Did you hear Jerry Springer interviewed on Front Row on Friday? He explained how he had spent the first five years of his life in London, his Jewish parents’ having fled to England from Hitler’s Germany…
Fancy escaping the Nazis, living through the Blitz, then calling your son Jerry!
Stense, there’s absolutely no way of putting the next bit delicately, so why don’t I come straight out with it? I went for a wee the other day, and it smelt of roast chicken. Seriously. Indeed, so like roast chicken did it smell, that I momentarily thought “oh good, tea’s almost ready”, until I realised that Jen wasn’t home yet, I hadn’t started cooking tea, and we weren’t having chicken.
In the evening, Carolyn and I went to the pictures to see The Commitments. On the way to the cinema, as I was driving through Willaston, I came to a detour. Unfortunately, somebody had nicked the detour signs, so I wasn’t sure of the best way to go. Guessing incorrectly, I headed down a little country lane which gradually grew narrower and narrower until we suddenly realised that it had turned into a footpath. Next thing we knew, there were trees all around us and all sorts of humps and bumps on the path. I was a bit worried that Carolyn might think this was some sinister plot to get her down a lonely lane, but she didn’t seem all that perturbed (actually, she was laughing her head off by now). There was no way I could reverse out the way I came and there was nowhere to turn round, so I kept going, hoping the path would widen. It didn’t: it split in half to go round a tree right in the middle of the “road”. At this point, I had to stop and carry out a rather embarrassing 87-point turn.
While we were drinking coffee, I gave Carolyn the following incredibly clever code to try and crack (which she hasn’t done yet):
Let’s Have Hex:
31 233573869, 1 2845 7658: 12648430!
31 207 47806 11325150 12648430 2766 7658, 1’13 190 232911341.
(7405 912559 12648430 10 2989 7658!)
[Note: I have published the solution to this fiendish code in the comments. So Carolyn finally gets to find out what the hell I was on about.]
Now there’s an interesting experiment someone should try: sprinkle a whole pile of cat-repellent crystals over the floor in a small room and throw a cat in. If the stuff is worth its salt, the cat should end up hovering a few inches above the floor, a bit like one of those Japanese trains.
Bit of a mishap at lunchtime today: I decided to pop into the Liverpool Tate to have a look in the shop. As I entered the revolving door, a young woman (bit of a babe, actually) leapt into the same segment of the door as me, even though it is clearly designed for single occupancy (especially when the occupant is of my proportions). She managed to get in, but her bulky shoulder-bag didn’t, so we became wedged. There wasn’t any room to manoeuvre, so we had to make a very slow and careful about-face and shuffle extreeeemely slowly back the way we had come to allow the young woman to escape. The poor lass went scarlet and couldn’t stop apologising.
I didn’t like to tell her it was the best thing to happen to me all day.
Overheard in a discount bookshop (said by a young, Scouse woman stacking shelves):
Bloody hell, hasn’t this Thomas Hardy wrote a lot of books?
Had to answer a very long questionnaire at work on Thursday. It was an EFQM (European Foundation of Quality Management) questionnaire, designed to tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong within your organisation. One question read something along the lines of:
How do you recognise the people in your organisation who contribute the most to the concept of continuous improvement?
By now, I was getting bored, so I answered:
They all wear purple badges.
Pleased with my funny answer, I repeated it to a colleague.
“What purple badges?” she demanded to know. “Why haven’t I got one?”
Best quote of recent weeks came from my dad (re. William Hague and the fuel crisis):
He’s a great band-waggon-jumper-onner.
Mind you, my mum came pretty close to bettering him when watching a programme about bison:
Aren’t those the things that Bungalow Bill used to hunt?
It was quite funny in the hotel restaurant last night. Nine of use met up and had a meal together, agreeing to split the bill nine ways and add it to each of our hotel bills. [Aside: I found it rather suspicious that the bill happened to divide exactly by nine (a one in nine chance, after all), but kept my mouth shut.] So the waitress brings back this yard-long itemised bill, which each of us has to sign against our respective room numbers. It all goes extremely well until the bill gets to Dave, who signs against the wrong room number, then it all starts going pear-shaped. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe the brain-cabbaging confusion that this simple mistake could cause. Nobody else can work out where to sign any more, the waitress gets confused and starts crossing out room numbers and replacing them with random numbers of her own devising, rumours start spreading that Dave is sharing a room with one of the other attendees, fiery letters are seen in the skies over Devon, dogs and cats start walking about on their hind legs, a woman in Taunton gives birth to a goat, Pope John Paul II blesses the Irish football team, crop circles appear in the cress sandwiches, Jesus returns, and the entire population of China says “Meng” for no readily apparent reason. And, to top it all, Dave has just realised that he never got charged for the meal on his hotel bill.
Me: You smell nice, mum.
Mum: Thank you, son.
Me: It’s sort of peachy.
Mum: Oh God, I’ve put that air freshener on my hair again!
(It was the word again that did it.)
I went to see my psychiatrist wearing underpants made out of cling-film. The psychiatrist said, “I can clearly see you’re nuts”.
Irish Mick and I went to the pub the other night and he bumped into some woman he knows from the mountain club, although she’s more of a canoe fanatic than a climber. He hadn’t seen her for several months because, it turned out, she had recently [been seriously ill], as well as having a dislocated shoulder and a ricked neck.
“I’m all right now, though,” she explained, “and I finally managed to get down to the swimming pool to get some canoe practice last week. I tried an Eskimo Roll and it was bloody impossible.”
“You should try a Swiss Roll,” I replied: “that’s a piece of cake.”
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Unfortunately, the woman completely spoilt it by saying, “How do you do one of those?”
I’m off for a couple of weeks to sort out some family business. But fear not! I have selected some choice titbits from letters I have written to Stense over the years, and they will appear here automagically with monotonous regularity. You’ve got to keep the punters entertained, you know.
Actually, they’re more like minced morsels than choice titbits.
I should be back the first week in April.
This morning, I was idly flicking my cheek, making a plooping noise vaguely reminiscent of a drop of water falling into a pool. I’m usually pretty crap at making this noise, but this morning I was in the groove.
“What are you doing?” asked Jen
“I’m making a plooping noise by flicking my cheek. Why don’t you have a go?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Go on, have a go!”
“I won’t be any good at it.”
“Who cares? Go on, have a go!”
So Jen flicked me in the cheek.
[One-Nil]
“Would you mind popping into Hebden Bridge later on?” asked Jen, a couple of minutes later.
“Sure. What for?”
“I need you to go to the dry cleaners and buy a tax disc for my car.”
“The dry cleaners don’t sell tax discs; you have to go to the post office for those.”
“Very funny.”
“One-all!”
“No, not one-all at all. That wasn’t as good as mine!”
“Yes it was!”
“No it wasn’t: mine involved physical violence!”
“Oh, you’re right… The dry cleaners don’t sell tax discs; you have to go to the post office for those.” [Slaps Jen across forehead] “Two-One!”
Who says the Tories are living in the past?
Hey, Ann! Far be it from me to cast nasturtiums at your first-born son, but you haven’t been letting Philip mess around with your Hotmail account, have you?
That email you sent me this morning appeared to come from someone named Gaylord Mincing Boy.
I would have told you this by return email, but I didn’t want to give the chaps at MI5 the wrong impression.
We appear to have a mental chaffinch in our garden.
I was making myself a cup of tea this morning, when there was a tapping on the window. I looked round, and found myself face-to-beak with a male chaffinch, who was staring menacingly at me through the glass. Weird, I thought, turning back to my teapot.
The chaffinch took great exception to being ignored in this way: he leapt up and started trying to break through the window. Five or six times, he flew up from the window sill and piled into the glass, pecking and clawing at it as he did so. This bird evidently had an attitude problem.
It took me a while to work out what was going on: he was fighting his own reflection, the stupid twat.
It must be getting near spring.
Liverpool Daily Post (03-Mar-06): Landing stage wrecked by freak weather
The world-famous Merry Ferries landing stage at Liverpool’s Pier Head has been wrecked in freak weather conditions.
Marine engineers were last night examining the steel and concrete stage as it sat on the river bed, but it seems almost certain that what is left has been damaged beyond repair. Much had already drifted off into the River Mersey.
I popped down to have a nose there this lunchtime. Here are the photos.
