» When I met the parents

Footsie...
Again, not me, but a friend...

Went to meet his (now wife's) parents over Sunday lunch at her house.

He decides to engage in a little bit of footsie action under the table with his girlfriend.
Strangely though, after at least two minutes of his finest toe-work the girlfriend remains unmoved and doesn't even aknowledge his best under-table attempts to make her smile.

Then all of a sudden, her mother puts down her knife and fork and turns to my friend and says that, "Although (she found it) rather flattering, she would rather not have her leg stroked under the table during Sunday lunch"


....cringe-fest
(Thu 19th May 2005, 13:47, More)

» When animals attack...

Wasps...
Ever seen a wasp (NOT a hornet) that was over 2 inches (45mm) long?
No, not kidding... I have a scaled photo to prove it.

Ever gone into your kitchen in the dark and unknowingly grabbed it in your hand thinking that it was a peice of pizza lying on your worktop?

Ever heard a grown man shreik like a girl (when it buzzzzed in his hand)?

Drop the buzzzing thing, run out of the kitchen and turn the light on as you leave. Shut the door and look back through the porthole. Then wonder how on Earth you got away with not being stung by a stinger that was in all likelihood the size of a drawing pin?

Then you hit the problem... wasp-killer spray is in the kitchen... with a very, very bad-tempered armour-plated alien killing machine flying around.

The solution... your friend arrives (on his way round to the pub) and you get them to go into the kitchen to investigate, armed only with the West London (very very heavy) copy of the Yellow Pages.

Find killer wasp on the floor... drop the Yellow pages onto it from a six foot height and... problem solved.
(Thanks Steve... you're a good mate.)


Come to think of it, that was the first and only time I have ever had a use for the Yellow Pages.
(Thu 2nd Jun 2005, 14:35, More)

» Walkman Flashbacks

People Are Strange/Cry Little Sister
From the Lost Boys soundtrack album. I was 16/17 at the time and utterly bessotted with a girl at school, who also lived in my village.
We became friends and I occasionally popped over to her house for a coffee and a chat.

What she didn't know was that I thought that she was an angel (in the romantic sense).
I got the impression that she kind of liked me a tiny bit too, but then reading signals has never been one of my strong points.

It was 1989/90 and the Lost Boys was still on the movie hot-list. I bought the soundtrack and copied those two tracks for her to take away when she went away on holiday to France with her family.

I came so close to telling her how I really felt about her several times- or at least asking her out on an official date... but never went through with it.

I live with that regret to this day. And every time I hear either of those tunes it takes me right back there.


She moved away with her family and I'm led to understand that she later married my namesake!... A spooky slap in the face for me every time I think about it.


Regret is a terrible thing to live with.

If only people weren't so damn protective of their feelings... the world would be a much bett..... ok, you get the picture.


Length, circumference...? It's not the size of the nail, it's the hammer that drives it in!
(Thu 24th Mar 2005, 14:55, More)

» Hidden Treasure

Found and lost
When I was a slip of a lad... about 10 years old or so... I was visiting my great grandparents during a long Summer holiday.

I decided to go hunting around their house for "artefacts"... you know, World War 1/2 guns, bullets and all of the other stuff that elderly people always have hidden in their homes.

Half an hour of snooping through draws revealed that my increadibly house proud oldies have cleared all of the interesting stuff away and all I could find that looked even slightly old was a rather nice soft brown leather wallet - no pun/paedo remark intented.

At this point, my great grandfather walked in an caught me in the act of disshonest appropriation with the intent of permenantly depriving the rightful owner.

Lovely old boy that he was, he told me that I could keep this wallet. I then spent the rest of the holiday trying to blag as much spare change from all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and anyone else who would cough up some dosh for their darling grandson/nephew.

I even took up playing Newmarket - a gambling game - with my auntie to boost my cash levels. The curruption of youth eh?

Anyway, come the time for my father to collect me and drive me home two weeks later, I had the princely sum of £11 in my little brown wallet.

To a 10 year old in 1982 that was a shit-load of cash... FYI it was easily enough to purchase 9 original Star Wars figures or 9 gallons of petrol or 16 pints of beer or 70 bars of Cadburys chocolate... so you get the picture.... I was rich.

Dad and I stop at a motorway service station for a drink and a rest on the way home and I proudly take out my wallet to remove a crisp £1 note (for the junior B3TA readership, born after 1983, £1 notes are those funny little green pieces of paper that looked like Monopoly money) to pay for an extra-large chocolate bar and a fizzy drink (with plenty of sugar and E-numbers in it).

Upon returning to the car to finish the journey home, I open the little brown wallet to re-count my cash. And I make the horrifying discovery that somewhere between my acquiring gastric treats and getting back into the car, I had lost every pennt of my ill-gottten gains. Bugger.

The realisation sets in that at 15p per week pocket money, it was going to take nearly two years for me to replace it!

...now that kind of length is unimaginable to a 10 year old!
(Tue 5th Jul 2005, 14:08, More)

» When animals attack...

Tarantula
I've handled large spiders and snakes several times before.
They don't scare me because I understand the golden rule... treat them with respect!
Don't ever get into an enclosure with a moody animal!

So picture the scene... my friend invites me to take a look at the tarantulas and giant stick-insects that he is breeding.
And he adds, "Only don't get too close to 'The Mama' (taranula) because she is shedding at the moment, which upsets her and makes her moody". Think of it as a very bad case of 'time-of-the-month'.

So into his heated shed we go.
Lots of creepy-crawlies everywhere, safely shut away in heated glass cases. Nice.

We turn to look at The Mama. Only to discover that her glass case is empty. She's done a runner - she is big enough to push the lid of her case off!
Oh crap!!

Friend tells me that I cannot leave now... if we open the door to the shed, the Mama might escape.

So there I stand in a tiny shed... knowing that there is a very large and very pissed-off spider moving around in there with me (don't look up), whilst my friend pokes around in the corners with a fishing net trying to recapture Mama... think of the scene from the first Alien film where the face-hugger comes off the chap's face and they are poking around the science lab trying to find it.



Length?... you should have seen the size of that twunting spider!
(Thu 2nd Jun 2005, 14:20, More)