for the rumbling stomachs (and it wasn't a nearby cow) – and I had wasted my time issuing cloakroom tickets (so that batches of 20 punters could assemble in an orderly manner to prevent everyone piling in at once) because the DJ announced the first batch of numbers and, within 15 minutes, everyone was queuing and, possibly the worst catastrophe of all: no crackling. So what could I tell you, then, if I’m not going to mention any of that? I may think of something soon. In the meantime - Happy New Year!