Just this weekend, Sunday to be precise, 'Meccano' Sagtrouser (erstwhile son of Mr Elias Sagtrouser, Conveyor of Building Requisites to the Hard-Working), was in church.
He was there for a special reason was 'Meccano'. (His name comes from a general appreciation of his - er - parts, and it is a well know fact that what can be done with his trunnion supported by a flange and a burst from a Magic Motor*, has brought some surprise and much comfort to many lady customers in the district). Yesterday, Sunday, was the day when a visiting Preacher was going to show off his ability to create religious history.
Meccano was duly called to the rail in the South Chapel, after several local converts were cured of various inflictions such as 'Gripes', and 'Scrotes'. The perspiring evangelist, Fr. Jabez Corncrake, placed his hands on the shoulders of our hero and asked in measured tones, what was required in this place of religion and belief.
Meccano replied, 'Father, I would like you to pray for my hearing'!
Now this came as a bit of a surprise from the assembled congregation, as nobody ever doubted Meccano's ability to hear a pint glass being filled at thirty paces, although he was usually oblivious to some of the afore-mentioned ladies when he was requested to stop...
Anyway, the Evangelist began to pray for Meccano's hearing, invoking his best voices, incantations etc, and eventually ended with a bellowing request to the powers bestowed on him by those on high, for Meccano's ears to be released from their deafness.
After a few moments, chest heaving, and with echoes of the final intonement still rattling around in the organ loft, Fr. Corncrake asked Meccano what his hearing was like now.
Meccano replied, 'I don't know Father, it's not until next Wednesday'!
* For those of an enquiring nature, consult the Meccano Book of Parts, available from all booksellers in 1947.
Monday, 27 July 2009
Sunday, 19 July 2009
Absent friends...
I'm sure that this man will be remembered for many years to come, and it's amazing that he was 51 years old when I was born (today's yet another Scrobs birthday, and we're going out later...)
What a big man Henry Allingham was! I salute you Sir!
Another much younger name to leave us - thankfully still with us in body, is the Grumpy Granny duo.
I was sorry to read a thoughtful comment that was left here on Friday, and even sorrier that I missed them and didn't see it in time to wish them 'bye!
So, here it is, slightly abridged as GG said that she's been instructed by Blogger not to say so much in one post.
It says an awful lot, so over to you Grumpers...
"This posting illustrates perfectly why we Grumpys have finally decided to quit and buzz off to our secure little hidey hole far far away from Nosepicker McStickyfingers and the rest of the poofs in Downing Street and the Marxist claque in Brussels.
I know we "retired" a few months and then returned - but that was caused by a minor hiccup to our long standing plans which has now been successfully ironed out. Grandad is a modest chap but he spent much of his life in economic and finance work and first saw the writing begin to appear on the wall when those who were pulling Bill Clinton's strings (and now probably those of his wife) instructed him to pass into law the conjoining of high street retail banking and investment and commercial banking; an absolute NO NO in banking terms. He described it as foolish and dangerous and said it would lead to great trouble and distress.
Knowing something similar was likely to follow in the UK, since then we have carefully watched minutely every action of our politicians. Things began to come nicely to the boil with the so-called dot-com bubble when brainless investors declared a young girl with a cat and a computer had suddenly produced a billion pound company overnight and out of thin air. No product, no history, no accounts. Lunacy. That little bubble went pop quite early on and we were not affected as we had no investments in that sort of idiocy.
The simmer continued gently with the ever increasing house prices. Grandad used to have a small graph showing average salaries (which hardly ever moved) against house prices which rose almost daily. It was obvious for anyone with eyes to see that this could not go one. How could anyone earning £20k before tax ever hope to service a £250k mortgage which, by the time the compounding had been done would amount to nearer £800,000. The sums simply did not add up.
We continued to watch. However, on the afternoon that Snottyfingers announced the £5billion pension grab changes, grandad was on to our fund manager and cashed in the lot within 24 hours. The proceeds were despatched to our hidey hole offshore and have since been earning a steady if unspectacular (but tax free)return annually. We eventually decided in 2002 that it was time to get rid of our house and rent while the money was there for the taking, so we put it on the market for what our agent said he could get for it and sure enough 3 weeks later we had a firm offer from a thick Indian who paid us over 3 times what we had paid 10 years previously and over 5times what we considered it was actually worth. The vast majority of that substantial amount of cash too followed into our offshore fund.
And now we both have new passports and ten years permanent resident visas, so we have left the tip that the UK has become for pastures not exactly new for us as we have visited our little cottage overlooking a beautiful bay at least twice a year since we bought it in the 1980s for really quite a pittance. We have made new friends in the village and happily we both speak the local language fairly fluently. It will see us out now I think. We do not have a land line phone installed so we will not be able to browse the internet any more.
The major advantage of this is that folks of our advanced years do not need all the daily boiling blood pressure, frustrating but helpless feelings over much of what the politically correct garbage and other mendacious crap we read or get fed via the BBC. We spent the better part of 130 years between us working honestly and diligently doing our bit for the UK (or England if you prefer) and were really quite proud of our country in a quiet sort of way. Basic things (health service, utilities, transport etc) worked ok most of the time, most companies were there to help rather than screw you, kids got educated properly and many did very well by their own efforts.
Take a deep breath, look outside and note what you see - wheelie bins with chips, cctv cameras all over the place, a useless politicised police force, once the finest armed forces in the world engaged in 2 illegal wars and reduced to penury by a one eyed Scottish Communist prat, and from overseas, our so-called "government" is simply a laughing stock.
So, in a nutshell we have had enough and we have been careful enough to secure more than sufficient resources to ensure our futures well away from Scottish poofs and nosepickers and Marxist theorists in Europe. We shall honestly miss all our blogging/commenting cybermates, and you all know who who are, so from the bottom of our hearts Grandad and I thank you for keeping us in turn, mildly irritated, bloody annoyed, screamingly helplessly infuriated - as well as most of the other emotions from amused smiling at the sharpness and unalloyed wit of many of you, to those who more than once occasioned the necessity to change the grandmotherly undergarments (it happens when you get to our age you know) when creased up in uncontrollable hysterical laughter.
En passant you may be wondering how I managed to type all this if I no longer have a computer. Well, the answer is that we have stopped off en route to spend a few days with one of our regular commenting gang who has kindly offered us accommodation, victuals and transport free of charge – which is nothing less than is to be expected from somebody I have known since we were both in the infants schools at the age of six in South London.
Bye everyone; it has been fun".
Luckily Pips was here to wave them off, and so do I here (waves)!
'Bye Grumpers, sorry to have missed you, and the very best of good fortune to you both!
What a big man Henry Allingham was! I salute you Sir!
Another much younger name to leave us - thankfully still with us in body, is the Grumpy Granny duo.
I was sorry to read a thoughtful comment that was left here on Friday, and even sorrier that I missed them and didn't see it in time to wish them 'bye!
So, here it is, slightly abridged as GG said that she's been instructed by Blogger not to say so much in one post.
It says an awful lot, so over to you Grumpers...
"This posting illustrates perfectly why we Grumpys have finally decided to quit and buzz off to our secure little hidey hole far far away from Nosepicker McStickyfingers and the rest of the poofs in Downing Street and the Marxist claque in Brussels.
I know we "retired" a few months and then returned - but that was caused by a minor hiccup to our long standing plans which has now been successfully ironed out. Grandad is a modest chap but he spent much of his life in economic and finance work and first saw the writing begin to appear on the wall when those who were pulling Bill Clinton's strings (and now probably those of his wife) instructed him to pass into law the conjoining of high street retail banking and investment and commercial banking; an absolute NO NO in banking terms. He described it as foolish and dangerous and said it would lead to great trouble and distress.
Knowing something similar was likely to follow in the UK, since then we have carefully watched minutely every action of our politicians. Things began to come nicely to the boil with the so-called dot-com bubble when brainless investors declared a young girl with a cat and a computer had suddenly produced a billion pound company overnight and out of thin air. No product, no history, no accounts. Lunacy. That little bubble went pop quite early on and we were not affected as we had no investments in that sort of idiocy.
The simmer continued gently with the ever increasing house prices. Grandad used to have a small graph showing average salaries (which hardly ever moved) against house prices which rose almost daily. It was obvious for anyone with eyes to see that this could not go one. How could anyone earning £20k before tax ever hope to service a £250k mortgage which, by the time the compounding had been done would amount to nearer £800,000. The sums simply did not add up.
We continued to watch. However, on the afternoon that Snottyfingers announced the £5billion pension grab changes, grandad was on to our fund manager and cashed in the lot within 24 hours. The proceeds were despatched to our hidey hole offshore and have since been earning a steady if unspectacular (but tax free)return annually. We eventually decided in 2002 that it was time to get rid of our house and rent while the money was there for the taking, so we put it on the market for what our agent said he could get for it and sure enough 3 weeks later we had a firm offer from a thick Indian who paid us over 3 times what we had paid 10 years previously and over 5times what we considered it was actually worth. The vast majority of that substantial amount of cash too followed into our offshore fund.
And now we both have new passports and ten years permanent resident visas, so we have left the tip that the UK has become for pastures not exactly new for us as we have visited our little cottage overlooking a beautiful bay at least twice a year since we bought it in the 1980s for really quite a pittance. We have made new friends in the village and happily we both speak the local language fairly fluently. It will see us out now I think. We do not have a land line phone installed so we will not be able to browse the internet any more.
The major advantage of this is that folks of our advanced years do not need all the daily boiling blood pressure, frustrating but helpless feelings over much of what the politically correct garbage and other mendacious crap we read or get fed via the BBC. We spent the better part of 130 years between us working honestly and diligently doing our bit for the UK (or England if you prefer) and were really quite proud of our country in a quiet sort of way. Basic things (health service, utilities, transport etc) worked ok most of the time, most companies were there to help rather than screw you, kids got educated properly and many did very well by their own efforts.
Take a deep breath, look outside and note what you see - wheelie bins with chips, cctv cameras all over the place, a useless politicised police force, once the finest armed forces in the world engaged in 2 illegal wars and reduced to penury by a one eyed Scottish Communist prat, and from overseas, our so-called "government" is simply a laughing stock.
So, in a nutshell we have had enough and we have been careful enough to secure more than sufficient resources to ensure our futures well away from Scottish poofs and nosepickers and Marxist theorists in Europe. We shall honestly miss all our blogging/commenting cybermates, and you all know who who are, so from the bottom of our hearts Grandad and I thank you for keeping us in turn, mildly irritated, bloody annoyed, screamingly helplessly infuriated - as well as most of the other emotions from amused smiling at the sharpness and unalloyed wit of many of you, to those who more than once occasioned the necessity to change the grandmotherly undergarments (it happens when you get to our age you know) when creased up in uncontrollable hysterical laughter.
En passant you may be wondering how I managed to type all this if I no longer have a computer. Well, the answer is that we have stopped off en route to spend a few days with one of our regular commenting gang who has kindly offered us accommodation, victuals and transport free of charge – which is nothing less than is to be expected from somebody I have known since we were both in the infants schools at the age of six in South London.
Bye everyone; it has been fun".
Luckily Pips was here to wave them off, and so do I here (waves)!
'Bye Grumpers, sorry to have missed you, and the very best of good fortune to you both!
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Lils' utilities...
Gas bills, Electricity bills etc., are a nightmare to understand. Lils' bills just mirror what Labour always do, which is confuse everyone, and take the money.
Just as I found out how to save £30 a month on my mobile, BT pulled the plug on the deal! I still haven't a clue how to understand how they charge, and all manner of spreadsheets and downloads are hopeless.
So, after a long term at my local evening classes, I've reverted to the old methods like these...
Just as I found out how to save £30 a month on my mobile, BT pulled the plug on the deal! I still haven't a clue how to understand how they charge, and all manner of spreadsheets and downloads are hopeless.
So, after a long term at my local evening classes, I've reverted to the old methods like these...
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Gently, gently...
...
End of final school term...
New hopes and dreams...
Shining eyes...
Moving away soon...
Maybe can't wait; maybe frightened...
Been there; done it - twice...
The song that brought it home - eventually...
...
End of final school term...
New hopes and dreams...
Shining eyes...
Moving away soon...
Maybe can't wait; maybe frightened...
Been there; done it - twice...
The song that brought it home - eventually...
...
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Urban myth...
...
A Well-Planned Retirement
(From The London Times)
Outside the Bristol Zoo, in England, there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 coaches, or buses. It was manned by a very pleasant attendant with a ticket machine charging cars £1 and coaches £5 .
This parking attendant worked there solid for all of 25 years. Then, one day, he just didn't turn up for work.
"Oh well", said Bristol Zoo Management - "we'd better phone up the City Council and get them to send a new parking attendant..."
"Err ... no", said the Council, "that parking lot is your responsibility."
"Err ... no", said Bristol Zoo Management, "the attendant was employed by the City Council, wasn't he?"
"Err ... NO!" insisted the Council.
Sitting in his villa somewhere on the sun coast of Spain, is a bloke who had been taking the parking lot fees, estimated at £400 per day at Bristol Zoo for the last 25 years. Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over £3.6 million!
And no one even knows his name.
A Well-Planned Retirement
(From The London Times)
Outside the Bristol Zoo, in England, there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 coaches, or buses. It was manned by a very pleasant attendant with a ticket machine charging cars £1 and coaches £5 .
This parking attendant worked there solid for all of 25 years. Then, one day, he just didn't turn up for work.
"Oh well", said Bristol Zoo Management - "we'd better phone up the City Council and get them to send a new parking attendant..."
"Err ... no", said the Council, "that parking lot is your responsibility."
"Err ... no", said Bristol Zoo Management, "the attendant was employed by the City Council, wasn't he?"
"Err ... NO!" insisted the Council.
Sitting in his villa somewhere on the sun coast of Spain, is a bloke who had been taking the parking lot fees, estimated at £400 per day at Bristol Zoo for the last 25 years. Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over £3.6 million!
And no one even knows his name.
Friday, 3 July 2009
Strawberry gaff - not...
...
Pips was talking about strawberries and raspberries etc just now, and I remembered - with some anxiety, an occasion when I wish they'd never been invented!
My old firm used to welcome our MD down to our Sussex office occasionally, and we'd always repair to the local restaurant for a long and liquid lunch. This was about the time of 'Spitting Image', and they'd been doing sketches about Margaret Thatcher, Kinnock, etc ad nauseam - but very funny. One sketch was about Mark Thatcher being able to come and go through a flap in the back door of No 10, which claimed the description 'Prat Flap'.
Cue lunch with said MD, whom we all knew well and actually liked. He'd once told us that strawberries tasted much better with a dusting of ground black pepper, rather than cream etc, as it brought out the flavour etc. We'd all tried it and 'had' to agree of course, but when we saw him at this particular lunch, everyone had forgotten this culinary epithet.
So, the liquids continued to pour, we all got more relaxed, and the conversation wandered around cricket, work prospects and TV stories. The No 10 sketch was the masterpiece of the Scrobs end of the table and we were all laughing heartily, until Scrobs himself just mentioned when the strawberries arrived, 'Who was the chap we knew who used to put pepper on his strawberries'?
Because I worked with utter, callous, mean bastards then, I hated them all and wanted to run them all over every second of the day (not true...), the place went quiet and one of the said bastards gestured towards our MD, and muttered, 'Who was the PRAT who put pepper...???'
And I never did say that, I really, honestly never did, but to this day I've never been allowed to forget it, especially when I see the bastards who tweaked my friendly little statement, and now I hate pepper on strawberries, and I hate the bastards (again), just for good measure...
Bastards...
Pips was talking about strawberries and raspberries etc just now, and I remembered - with some anxiety, an occasion when I wish they'd never been invented!
My old firm used to welcome our MD down to our Sussex office occasionally, and we'd always repair to the local restaurant for a long and liquid lunch. This was about the time of 'Spitting Image', and they'd been doing sketches about Margaret Thatcher, Kinnock, etc ad nauseam - but very funny. One sketch was about Mark Thatcher being able to come and go through a flap in the back door of No 10, which claimed the description 'Prat Flap'.
Cue lunch with said MD, whom we all knew well and actually liked. He'd once told us that strawberries tasted much better with a dusting of ground black pepper, rather than cream etc, as it brought out the flavour etc. We'd all tried it and 'had' to agree of course, but when we saw him at this particular lunch, everyone had forgotten this culinary epithet.
So, the liquids continued to pour, we all got more relaxed, and the conversation wandered around cricket, work prospects and TV stories. The No 10 sketch was the masterpiece of the Scrobs end of the table and we were all laughing heartily, until Scrobs himself just mentioned when the strawberries arrived, 'Who was the chap we knew who used to put pepper on his strawberries'?
Because I worked with utter, callous, mean bastards then, I hated them all and wanted to run them all over every second of the day (not true...), the place went quiet and one of the said bastards gestured towards our MD, and muttered, 'Who was the PRAT who put pepper...???'
And I never did say that, I really, honestly never did, but to this day I've never been allowed to forget it, especially when I see the bastards who tweaked my friendly little statement, and now I hate pepper on strawberries, and I hate the bastards (again), just for good measure...
Bastards...
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Mrs S. spots a famous tennis blooper...
Just before Andy Murray won the match against Ferrero, he was fluffing a few shots, and not getting his quick finish.
Andrew Castle, commentating in the box casually mentioned that "He's doing a Tim Henman".
Pity that Tim Henman was sitting right next to him...
Ooooops...!
(Hat tip - Mrs S).
Andrew Castle, commentating in the box casually mentioned that "He's doing a Tim Henman".
Pity that Tim Henman was sitting right next to him...
Ooooops...!
(Hat tip - Mrs S).
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