Funny Words

Opt - it's so little and once you've said, thought or heard it a few times (which one does in the world of permission marketing) it becomes ridiculous really quickly. Punctual - should mean something more dangerous than it does (although an unhealthy obsession with punctuality could be considered a disease). Ladle - this may be the quickest word to lose sense when repeated over and over again, though closely contended by 'ketchup'.

Am I the neighbour people tell horror stories about?

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and talking about the various crazy neighbours we have all had over the years. We relived the hilarity of a drunken Boy Wonder deciding to talk to the people we occasionally saw naked (and saw us naked, let's not forget the really awkward part!) when he saw them in the pub, and discussed the merits of living next door to a drug dealer (very good neighbours - strange smell in their daughter's bedroom!). We were talking about shared gardens and I told the story of when we lived in the top flat of a converted house with no access to the garden. It was summer ball season and I had gone to one while the Boy Wonder was playing at another, so I had come in at around 6am, absolutely knackered. Outside, parading along the fence in the downstairs garden was a wailing cat, so I opened the window to shout at it, which had no impact but was at least easy to do. Once I had exhausted my enthusiasm for shouting, I decided to go for something with a little more impact and after a little spirited rooting around in the drawers I came across some old party poppers. 'These will do the job' I thought to myself, and so I was terribly disappointed when the earsplitting noise I had anticipated was a little damp squibbish and failed to arouse any response from the bloody cat. So not only was I not asleep and slightly drunk, but I was becoming increasingly convinced that the cat was deliberately mocking me, so I decided that I would try appealing to a different sense and formulated a plan to throw dried pasta at it in the hope of startling it off its perch on the fence, or at least breaking its concentration and forcing it to re-evaluate its choices of hobby. In a similar fashion to the party popper, I could envisage all this taking place within the space of around two minutes with me landing a few choice shots and putting the whole thing behind me. What actually happened was that I discovered how difficult it is to accurately throw pasta across a 10m garden at a 45 degree angle from a sash window at a small, moving target - very. One last attempt I thought, and stamping back to the bedroom I decided to revisit my original plan of startling the damn thing with a loud noise, and the option which presented itself to me was a good hard slam of the large sash window in the bedroom which at least faced the garden fence. I gave it a whack, the glass cracked and the cat's basic position of 'Fuck You human!' was established. Once I had had some sleep, I realised that not only was the window now broken (I accidentally made this less of a problem, on which more later) but our downstairs neighbours now had a garden full of dried pasta and party streamers. This is exactly the kind of thing you read on websites 'I came home one day to find my garden looked as though a group of impatient Italians had been partying in it - WTF?' or find out from your friends about their neighbours. Having said that, it's done now, and out current neighbours have won all the prizes going for inappropriate behaviour, so I feel sure they have no tales to tell of our exploits which wouldn't be met with disbelief or outright hilarity!

The Gift

The Gift has started saying 'Wik', which cracks me up!

The World Famous Comfort Cafe

Staffed by a selection of triads and Eastern European mafia members who work together to create the most spectacular (or certainly closest in proximity) fry up you can find, the World Famous Comfort Cafe have gone to the trouble of including their rather lofty claim of international renown right up front so you can see it on the approach. The car park is an awesome expanse of space, with areas allocated to vehicles of any size, from coaches (which we presume all arrive shortly after we leave for decadent lunches and glamorous dinners) to the bikers that we often see revving their engines incessantly outside the place in case nobody has noticed that lurking under their beer guts are some kind of bike which is presumably terribly impressive if you are a fellow biker, but turns out to be less so when you are hungover, sleep deprived and trying to enjoy your breakfast through the fug of exhaust fumes. To further their claims of being World Famous, there are a series of improbable clocks on the back wall displaying the time in Ulan Bator, Montevideo, Casablanca and other far flung places that sound familiar, and then you realise that you have no idea where most of them are and start trying to fight off the hangover fog to work out whether time goes forward or backward as you travel east. There is also the stunning 'garden room' which is a peculiarly constructed extension with massive folding glass doors which we have never seen open in summer, but which house large gaps which let in a lot of chilly air in the winter. At some point, somebody clearly decided that the view should be softened with a lot of creeping plant life, meaning that currently the windows are pretty much covered with vegetation which makes for an odd view but a strangely secluded feel when eating in there (as is our preference when it's too chilly to eat outside). A glance at the clientele that the World Famous Comfort Cafe attracts serves as yet another reminder that you are in a deeply special place - from young families with screeching children to doddery old folks enjoying a nice early lunch (or sometimes afternoon tea by the time we rock up for breakfast) and an assorted array of people who clearly had no idea that the place was there, making you wonder what on earth they were doing on that particular stretch of disused former A road ('the gateway to East Anglia' according to their own website) which is home to a Little Chef (surely the most pointlessly positioned eatery ever) and a petrol station manned by a man in a Ferrari jumpsuit who has trouble distinguishing between genders. Every time we have been we have taken note of the fact that people are enjoying items from the World Famous Comfort Cafe's extensive lunch and dinner menus as well as the classic breakfast fare that keeps us coming back time and time again, including the tiny bottles of wine which they place strategically on top of the counter as you approach to place your order to remind you of why you need so much comforting starch and grease. People unlike me who aren't faddy and set in their culinary ways probably find the process of ordering food very difficult - if you aren't going to order the same thing you had last time, there are a dazzling array of tempting treats all of which follow an apparently random pricing structure (£2.95 for a bowl of cereal and milk, £3.95 for a massive fry up) which is sure to have you gazing up in rapture at the many menus whilst the dark-haired eastern European girl looks at you with the same blanket contempt that people who have been up since 5 always have for those who order breakfast at 2pm. Once you have chosen, you then have to force your brain not to immediately lose your receipt on which is written your order number and without which you will be desperately trying to identify your particular combination of food items as they make their way round in the hands of the triad chef with other diners all peering at it to see if it's theirs too. The food is incredible - it's not so much that there's anything special about the ingredients or how they cook it so much as the fact that they cook it (as opposed to having to cook it yourself), it comes quickly, and it always tastes the same, which is a definite prerequisite for hangover food. The sole fly in the ointment is their slight tendency to run out of orange juice (a must when preserving the sanctity of a hangover breakfast) but this is more than made up with by the fact that they sometimes have Blood Orange juice (it tastes pretty much the same but looks much more dramatic) and the opportunity to taste weird and wonderful combinations of fruit and vegetable juice as a substitute. All in all, the World Famous Comfort Cafe is one of the most extraordinary places I have ever been, and is definitely my favourite venue for eating out (we will have dinner there one day, possibly with the Gift and/or the World Famous Comfort Cafe's newest fanboy, Uptown PJ) plus their faultless dedication to serving breakfast at whatever time you want a la Ken Walker is not only admirable, but demonstrates unfailing dedication to personal freedom.

Things I probably shouldn't have said at work

'You can tell him to suck my hairy bits' will be one of the things I later regret allowing to slip out at work. I suppose it could have been worse - each individual word isn't offensive in and of itself, so I should be grateful for small mercies. Update - my rallying call of 'Who wouldn't want to come into work and see some festive pubes on the wall?' to inspire enthusiasm in the sales team also had a less than stellar effect.

A tragic event

On Monday, as part of our plan to sort out the house this year, the Boy Wonder spent a valiant few hours, no small amount of money, and a goodly level of energy making the inside of our oven sparkle like a brand new 70s brown oven. On Monday evening, I marvelled at the clean wonderland which is now in our kitchen, enjoyed the delight of being able to see through the door, and was confident that the slightly tricky hinge would be fixed by the next evening. On Tuesday however, we had a sudden resurgence of 'fixing it by breaking it' on the Boy Wonder's part (although not at all his fault) which lead to the spanking clean oven being rendered unusable without spending £78 on new hinges or using only the grill section. My immediate response was to buy another oven, followed very shortly by the desire to somehow preserve all the work the Boy Wonder had done and contemplate the option of 'making good' the already ancient oven in favour of spending slightly more on a new oven which would nevertheless be guaranteed to work for a reasonable period afterwards. So, reluctantly, I tried as gently as I could to encourage the Boy Wonder not to feel too bad about the situation and in fairness, he was already thinking along the same lines, but was having trouble reconciling the practical facts with his desire to at least have one chance to enjoy the clean oveny goodness of the existing model. One upside is that, having been living with a substantially old and knackered oven, the process of choosing a new one is made all the more exciting by the impressive array of features which now come as standard. I was half way through an excited moment with the Boy Wonder whereby we rejoiced at the fact that our new oven will have a light inside it, before I realised that EVERY bloody oven has a light in it! Even the clapped out old oven that my Dad had when I was a kid that had to be lit perilously with a match had a fricking light in it! Nonetheless, the level of excitement we have managed to muster about an oven which is four times more efficient, has glass through which it is actually possible to see and a light inside for aiding the view through the clean glass is almost unbelievable! Roll on 'sometime next week' - the peculiarly vague delivery date we've been given by a company with a broken database who seem unwilling to admit that fact, preferring instead to let themselves appear wantonly incompetant instead. Edited to add: Not only did the new oven arrive on Friday morning, meaning we were without an oven for only three nights in total, but on taking the old, spiteful oven with the malevolent hinges to the tip (sorry, household waste recycling centre) the Boy Wonder and Uptown PJ found a Farfisa Organ in a skip which made the collective days of the whole band. Thus the balance of karma has been restored and we still have a new oven which is delightfully lit, enchantingly clean and thus far smells a little bit like chemicals and old fish. It also lead to a sharp increase in my ability to look interested in websites about Farfisa Organs which is an underrated skill in today's modern world.

Amusing misspellings

Some of these come up fairly regularly in the workplace, some are less common, but all make me laugh whenever I type them. Fortunately the time I e-mailed a client and told him I was 'moistly' waiting for the holidays, it was someone who appreciated the entertainment value of the typo and found it amusing rather than offensive.

Promble - Problem Accunts - Accounts Borken - Broken Scared - Sacred Gold - Golf Gift - Git Most - Moist Dong - Doing Teat - Test Dong - doing Discunt - discount

Bateman's - Batman's

It can't just be me

Yesterday I had the unpleasant job of justifying apostrophes to someone who had just uttered the phrase 'We could just strip all the apostrophes out'. At first I was pretty nice as I assumed I had misunderstood what he was suggesting, but when I realised that he really did believe that we could just use the same text without any apostrophes I had to dig my fingers into my knee so hard, I thought I was going to pass out just from the effort of not punching him. I mean, I can understand people not knowing how to use an apostrophe (well, I can't understand it, but I have had to accept that it's true) but a complete disbelief in the absolute necessity of having them is another matter. In the end I composed an impassioned speech which started with a short discourse on the most important elements of apostrophe use, covering the indication of possession and including some wisdom about the contractions. I then went on to point out that even if I never contracted another word and managed to express every concept on the website without the use of the possessive, we would still have to be able to use apostrophes in John o' Groats or 3 o'clock and thus it was an entirely unacceptable pretence at a solution. Fortunately, whilst I fear the finer points of my verbal treatise may have been wasted on someone who came up with the idea in the first place, the sheer vehemence of my argument seemed to scare him into not pursuing the suggestion any further.