We did that!
Taken very hurriedly outside my house this evening. The black line is a telegraph wire. The white line is the International Space Station.
True story: Last year, my mate Karen received a phone call from the International Space Station. She was out. So the astronaut left a message that he’d call back later. Which he did.
(Stuff came out my nose.)
While I was in the chemist’s yesterday, stocking up on my illegal stash of hydrocortisone cream, I couldn’t help noticing a gentleman wearing a bright blue cloak and tricorne hat browsing through the non-prescription medicines. In any other town in England, this man’s garb might have been considered a bit unusual, but this is Hebden Bridge, and we’re used to oddballs.
An oddly garbed gentelman yesterday.
Town criers are like morris men, people who pretend to be statues, and Big Issue sellers: I am glad that other places have them, but I don’t particularly want them drawing attention to themselves in my hometown, thank you very much. (And don’t get me started on so-called mime-artists.)
Then it occurred to me, what kind of ridiculous job is town crier anyway? It’s the twenty-first century for Pete’s sake! We all have iPhones and RSS readers these days. We don’t need some loud-mouthed hooligan yelling the news at us. We can get that off the telly.
Still, though.
I wonder how they recruit town criers. Advertising for them in the local paper would demonstrate the utter pointlessness of the job: we’ve got a local newspaper; we don’t need a town crier. I suppose, if they were going to do it properly, they would make the outgoing town crier yell out advertisements for their replacement. But that would mean that no town which didn’t already have a town crier would ever be able to recruit one. Which is fine by me.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, you can tell.
I didn’t get to see what the Halifax town crier was buying in the chemist’s. I more than half suspect it was throat lozenges.
Darwin, Shakespeare, Nelson, Churchill, Newton… Bale.
It’s not every day that someone new earns their place in the pantheon of all-time Great British Heroes. But that is exactly what Mary Bale (spinster, 45) did yesterday when this moment of selfless bravery came to light:
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by such heroism.
Come on, Your Majesty: a damehood is surely in order.
Jen and I are just back from a weekend in the Yorkshire Dales with Hitchin & Soo and their sprogs. Here are the obligatory photos.
This week, I invented an entirely new genre of photography: craparazzi photography.
Craparazzi photographs are photographs of celebrities taken off-guard, which are so ineptly taken that you can’t actually tell who they’re of…
Comedy legend Les Dennis.
Last week, during my lunchbreak, I was walking along the Liverpool waterfront with my sunglasses on, cup of coffee in hand, when I notice a young couple looking at me from inside a bus shelter.
As I approached, the lad stuck his head out of the shelter and announced, “‘ey, mate! Me girlfriend reckons you look like one of them movie stars!”
The lad’s girlfriend went scarlet. I suspect what she had actually said was something more along the lines of “Who does this fat tosser think he is? Some kind of movie star?”
I turned to the blushing girl. “Happens all the time,” I said. “You’re thinking of either Sean Connery or George Clooney.”
If I were rower Matthew Pinsent,
I’d have a son and name him Vincent.
Man looking at Bruce Lee Enter the Dragon poster:
I’d forgotten he were in Enter the Dragon.
It started a couple of weeks back with one of Carolyn‘s obscure text messages:
R u going 2 your dads on Tues. & can u take your camera?m
I don’t know when Carolyn started spelling in such an appalling way, or what the ‘m’ at the end stood for. Perhaps it should have rung a few alarm-bells. She went on to explain (I use the word loosely):
I wanted u 2 take a special picture of a field of flowers. If I can get a key to the field gate.
What the dapper beekeeper is wearing this season.
In other words, I walked straight into it.
Read what Carolyn texted me again. Read it again very carefully: Field… Flowers… Photographs…
Do you see any mention at all of bees? Or of bee-suits?
Carolyn recently took up beekeeping, and, it turned out, she wanted some photos taking of her bees in action. But it was all right, you see, because she had a spare bee-suit, you see.
Her own bee-suit is a rather dapper affair, sensibly camouflaged to make it harder for the bees to spot her. Her spare bee-suit—the one she expected me to wear—was what can only be described as honey-coloured. It was also, it transpired, about 17 sizes too small. Carolyn literally cantered back and forth, jumping up and down in a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at containing her laughter, as I tried to clamber into her spare bee-suit. I know I’m not exactly the sveltest of chaps, but there was no way on Earth that I was going to be able to zip it up. I couldn’t ever stand fully upright in it.
So I stooped at a respectful distance, with my stomach hanging out of my borrowed bee-suit, taking photographs, while Carolyn did whatever it is that beekeepers do. Then we returned to her car, where I tried to get out of the damn bee-suit. In the end, Carolyn had to help me.
“Wait till I tell Jen that you took my clothes off!” I said.
“Just as long as you don’t mention it on your website,” replied Carolyn. “My niece would be mortified if she knew you’d been wearing her bee-suit.”
A thought occurred to me this week:
If Lady Gaga’s middle initial were an ‘O’, she might be mistaken for a Japanese Queen tribute band.
That is all.
Anyone who has been following the ‘Recent Bookmarks’ section in the Gruts sidebar recently (RSS feed here) might be forgiven for thinking that I have become an avid reader of the Daily Telegraph. There’s absolutely no danger of that. But the venerable, old rag certainly seems to be taking an eminently sensible, pro-nuclear, anti-wind-powerstation stance when it comes to energy policy. Which is why it get my links. Who’d have thought it? The Torygraph talking sense, and getting its priorities right!
Don’t worry, we that we can still rely on the Telegraph to take a somewhat distorted view on reality. For instance, it looks as if the unusually dry summer is going to lead to a serious hay shortage this winter. My farmer friend is certainly praying for lots more rain. When you’ve got scores of organic beef cattle and sheep to feed over the winter, the price of hay is a major issue for a hill-farmer working hard to make ends meet.
Credit to them, the Telegraph has picked up on this important rural issue. But what slant do they choose to put on the story?
Yes, the Telegraph still understands its readers’ priorities.
Me (L), Stense (R) and prophetic sign (centre).
As of today, my babe mate Stense and I have been friends for twenty years.
H O L Y S H I T ! !
Happy anniversary, mate. I believe a present made out of china is in order. Our upstairs loo has certainly seen better days. How are your false teeth bearing up?
Last night, some friends and I noticed that one of the waitresses in our local Italian restaurant is rather handy with a corkscrew, so we asked her to demonstrate her technique for the camera:
Admit it, you’re impressed.