Thanks guys

A fun guy with a funny walk

Two fathers’ day cards. One had a seaside postcard cricket scene, the vicar is sipping from his cup of tea and he asks a fat lady in a deckchair:

“Did he get the runs?”

To which she replies:

“No, I think he always walks like that.”

Cricket, toilet humour, and a “no, I always walk like this” joke variant.

The other had a photo of mushrooms, a bold caption saying “Dad, you’re a real fun guy”, and a cryptic message about the zen of knitting. One of the mushrooms is knitted, with eyes, Clangers-style. Whimsy, bad puns (as in good puns), and random references to knitting wool.

My two favourite chilli sauces, real coffee, and rugby tickets, thanks guys.

Six out of ten…

…in the fathers in literature Guardian quiz. Bad memory, as I’d read most of the books: To Kill a Mockingbird (right answer, Atticus Finch is a lawyer); The Railway Children (dad accused of spying); Matilda (house and money stolen); Lord of the Rings (skipping the campfire songs – Denethor was the Steward of Gondor); The Northern Lights (wrong answer, but it was close, Edward Coulter not Edward Daughter); MacBeth (studied under the worst imaginable old bitch of an English Lit teacher, she could suck the joy out of the collected Bob Marley recordings, so no surprise, I got that one wrong); The Owl Service (awfully under-rated books and an excellent telly series, right answer but bit of a guess); Little Women (one I’ve not read but it had to be American Civil War at a guess).

Relationships based on trust?

Or on spying on each other?

Our lot were tapping phone calls and even set up fake Internet Cafes during the G20 summit to collect information from foreign diplomats and delegates.

It’s like they can’t help themselves. Like a body of elderly women with their withered, bony fingers pulling back the curtains or opening their neighbours’ mail, they just have to snoop. Bad enough as it is, but it inevitably ends in bloody nosed embarrassment when it comes out after the horrific events that they had all the information they needed to take positive action and nip things in the bud.

Like those ineffective social workers who visit, report, visit, report, meddle, snoop, then shrug their shoulders when the baby dies from the torture inflicted, our government dig and delve, snoop and pry where they’re not wanted, and still fail to get the tax due from the big companies, still fail to make anything (anything at all) better than it was, and still fail to stop terrorist activity.