I live near a football ground and, although I have…

I live near a football ground and, although I have nothing against football fans, sometimes their manners after a game aren’t the best. Like taking a leak in my front garden.

Well, I think I’ve found the answer. Austrian officials fed up with motorists stopping to urinate by the roadside have put up fake snake warnings to scare them into using toilets. The idea is that men stop to relieve themselves, see the warning about snakes, and put their own snake back in their trousers.

So, where can I get one?

Misguided football followers

I have a new young lady in my front room. I’m assuming she’s a lady because she dresses nicely, doesn’t swear or spit and has a friendly rapport with her grandmother. But should I assume?

Looking more closely she follows what is called a football team. Now, everyone and their dog knows that there is no football played anywhere in the world except in my hometown, in other places they have a sort of a ball, and sort of men in sort of shorts falling on it. That’s not football. (I’ve even heard it’s played with a round ball in some countries)

Football is played with an oblate spheroid on oval shaped playing fields called ovals. There is no falling on the ball. There is no falling on the other players. There is no tackle or scrum or scrim or other fancy names for men rolling around in the mud with each other.

Someone should tell my renter

Free Milk for Schools

Yesterday I touched on a subject which remains vividly in the memory of many readers. The Free Milk for Schools scheme.

I’m not the only one who suffers recurring nightmares of forgetting to shake the bottle before opening and copping a mouthful of warm, lumpy cream, but fortunately no one else endured the horror of Miss Callanan who policed the crates in our school playground making sure no child got free without a bottle.

Even when the magpies had already pierced the top of the lid, there was no escaping the forced ingestion of Free Milk in all its curdled foulness.

It was the defining childhood experience that taught me the absolute necessity of being able to lie convincingly. “That’s mine Miss!” pointing to any old empty bottle in the crate.

It also taught me that some boys will do anything for a dare.

Goodbye Popeye

I’m shocked. Not so much by the news of the entire population of the North American continent going down with food poisoning from eating bagged spinach, but by the lack of respect shown to growing childen.

” Marina Zecevic said she made the mistake of serving creamed spinach to her kids the day the story (of the contamination) broke.”

No, Marina, your mistake was the heinous creaming of the spinach in the first place. In my day, no self respecting child would stand for such a blatant disregard of Human Rights.

Food plays such a large part in our character, it shapes our very souls. My generation gained tolerance through the wheatgerm which marred our porridge, fortitude from the boiled cabbage, and the daily teaspoon of cod liver oil constantly strengthened our righteous anger.

We survived the hideous institution of Free Milk in Schools and dutifully swallowed, every day at lunch, a warm bottle of clotted, curdled milk which had been sitting in the sun since sparrow-fart.

We were a tough bunch.

And no one would have dared to serve us creamed spinach.

Leave the Scots alone

Please, if you live in York, stop shooting Scotsmen with your bows and arrows. Just because the ancient by-law which allows you to legally send an arrow up a kilt within the city walls has never been repealed, that’s no reason to keep up your archery classes. The war has been over for centuries, don’t you think it’s about time you stopped?

A peace offer to the Scots

Bathtubs and Telephones

Why does the phone always ring the minute I climb in the tub? This morning I was all set for a little soak when some pest selling brick cladding was on the blower. It’s as though there is some etheric connection between the two. A vibration that resounds in the ionsphere when the bath salts are added to the tub. But think of this ;-

The bathtub was invented in 1850.

The telephone was invented in 1875.

This might not seem like much but, if you had lived back then, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without being bothered by the phone

Going shopping? Take your rubber gloves

Shopping trolleys and me don’t get on. I always get one that wants to trundle along the baby foods aisle when I want to go the other way to the cereals (high fibre). It makes you wonder if they really did put a man on the moon if they can’t design a working shopping trolley with wheels that turn in more than direction.

But it get’s worse. Shopping Trolleys are full of Germs with 1,100 colony forming units of bacteria per 10 sq cm (1.55 sq inches) !! These days it’s scarcely safe to step outside.

Fortunately I have a large supply of pink rubber gloves. Next time I’m in the supermarket I’ll whip them out before I tackle a truculent trolley.

The Perils of Spinach

My Council Home Help girl gave me a book today. She’s supposed to be dusting and running the vac over the rug, but she gave me a discourse on the benefits of spinach and a cookbook with over 300 recipes of the vile stuff.

The author, who probably wears hairshirts as well, calls her book I Love Spinach!

Can you imagine? Spinach! Typical of my Council Home Help girl, sticking her nose in people’s private gastric affairs. (I strongly suspect she is an ageing hippie, always in the garden with those funny herbs and things)

“There’s an old French Proverb” she said, “Spinach is the broom of the stomach.”

That’s one way of putting it, I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it

Life is too short

If life is too short to ice a cake, then it’s too short to hold a grudge.

So I swallowed my pride and some aspro and returned to the hardware store for more paint. I even found the same young man to help me, and this time I was quite quick in choosing the exact shade of brown, not too dark, some tan, a bit of orange but not too much, a sort of dullish yet warm brown with an undercurrent of earthy tones yet with a lightness to it. It took me only a little over an hour.

As I was leaving, I noticed the young man had made a mistake, I wanted one gallon, he gave me two. I tried to give him the other gallon back, he refused to take it! Extraordinary.

He absolutely insisted that I should take double what I needed, he told me that he didn’t want me to trouble myself by coming back to his shop again.

What a charming young chap. Now that’s good manners.

Outrageous youth

The young man in the hardware shop was extremely rude to me. I bought some paint to transform my brick wall into a beach scene, to make it look as though I live on a beach (it only took a few hours to choose the exact shade of blue I wanted) and I loaded the cans into the basket on my tricycle.

He helped me stack the tins of paint next to my thermos of coffee and vegemite sandwich. (Pedalling makes me peckish) So far so good.

Then the cheeky little bugger says to me “You will need to get thinner”. What audacity. Unmitigated gall.

I won’t shop there for paint again