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