I woke up this morning to find one of Carolyn's random text-message queries awaiting me:
C: What is the plural of Hippopotamus?
R: Hippopotwomuses.
C: With a w?
R: It was a joke… Plural: HippopoTWOmuses!
C: That's a very early in the morning joke!
Apologies for the dearth of updates recently, but I have been spending what seems like the last 14 years redecorating our guest bedroom.
I'll spare you the details, but one of the (many, many) reasons this job has taken so long is that we rather stupidly chose to paint the walls a totally different colour from the ceiling, skirting-boards, window-frame, and doors. Which means there have been an awful lot of straight lines that needed painting by hand, for which I have had to resort to a minuscule ½-inch, flat-ended Rowney art-brush:
Yesterday, I was perched on top of a ladder, painstakingly edging the window-frame when the doorbell rang. It was Derek the plumber, who had come to re-plumb our downstairs loo.
“Doing a spot of painting, Richard?”
“I'm re-decorating the guest room. It's taken bloody months.”
“I'm not bloody surprised, with that brush!”
Me: Have you seen they're saying we should be eating ten fruit and veg per day now?
Jen: I remember when ‘ten-a-day’ referred to Woodbines.
Jen: I was reading in the paper that the number of vasectomies in England has fallen by over 60% in the last ten years.
Me: Over 60%: that's a vas deferens.
–Do you have any non-alcoholic ginger ale?
–Yes.
–I’ll have one of those with a shot of vodka in it.
In-car conversation with Jen this morning:
J: I think his name must be Dave C.
R: Whose name?
J: The chap in that blue car. Its registration was D4 UEC.
R: That's not even close.
J: The 4 represents an A.
R: Yes…
J: …and the U represents a V.
R: No way! You can't have a U representing a V!
J: I didn't say it was any good. I was just trying to work out why he'd spent his money on a personalised numberplate, and what it was supposed to stand for.
R: Do you think his mates call him DAUE?
J: I don't reckon he'll have many mates.
Checkout lady: Having a party?
Me: Erm… No.
