September 4, 2008

Everybody's getting a tad too wound up round here, lately - and I blame the weather.

In fact (with respect to our Muslim brethren, but some quips are too easy - and I credit a fellow (for once unnaturally timid) blogger for this) it seems we are now living in a Middle Eastern climate:

That is, partly Sunni, but mostly Sh-ite.

Anyway, in an effort to lift the gloom:

1) Until reaching secondary school my mildly affectionate nickname was Dumbo, because of my protruding ears. This was not a problem until I was 18, when I bumped into a girl I hadn't seen since primary school. In a nightclub. She was loud.

2) I was once chatted up at Piccadily railway station in Manchester while waiting for a train home. This would not normally be a problem if the chatter-up in question wasn't wildly drunk, covered in piss, in a wheelchair, and wholly gay. And he made me miss my train.

3) As youngsters, my elder brother and I used to share a room. Once, in the middle of a furious fart-on-each-other campaign, I only narrowly avoided being splattered with shit thanks to a nifty manouvre of what in those days my mum insisted on calling my "continental quilt".

4) "7Up, not a cola, not a lem-on-ade, it's a super new drink with no artificial aid" was the slogan that won me the grand prize of a solitary 7Up T-shirt back in the 70s. "Naughty but nice" slogan author Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, merely got a death warrant issued against him.

5) I first came up with the idea of the much-vaunted (by me) idea of the Wee Hose when I pissed myself - quite literally - as I performed altar boy duties (on the altar, and not in the vestry, I hasten to add) right in the middle of mass at St Alban's Church, in the early 1980s.

Over to you...