Monday 29 July 2013

Man Plans, God Laughs

So we went camping, and everything went brilliantly. For the first time in six years we went out into the wide world and no one lost an eye, I didn't explode into a vast and impotent rage and (due to the Girl's metaphorical toys remaining in her metaphorical pram) the High Street of Cromer didn't come to a standstill. It was a sterling success.

Almost.

We'd managed to go three days without mishap or mayhem. Three days of sunshine, beaches, ice cream and lashings and lashings of waiting-until-the-Kids-went to-bed-and-then-drinking-ourselves-unconscious. On the last day we found ourselves standing by our cars, neatly packed with our camping accouterments, the picture of parental smugness. We were just patting ourselves on the back for getting our tents back into their bags without a) swearing or b) splitting the bag and disgorging a pile of canvas and poles into the grass when our friend's youngest child casually strolled over and said;

"The Boy just did a poo in the secret toilet."
"Er... What?"
"Yeah. He did a poo in the secret toilet and then I covered it up and did a wee on it."

With look of anxious hope I turned to his dad and said;

"Heh. Fertile imagination your boy's got there."
"I don't think he's joking."

Bollocks.

I turned and marched over to the children's playground where the Boy was sitting on a swing looking like the cat that got the cream and then took a shit on a secret toilet. He beamed at me as I walked over.

"Boy. Did you do a poo?"

He nodded, grinning.

"WHERE did you do a poo?"

Still grinning, he pointed to his right at a hollowed out tree stump.

"You didn't."

Of course he did.

This prompted a slightly frantic conversation during which I extolled the virtues of getting in the cars, lighting up the tyres and making a run for the border. Based on this, the general consensus was that I had to go and clean it up.

So with a heavy heart and a Sainsbury's carrier bag, I walked back to the scene of the crime and... well it was a bit like this

Except that when I scooped I realised that either the Boy had eaten a cow, or he wasn't the first to use the secret toilet. So there you go; man plans, God laughs and your Boy takes a shit in a tree when you're not paying attention. It's a lesson for life, my friends.

Monday 22 July 2013

Art for Arseache

It's been a normal kind of week in our household. The cat has found a new career ethnically cleansing the local area of wildlife. So, the Wife put a bell on him. This has had two effects; firstly, he plays a lovely tune whilst he snacks on small birds and secondly, I keep waking up in middle of night convinced we are being burgled by a morris dancer
.
Meanwhile, the Boy has been writing a newspaper. Allow me to broaden the readership of his first issue.



This is the front cover, advertising a food and drink festival with the tempting offer of a free bag of sticks. Ironically though, dogs aren't allowed.


Here is the aforementioned bag of sticks.


These are, quite clearly, bad people. The gentleman on the top right is "sicking up blood" whilst his accomplice to the bottom left is "sicking up hair." Which marks them out as bad people.


The headline on this page reads; "The Danger in Japan"




This chap unwisely posed for a photograph whilst holding a knife. 
It is a knife.
He's not giving you the finger.



There's nothing I can say that will explain this.

So, um... that's the news.

Wednesday 10 July 2013

Learning to Fly

The single best thing about today is that I didn't shit myself.

Ordinarily I consider the sort of day where I fail to disgrace myself as the status quo. But it's Wednesday, and I've never quite got the hang of Wednesdays.

Regular readers (hello, mum!) may feel that I have a bit of a poo fixation, but the truth of the matter is that yeah, alright, I have. However the events of the last 24 hours have done nothing to convince me I'm wrong.

To prevent this from becoming too graphic, I'm going to use a metaphor at this point. Ordinarily I'm as regular as a railway time table. Most days three trains leave the station. However, for the past two days there's been a signal failure and to put it mildly the passengers are revolting.

So last night I took something that would fix the signal problem. Unfortunately, in an uncharacteristic move, I slightly overdid it. As such I awoke this morning to find the station rumbling away, threatening the possibility of an express train. However, by the time I was ready to go to work the line was still blocked.

This was the background to my morning commute to work by bike. I cycled along merrily enough, confident that short of a disaster I would make it to work without expelling something awful.

Disaster inevitably struck as I was cycling by the river and spied a chap riding slowly in front of me.

"Out of my way, fatty!"

I thought, swerving  brilliantly onto the grass to go round him, expertly standing up and deftly pedalling straight into a massive hole. The bike took this badly, went base over apex and ejected me a full eight feet across the field.

I was in the air long enough to think

"This'll hurt."

Followed by

"I'm going to poop when I hit the g-"

At which point, I hit the ground. But did not poop.

"Fatty" meanwhile was kind enough to help me to my feet, pick up the broken remnants of my bike and ask if I was okay. To which I replied

"I think so. At least I didn't shit myself!"

Heroic.

Tuesday 2 July 2013

The Parallax View

There's a common cliche in science fiction stories about a protagonist who travels to a parallel universe where ALL IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS. And so, dear reader, by virtue of moving into someone else's house, I have become such a protagonist.

You see, in my own home I know where things are. Well, most things. For instance, I don't know where the tampons are. In fact, on occasion I find tampons and, since I'm not really familiar with such things, think they're Nerf gun darts.  In my own defence this has only happen maybe six or seven times.

 Anyway, aside from tampons, in my own house I know where to find, for instance, a knife in the cutlery drawer. Because right minded people keep their cutlery in the following order from left to right; spoons, forks, knives. And then below these in the little horizontal bit, are the tea spoons.

No so here. Here the order of the cutlery draw is; knives, forks, spoons. However, the spoons are tea spoons, and the dessert spoons are down below.

This simply will not do. Things like this mess with my mojo, and given the nature of my freaky-deaky offspring, I need my shit unmessed. I was bemoaning this fact the other day to my brother-in-law, father-in-law and evil-step-mother-in-law whilst trying to find the charcoal for a barbeque I was meant to be cooking. Mainly I was bemoaning this because I couldn't find the charcoal until my father-in-law said;

"Found it. The charcoal's in the rabbit hutch."

Of course it is. That's where sane people keep their charcoal. I found the firelighters on a small island in the middle of the point.

Fortunately the Kids have made the transition into a new house relatively easily. Admittedly over the weekend the Boy said;

"I feel homesick for our old house."
"Well, I miss our old house too."

The Girl piped up.

"I miss our new house."
"How can you miss the new house?"
"Ignore her, dad." *Conspiratorialy* "It's the hormones."

But on the whole things are pretty much back to normal. As demonstrated when the Girl told the Wife;

"If you want, I can teach you to be naughty."
"Er...okay."
"Well, first you have to shout 'No, no, no!.' Then you have to cry loads and then you lay down on the floor and don't move."
"You haven't lost your touch then?"

The Girl then showed the Wife what she meant, and when the Wife told her it was time to pick up the Boy, the Girl followed her pretend tantrum with an actual tantrum.

Meanwhile, the Boy is still playing conversational twister by responding randomly to any statement.

"I'm wearing a shirt today because we have to go church for assembly and I want to look smart."
"Well, I think you look very smart."
"Ha ha! And when I went to the office the other day because of my breath* someone had been sick and they put cat litter on it."
"Did you hear what I said?"
"Look at those tits!"

I should point out, they were blue tits.

Best of all, however, was the moment that came when I was making a complete arse of myself attempting to fix the brakes on my bike. As I was persuading the brakes with a hammer I heard the noise of a low flying aircraft and looked up to see a B17 bomber loom over the horizon. I called the Boy and Girl who were having their dinner at the time. The Boy ran to the door with a spoon in one hand a a yoghurt in the other and gazed up at the bomber as it buzzed over the horizon.

"Cool."
"That's the Sally B. I think it's the last airworthy B17 in this country."
"What's a B17?"
"It's a bomber."

The Girl's, who was looking a bit bored, suddenly looked more interested.

"Is it going to bomb us?"
"No, darling. It doesn't have any bombs. It's a old bomber from World War II"

She looked at me disapprovingly, as if to say "Well, if I'm not going to see a bomb, what's the point?" The Boy decided to regain her attention by teaching her what he knew about World War II.

"You see, some really horrible people started a war with England."
"Why did they want a war with England?"
"Well, they had the First World War and they thought; 'That went well' so they decided to have another one."

* He had asthma. Not, like, halitosis or something.