Kentucky Fried Chicken

I have just purchased the newly launched neighbour-trumping version of the 10-bird roast (now surely relegated to being described merely as 'ordinary' ) from Aldi. The imaginatively named  'Mr Creosote Deluxe Roast'  is a monster 23-bird culinary delight, starting with a bee hummingbird at its centre followed by 21 further feathered friends and a final encasement of an oven-busting ostrich, all tastefully separated by a substratum of various patés. The average total weight of this substantial trencherman's hors d'oeuvres is around 125kg.

According to the cooking instructions however, I've worked out that I'll have to get it on by Sunday morning, at the latest, to stand any  chance of it being ready for Christmas dinner. After all, one really doesn't want it to be cooked only  through to the swan layer when one sits down to dine once the Queen has delivered this years Annus Horribilis muse.

I'll also have to remember to refrigerate properly once it's cooked so I can look forward to cassowary soup and budgie curry until about June 2014.

It’s a Christmas Conundrum

Us men have once again begun our seasonal late night looking through Amazon in a bid to buy something appropriate for the lady in our life.

We know, from our limited observations of said lady throughout the year, that there is a 52% chance she will not object to anything Michael Bublé based. But as the Christmas Doomsday Clock reaches T minus one month, we have already started our panicky surfing of the interweb using search terms such as ‘woman gift’, ‘Keira Knightley motorbike perfume’ and ‘books about relationships’.

Last Year my lovingly wrapped gifts of an electric toaster, matching kettle and oven gloves  were seriously frowned upon. So, in order to delay this years journey towards universal disappointment, I’m playing CD roulette with Michael Bublé and his fellow plastic Sinatras in a bid to remember which one she thinks is ‘brilliant’ because I overheard her on the phone to a

friend the other evening when she said “I do hope he gets me something I like, but that would mean him knowing something about me besides my mobile number and which colour wine I prefer", so the pressure is on.

 It would be great if Amazon were to offer to assess the perfect ‘woman gift’ based on her previous purchases, the items on her wish list and a complex algorithm involving stereotypes and simplify the delivery options into :- 

 1. Whatever, as long as it’s before the 24th 

 2. It's the 24th tomorrow, that'll be a sixty quid surcharge !

Dr Who ?

Dr Who fans are concerned that as a Time Lord from Gallifrey the Doctor is restricted to 12 regenerations and therefore the show must end or the Doctor Who universe could collapse in on itself, destroying everything including Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.
Roy Hobbs, a Whovianist from Peterborough, said: "By my calculations the rogue Time Lord will succumb to the Master in 2016, the same year he faced the Judoons in episode D184. This cannot be."

The Doctor Who producer, Russell T Davies, has once again reminded the show's ardent fans that it is actually intended for children And said: "How's about this? I've just decided that The Doctor can fire Angel Delight from his fingertips and is sexually attracted to suspension bridges. How did I do that? Easy, we just make it up as we go along".
"If you watch any third-rate comedian, he will pretend to like Knight Rider and Bazooka Joe bubblegum before talking about watching Doctor Who from behind the sofa as a child. As… a… child."

Davies stressed he has little interest in Doctor Who mythology and said obsessive fans should instead try to pinpoint the moment when their lives veered horribly off track.
He added: "I'm sick of having to discuss Tardis engineering with people who smell like damp sandwiches. I'm more into designer glasses and phallic symbolism."
Davies admitted the latest series will upset fans further as the Doctor travels to 1978 New York to help the Village People write 'YMCA' while being played by an actor who looks like Noel Fielding drawn on an Etch-A-Sketch.

Off to the Conveniences

To avoid the problem of ‘splashback’ when having a pee in the standing position, especially after a few beers, I offer the following simple solution....

Wee in the sink.

As I see it, the standard toilet bowl is simply too far away from a Gentleman’s Tackle and mishaps are therefore inevitable. It’s got to be far more sensible for us men to go in the sink and since urine is sterile it’s not a hygiene issue so it’s got to be totally fine hasn’t it ?

In terms of convenience it’s brilliant because you don’t need to cross the room to wash your hands afterwards and it’s good for the environment too as it saves water, the hand wash becomes the flush, thus it’s a ‘Green’ way to pee, although if you are peeing green you should probably use the toilet. An added bonus is that lots of rooms, such as kitchens and hotel bedrooms, don’t have toilets but do have sinks. So, if your hotel room has a sink at the bottom of the bed you can even have a pee without getting up.

 “It’s all hypothetical of course; I’ve never done anything like that. Well….. maybe just a couple of times.”

Lets do the Time Warp

I see the Government is playing at being Time Lords again by putting the clocks back an hour this weekend. Other than putting time back on the correct meridian, and GMT, what actually is the point of plunging us all into darkness earlier in the evening just because of about a dozen people who still deliver milk or grow things?

David Cameron is probably a Dr Who fan and therefore feels he has to tinker with the clocks, “Otherwise farmers and milkmen would have to get up when it’s pitch dark, and would probably crash their respective tractors and milk floats into trees or Daleks”.

However, only a handful of people actually still do those jobs, as Supermarkets have made milk delivery and agriculture economically unviable, and those that do probably have access to a torch and a vehicle equipped with working headlights. Ok, they may not be able to afford electricity for lighting to their homes, but that’s no different from the rest of us, so I have no idea why they still do this.

Perhaps it’s so MPs can’t be seen sneaking off home early in the dark or it may just be part of the Government’s ongoing commitment to making our lives as grim as possible.

Batten down the Battenburg

The winner of The Great British Bake Off, 31-year-old Frances Quinn, was handed over to Mr Kipling’s dwarfish minions yesterday evening to work in his underground cake catacombs.

In the traditional ceremony, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood solemnly shaved Quinn’s head, before placing a perfectly crafted French Fancy on it and kissing her on both eyelids. She was then handed over to Kipling’s homunculi who ceremoniously loaded her into a sedan chair and carried her off to a cave near Burwash, East Sussex, where she will devote her existence entirely to thinking up new cakes.

Little is known about life in Kipling’s subterranean world, but it is understood that his baking factory is a huge cavern where his giant fondant-encased brain hovers above a cake production line staffed by a mix of past Bake Off winners and Big Brother housemates with Troglodytes continually reading selected chapters from 'Plain Tales From The Hills' and 'The Man Who Would Be King' over the PA system.

 

Paul Hollywood said: “Those who enter the Bake Off understand that this is their ultimate reward. Once they have embarked on the spiritual path of baking, high quality confectionary, poetry and short stories become the only absolutes.”

Phrontistery

Chasing up an email recently that I hadn’t had a response to I received the following reply: “I am currently out of the office. My emails are being forwarded to my assistant who will revert back to you as soon as possible”

REVERT ? ~ I looked at this for quite a while and wondered what I should do. I’ve had property revert to me from time to time, but never a human being. How would I know that the assistant had reverted back to me, I’m pretty sure I would recognise if they got back to me.

Clearly a Thesaurus had been consulted during the composition of this automated reply and in an attempt to ‘big up their importance’ they had looked for something that sounded far more impressive than ‘get back to you’ or simply ‘reply to you’ and revert was the unfortunate result.

I confess to using the thesaurus myself, not to look for more difficult words but simply because, increasingly so, I can’t remember the simple ones.

I was talking to a friend on the phone last week and I mentioned a classical concert I had watched on the telly one afternoon last month, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra doing the…‘you-know-that–thing-quite-famous from Tristan and Isolde’. But I couldn’t think what the thing was called. This went on for a while and despite my repetition and prompts of ‘the bit at the beginning’ and ‘before it starts’ or ‘Tristan’s got a famous one’ he was none the wiser nor could I remember and so the conversation drifted effortlessly and comfortably onto another subject before we duly said our farewells and ended the call.

But it was bugging me and later that evening I remembered the word I had been searching for and called him back. ‘Overture’ I said feeling all smug.He kindly said he was pleased that I had remembered & not to worry when words slip away, but it’s hard not to.

I have never lost obvious words like ‘Lettuce’ or ‘Velocipede’ but there are numerous object in the house whose names so often escape me that when I invariably refer to ‘the wireless’ Jayne now automatically knows which of object I am actually talking about.

So perhaps the best thing is to visit the thesaurus, I just looked up ‘looked up’ as you clearly can’t rely on others as they always lengthen you (I just looked up ‘let down’).

The phrasal verb is the problem when made up of more than one word as generally it can have a variety of uses. One can ‘put up’ a shelf, ‘put up’ friends for the weekend, ‘put up’ a candidate and even ‘put up’ with a load of nonsense, thus you have to be careful about the range of meanings on offer before use. I suspect someone looked up the phrase ‘set back’ and came up with this ridiculous reminder I once saw on a hotel TV screen ‘upon retiring please retard your clocks by one hour’

Having checked my email I can find no evidence that the assistant did revert to me, nor more interestingly even ‘get back’ or ‘reply’ to me. Perhaps they also had read the automated reply and simply decided to safely lie low. But, that leaves me in a quandary as I have been ‘seriously extinguished’ so should I ‘emancipate’ it or write back to the sender and ‘accelerate’. I suspect that this is the sort of thing you are not supposed to ‘eructate’ and perhaps I am ‘exploding’ it out of all proportion.

Faulty Beer

I recon that hangovers can be blamed on beer that is somehow faulty or contaminated.

There’s so much that could go wrong that we should blame any after-effects of beer consumption on ‘dirty pipes’ or some other obscure fault as most of us are reluctant to accept that beer drinking almost inevitably leads to feeling dreadful; hence attributing the morning-after effects of alcohol consumption on your pint being somehow ‘bad’.

Frankly all pints are ‘bad’, but it’s the ‘bad’ ingredient than makes them ‘good’.

After drinking several pints of beer last night, I found my vision this morning blurry, thus delaying my departure from my bed by several hours, plus I had visible sweat patches on my forehead and a lingering sense of paranoia. Clearly this was all caused by the publican failing to correctly observe some aspect of beer maintenance, and now I think about it I probably had a dirty glass with bacteria in it. Or maybe I got the bottom of the barrel.

 There’s no way 9 pints of clean, pure beer would make me feel this bad.

"Greed is Good"

I’m a real hot shot now, having got my hands on a bargain share of a Royal Mail 1st Class stamp and potentially making a mahoosive profit. I wonder how many Apps I can now purchase.

“Buy low, sell high”, that’s my mantra not, dissimilar to Gordon Gekko in ‘Wall Street’….. “To the victor the spoils”, I’ve even bought myself a pair of those wide red braces from Asda.

” I am the lion you chumps and losers, hear me roar, time is money and money is power”

However, as a first-time investor, I have yet to ‘cash-in the chip’ from my high-stakes market deal, as I’m not actually sure how I do it. I’m going to Google it as I don’t want to get it wrong; I hope it’s not too complicated

Do Bears Sh*t in the Woods ?

Sorry I’m late but I wasn’t going to pay fifty quid for it so I said I’ll go elsewhere but the manager came out and let me have it for thirty, and it fits better so now I’ve got one for daytime and one for work, its colder today so I’ve got long gloves on, thought we’d go down past Asda and see Granville. Let’s go ‘commando’ - no GPS or Mini iPad. Sorry I forgot the chairs, I did 40 miles yesterday are you ready?

No wonder he doesn’t run out of puff on the uphills !!!!

Heading out past Sainsbury’s and then Wicks we crossed the M54 (thankfully via a footbridge) and from therein the route gets a bit blurred, as usual on these outings, but involved getting lost, losing each other, going round in circles, not being allowed into an industrial estate, a quick round on the golf course, a visit to the landfill site, being told by a member of the Pony Club to "Get orf moi laaaand", seeing a baby bear, and some  jungle path-breaking worthy of any David Livingstone expedition which would necessitate copious first-aid treatments for Leg Lacerations and Stinging Nettle Shins upon our return to civilisation.

Talking of which, after showering when I got home, and in an attempt to calm said lacerations and still burning shins, I smothered them in Savlon, King of Antiseptic Creams. However, it took an unusually long time to rub-in and was sporting a rather distinctive Minty odour.

It was a mistake any fool could have made whilst not wearing his spectacles.

Superfluous Bullshit of the Modern Workplace

Employers have warned that many school leavers are unable to pester colleagues into sponsoring them for a charity fun run, talk at length about their dinner plans or write arsey notes about unwashed mugs.

Local Businessman Arthur Daley said: “Too many youngsters enter the workplace unaware that at least 60% of their time will be spent chatting, bickering and engaging in juvenile politics".

“One young lass recently taken on from the Job Centre didn’t understand there was a rigid hot drink rota that fills people with smouldering resentment if every single cuppa is not reciprocated. Plus, having now been here a week not once has she been heard complaining about the smokers outside the foyer making the company look unprofessional". He continued, "They should have been taught the superfluous bullshit needed for the modern workplace before leaving school"

Business leaders like Mr Daley now want the government to change the National Curriculum to include skills ranging from hoarding White-Board markers to whining about the canteen not being a McDonald's and closing at 6pm, thus inconveniencing late-working staff with no social life.

A Department of Education spokesman said: “Business leaders have told us they want more petty-minded workaholic losers, and it is the duty of the education system to provide them. So we are proposing to mess around with the National Curriculum again this winter and replace the old traditional and outdated subjects like GCSE Maths and English and replace them with Proper ‘O’ levels in subjects like ‘Obsessing About How Long Your Colleagues Take For Lunch’.

Ultimately, our goal is that every pupil will be the sort of co-worker you really try to avoid getting the train home with.”

Schools Back

Parents across the UK are drunkenly celebrating the end of six weeks

 of hellish full-time childcare.

Here’s to the remnants of shattered sanity

 

Their shamelessly adult partying began outside school gates at 9.01am Monday morning after handing their offspring back to education professionals.

Mother of three Tamsin Rissington-Smythe said: “I waved a two-fingered goodbye to my little darlings, cranked Azealia Banks full blast on the stereo, cracked a bottle of Merlot right there in the car and sucked desperately at the bottle like it was a teat".

"Some other mums got in and we drove to a strip club, which made a refreshing change from overpriced pirate-themed attractions in castles.”

Risk manager Tarquin Jollyboy, who has spent half of the last six weeks pretending to be so bad at football that a five-year-old can beat him, said: “Freedom tastes so sweet".

“After a fantastic day of work where nobody mentioned Spongebob Squarepants, Despicable Me or Thomas the bastard Tank Engine, we hit the wine bar at 4.30pm on the nose. I can’t remember whose idea it was that we just not go home, but it was a damn good one.”

Grandparents have joined the party, elated at their release from a hellish round of local museums, sad farm parks and protracted negotiations with sucrose-crazed dictators just to get them out of their pyjamas.

 

The nation’s children greeted their return to school with equanimity. Eight-year-old Damien Trotter said: “If they’d taken me to one more petting zoo I would have strangled a hen, then pretended I didn’t understand why that was a bad thing to do.”

Hi de Hi

We went to Madonna’s 80^th birthday concert on Saturday evening, at a small intimate venue in Stirchley. Not usually the sort of concert I would attend so the Bad Lady Wife and I went in disguise, but I did feel a right “Wally”.

A liberal sprinkling of draught cider ensured a very pleasant evening for everyone and Madonna’s performance on the stage was actually very good and quite emotional, excepting when she asked us to ‘without further ado…. drink the food’ Talking of which, it is many a year since I have had a 'Spam and Jam and Sandwhich Spread' sandwhich. But it is good to see’ Hula Hoops will be a round forever’ !

The star of the show was undoubtedly the fella who dressed up as an eighty year old; to be fair I think he went a bit OTT as he looked about 90. I also noticed that Spiderman had a camel toe, saw Jake Blues was asleep at the table and it felt quite weird going for a pee with Slash.

The Get Rich Quick Club

  

Oh well, I guess that's a resounding NO then .....

Vodka Jelly & the Dagenham Girl Pipers

“What time are you arriving? I’ve corralled as much land as I can and raised the colours, but the natives are revolting and amassing in numbers, the Memsahib has buried her head in Crushed Candy, the Kat has got a hole in the bum of her onesie and to cap it all, Dammit, Ray Mears has gone back to his tent for a nap. If you don’t get here soon I fear we shall be overrun”. 

 

Perseverance Old Boy and fear not, for the Bad Lady Wife and I are on the way post-haste, armed with Jellies and reinforcements from the Black Country. Stretch and the Cowper Van will form a pincer manoeuvre with NooNoo & Mr T, which assuredly will be covered by a ticket-bagging, lip smacking, drink clenching, cool buzzing, high talking, fast living, ever fizzing journalist from the Carnoustie Guide & Gazette, so Stand Fast and keep a Stiff Upper Lip.

Well done chaps, think we’ve made it. They stood no chance against the incessant wailings of the Kat, the magnitude of the Evans Bottom Burps and the Full Frontal Flashing of Mrs B.  Each and every one of you were ‘ferocious in battle, but we must remember to be magnanimous in victory’. Let us finish the Vodka Jellies and go and dance like demons to the Ferocious Dogs of the Night, for tomorrow your sight will be like a blurry mist, your memories a ragtag collection of partial moments of Portaloo un-pleasantries and a knowledge that before we depart for our homeland the cider will have defrosted, the Dagenham Girl Pipers will sound like a rock band and one of you will be urinated on by a small dog.

Good Luck my merry Band of Brothers !

Skiing Uphill

There is the slightest chance that I may have got this wrong !

I’m talking dishwashers, and I’m not referring to the poor sods earning minimum wage in the back of the Greasy Spoon café whom we all rely upon to receive sanitary food, but about the actual appliance.

I enjoy cooking and eating a meal and then afterwards the absolute convenience of dumping all the dirty stuff, the pots, pans and plates etc into the machine whilst I retire to the comfy chair with a nice glass of wine and wait for said dirty stuff to become clean & dry.  Ergo, the dishwasher is one of my favourite kitchen appliances, running a close second only to the microwave, which incredibly lets me get stuff from frozen to hot without having to really cook anything.  Now that really is what I call convenient. 

However, there comes a time when the actual cleaning machine is in need of a clean itself and today was that day. “Simples” I thought, as I proceeded to unblock the filters and then spay the inside with a “Multi-Action cleaner” that proudly boasted that it “Cuts Grease & Soapy Scum and Kills 99.9% of Bacteria”. I then Loaded the dishes, inserted a dishwasher tablet (plus a second one for good measure) and set the machine going, starting with the Pre-rinse cycle obviously as it needed to rinse the “Multi-Action Cleaner” away before it actually washed the dishes. 

However, my plan, as you may have deduced, was a bit like skiing uphill, it just doesn’t work no matter how hard you try…

 So, two rinses and a full wash cycle later I still have a major superfluity of Suds.

Weddings & Stinging Vegetation

"Sorry I'm late but I had to collect a parcel from the Post Office and the couple in front of me were getting married and didn't have any ID with them, do you like my new gloves, you'll never guess how much I paid for them from the Pound Shop, shall we go ?"

I was confused but thought better of asking Dale for an explanation.... undoubtedly it would be long and convoluted and would involve a new App he had downloaded.  

I have absolutely no idea where we went, as usual. Highway, Byway, Alleyway, Bridleway, Pathway, Subway, Passageway, Driveway and tracks, but we ended up in Ironbridge and crossed said bridge to see where a track he had noticed some weeks ago actually went.

I quickly tried looking secretly at Google earth on the phone ('cos I don't have a mini iPad like Dale)  mini iPad day , but all I could see was a jungle. 
 

Through a gate, it didn't say keep out like I hoped it would, and the track descended steeply through 8 foot high stinging nettles and brambles before ending abruptly on the narrowest of paths some 50 foot above the river, obviously a smugglers (or perhaps a fishermans) path, but certainly not something any sane fool had attempted to cycle along before. We met this challenge head on, well Dale did, literally. Miss Mantle reared up and gave him a brief but loving kiss on the nose and in the process converted his new black bell into a hooter.

Emerging, via some posh-nobs driveway, back into Ironbridge we retired to the cafe for a coffee (the 'Pub' App wasn't working) and to remove the accumulated thorns, fauna and the inevitable leaches from our persons.

Suitably refreshed we sped homeward, without further event but with a plan to 'Explore Wellington' next week, which I thought might be a tad too far for a daytrip even for Dale.

.

The Mistmantle Chronicles

I've put a new bell on Miss Mantle, a big black one, its super loud which means I can go even faster & scare the bejezus out of anyone daft enough to be in front of us and I've downloaded the latest 'Fishcake Recipe' App, she's been serviced and is hot hot hot, so what do you think ?

Dale, what on earth are you babbling on about, who is Miss Mantle and what the feck has hot fishcakes got to do with anything ? 

Well, The Mistmantle Chronicles are a series of books by M. I. McAllister about anthropomorphic animals and feature the life of a pale, honey-coloured Eurasian red squirrel named Urchin, and the first book was "Urchin of the Riding Stars", "Riding Stars"... get it... and I thought the fishcake recipe might be useful ....and actually, by coincidence, Miss Mantle was my primary school teacher and she looked just like the Green Goddess and I fancied her something rotten when I was younger, I wonder what she's doing now !

.......So you up for it tomorrow or what ?

"Does it involve cycling uphill again" ?

NO, well not according to the new 'UK Immigration Statistic Maps' App that I've downloaded to my Mini iPad, but it's currently only showing Bradford, so I expect it'll update itself as we ride along. Anyway I'm not going to go mad, 'cos I did that today. And it'll have to be short one as I have shopping and housework to do in the afternoon, so I'll be round at yours at 9.00 in the morning, Bye ! 

Aaaargh !

Keep your balance

"I'm in the bike shop; the new machine is just getting finely tuned so I'll be with you shortly. You'll need that dusty thing hanging in your garage and some beer tokens; I've charged up the new mini iPad and added a few more useful Apps.  Do you realise I can now find out where and when all the manhole covers in Tunbridge Wells were made just by scanning them using a free App I downloaded this morning !"

Feck, he was serious !!!

We set off at a tremendous pace just before midday, I let him get quite a way ahead as he'd had a bell fitted to his handle bars, which evidently linked by Bluetooth to his mini iPad and an App that could determine the "Family Tree" of anyone he rang it at on the trail, so it was only fair to let him play with it.
It was redders, a proper scorching hot day as we raced along the tracks. Evidently neither the "Food Hygiene" nor "Pub" Apps had been fully updated because we passed up several opportunities of taking on victuals and watering our trust steeds. Eventually arriving at Bridgnorth we stopped to scan a manhole cover conveniently located next to a licensed cafe.

Dale, as with all men has no need to read instructions, especially those of his new HipLock bicycle security system and it did take him a while to work out that you do not chain the bike to yourself as it makes getting to the bar a tad more awkward than necessary.
A couple of cool Thatcher’s and a large helping of Bread Pudding and we were on our way, but  I had failed to realise that the way there had been predominantly downhill and thus the return would be UP !
Feck, Feck !
The App says the Brewery at Ironbridge is open he says, so we can stop for a swift one if we get a move on….. It was closed
Feck, Feck, Feck !
Err, we have two choices here: the long steep road climb or we can go up Paradise said Dale… so a no brainer then I said 

 I made him stop at the Coalbrookdale Inn  (which his App insisted either didn’t exist or was closed even as we stood at the bar ordering.
The rest of the journey, using the new “take me home NOW” App took us up every 1:2 hill in Shropshire and predominantly through housing estates littered with burnt out cars and  populated by children all looking very similar to each other.

I was proper pooped when eventually I got home and had to phone the Not so Bad Lady Wife (who was lounging in the garden) to help me off the bike as I had become welded to it in the heat. 
 
"Life is like riding a bicycle. to keep your balance you must keep moving" 

Mad Dogs and Englishmen...

It all started off so innocently….

We met up with some friends at the Hole in The Wall Festival on Friday evening with the plan to enjoy the sunshine and then chill around the fire pit enjoying the odd bevy or two and engage in witty banter.

By 2am, the Bad Lady Wife and the Good Lady Cindy having departed for bed the previous day, we had exhausted the supply of defrosted cider. Yes, Dale had deliberately put them in the freezer he assured me, “to keep them cool, can’t abide warm Cider”

Awaking to glorious sunshine again around mid-morning, yawn, I had an unnerving recollection of a plan involving Dales new Mini iPad that, not only has the “Hold the Button for as long as you can” App,

but also the "Bin Collection Days for all Streets in the West Midlands” App,  the “Food Hygiene Ratings for all Curry Houses North of Watford” App and more excitingly the “Location of all the Pubs in the World together with opening times and beer prices” App which we could use to go for a bike ride on Monday. That is of course after he had collected his new Velocipede. I also kind of remember his description of it as “a Viper Green Beast with 29 inch 'go-very-fast-wheels' and something like 48 different gear combinations”.

However, I thought no more of it and duly re-commenced reducing the national surfeit of tinned alcohol whilst waiting for the Bad Lady Wife to make my Bacon Butties. Once comfortably replete we adjourned to the main Festival area and settled into the routine of bar-chair-bar- wet head under tap- bar-toilet-bar whilst Blondie, then Bon Jovi and finally The Rolling Stones tried their best to keep us from our competition to get the most beer for the least money. (Dale triumphed on the single round whilst I took the trophy for the greater number of bargain rounds).

The next thing I recall is Sunday lunchtime and a realisation that we were really going out on the bikes on Monday; evidently it had been discussed in great detail back at the vans after the concert.

Dance like your Dad

The 'Good Lady Wife', as she has been affectionatetly referred to, will henceforth and until reparation now be known as the 'Bad Lady Wife' for her despicable and heinous act of leaving the shower set to COLD this morning after she had finished with it. 

The ensuing dance moves,  worthy of someone half my age for agility and speed, painfully rekindled  memories of when my dad insisted on taking to the dance floor at his works Annual Children's Christmas Party in the late 60's. (In subsequent years I mysteriously always went down with a temporary bout of African Trypananosmiasis / Dengue Fever / Athlete's Foot, or the like, on the morning of this party and mercifully had to miss them).

After the dancing came the cold realisation that I was now trapped between the ice cold water and the shower cubicle door.

'Bad Lady Wife'