gamboling.co.uk

In the continuing series of articles highlighting my ineptitude it’s time to come clean about my ability to spill things. While growing up there was almost a compeition at the dinner table to be the first to announce who had managed to splash a spot of pasta sauce on themselves.

At work the main danger is, of course, the coffee spill. It is made especially bad because when you are most in need of the coffee is when you are at your most clumsy.

Anyway, on one particular morning a few years ago I managed to spill a cup of coffee completely down my shirt. No amount of washing at the sink was going to sort this problem. Luckily near our office there is a large Marks and Spencer so I walked over and picked up another shirt.

I decided to make some idle chit chat at the till as I often do. And so I pointed out the stain on my shirt and the new shirt, and looking for some kind of reassurance, I said, “I guess you get a lot of people buying shirts at times like this”.

She looked at me, looked down at the till, tapped some buttons, looked back up at me and said, “computer says no”.

I was talking with some friends the other day about when they realised they were geeks. And one of the friends in the conversation claimed – shock horror – that he wasn’t a geek. Ridiculous! I claimed, of course he was. He argued that he didn’t care that much about computers, but that isn’t actually the point – the point is that a geek is somebody that is obsessed with something. The kind of person who knows where the best shops to go for their particular obsession are, the kind of person who starts thinking about a small corner of their chosen subject and six hours later realises they have forgotten to do anything other than think about the problem. This is different than the nerd, the nerd is the person who is so absorbed by the subject that they can’t do anything else.

Imagine, to pick a neutral subject, that we were talking about cooking. A geek would be the kind of person who would love, no, need to spend time in the cookery section of the book shop, loves going to cookery accessory shops and picking things to own, might even have a wishlist of things to own. The geek loves cooking, loves experimenting and enjoys it. The nerd knows that the Mixifier 5000 is better than the Ingredalot 360 because the different attachments are far superior and are interchangable with the entire Emulsify range. They don’t ever use any of the things that they buy, they keep them in the original box and eat processed cheese on toast.

So I guess my friend realised he was a geek right then, when we were having the conversation, and maybe reading this you are recognising this in yourself. My question is this, when did you realise that you were a geek and what happened to let you know?

Now I don’t think I know what I’m doing as I go through life, and I certainly don’t feel that I give the impression that I know what I’m doing in life. I mean, I’m the kind of person who spills fish and chips on themselves. But clearly some people think, upon seeing me, that I know what I’m doing. And the only possible reason is that I wear a collared shirt all of the time – even in bed – and when I’m out and about I am partial to wearing a jacket. And by jacket I do not mean bomber or leather, no I mean what is called in America a Sports Jacket. And what is called in England – a jacket.

This used to make me look like a toff (and to some it still will) but because people don’t wear those kinds of clothes anymore, and because I’m not over forty people seem to think that this means I work wherever I am standing, or that in some way I am in charge. It’s odd because often when this happens to me, I am actually scouting around quite vigorously* looking for somebody who works there or is in charge.

I’m asked directions a lot. No, I know, you’re asked directions from time to time too. I would say that it’s rare that I go two days without being asked directions. I was once, while lost in Italy, asked directions by an Italian in Italian – that’s how approachable I am.

Approachable used to be what I thought it was. I had that way about me, where people weren’t afraid to walk up and say, “excuse me, what time is the train to Basingstoke”? But there is something else, maybe people think I might know the answer, or maybe, as I’ve come to suspect, people think I might be in charge.

Yes, I think it’s the clothes, the shirt with a collar, the jacket with a collar, they make people think that I probably know what I’m doing. That I have some authority. I suspect this because of an incident that happened to me during a visit to the doctors. I was suffering from a blocked right ear and I decided that I needed my ears syringed. I suppose one is supposed to visit a doctor who refers you to the nurse who does this, but I clearly didn’t have time for such shilly-shalying around. I wanted to get this baby syringed. I phoned the surgery and they booked me in and I turned up. Now this is the first occasion that I have been to the doctors in 5 years*** and we’ve moved and so therefore has the doctor. So I haven’t been to this building before.

I find the place well enough and as I approach I realise that there are no obvious way into the building. Two entrances look viable but there is no sign.**** I approach with caution and then at the last moment make a bold play for the larger set of doors.

Once inside, I realise I have made the wrong choice. I could, of course, walk back through the door, admit defeat and enter the correct way. But that wouldn’t be the manly way to do things. I decide to stride on purposefully. I plan to edge towards the other entrance as well as I can given the internal geography of the building. After a few moments of panic this genuinely seems to have worked. I am now near the doctors surgery. I walk past the receptionists and I see that they are all facing into a room that I can’t see a way into. After a moment or two I realise there is a door but you can’t open it from this side only from the other side. Presumably I have come in the exit. I walk, no stride, back to the receptionists.

The three ladies are sitting in a long thin room with a desk in front of them with telephones, computers, blinking lights and a big glass window at the front of it to presumably stop the diseases from getting to them. But they have thankfully left the door to their room open, presumably because it is blinking hot and their office would essentially otherwise become a greenhouse. I am in the side alley, the side alley onto which their door opens.

I sidled up and said, “Erm, I have come…”, I make a gesture, “Ear Syringe”.

Now, I admit, that I could have used more words. I could have said, “to have my”. But that’s just not the way I speak. I leave out vast swathes of information, it’s my way.

I’m sure you’re well ahead of me, they gave me directions this time, and instead of thinking I was a patient, they clearly thought I was a doctor needing to visit the nurse to discuss her current case. They told me where to go. It sounded feasible that this was a secret way back into the waiting room.

I walked, I turned, I firmly opened the door… And discovered the nurse giving another patient the ear syringe operation.

“Ahh… Doctor…” she said.
“I’m not a Doctor,” I said.

I realised with alarm that she hadn’t stop syringing the poor blokes ear. He looked aghast at the news.

“What,” the nurse quite reasonably asked, “are you doing here then?”
“I think I’m your next patient. I think there might have been some mix up at the desk.”
“Yes there must have been.”
“I’ll…,” I said, “I’ll go.”
“Yes,” she said.

I went back, walked all the way around, back outside and into the reception the proper way and luckily the receptionist who had pointed me in the direction of the room earlier was on the phone. This time everything worked.

What I’m trying to say is, “don’t ask me for directions”.

* With my eyes only I don’t wield binoculars or put my hand above my eyebrows, as though putting your hands above your eyebrows suddenly makes you see further**

** Although I do of course do the hand / eyebrows thing from time to time just to check.

*** The previous time I went was the day after the 7th of July bombings in London. Imagine having your blood pressure taken while a) the 7th of July bombings had happened the day before, b) you have just had 2 pints of coffee, c) you are about to make your way into London, d) your mother is sitting outside in a cafe waiting for you so that we could all go into London, e) to meet some friends who had warned us not to be late for a busy restaurant with wall to wall reservations, and f) there had been a forty five minute delay seeing the doctor. It was a little high.

**** I later found the sign in a hedge.

A few years back, I had an idea for a new kind of old shop. Everyone harks back to the idea of an old fashioned sweet shop, don’t they? They want to see the jars of sweets piled high to the ceiling and some benevolent old man weighing out sweets with enormous scales. Cola bottles, gobstoppers, white mice, those white chocolate buttons with hundreds and thousands on them.

The problem with these kinds of shops is that they can’t work for us anymore as adults. As adults… we are too tall. We are the same height as the people running the shop. We can see over the counter, we can reach the jars at the top.

So the answer is pretty obvious to me. What we need to do is build a really big shop. The counter for the shop should be 6 feet high. Giant animatronic puppets should work behind the counter, weighing things. Puppeteers would have plenty of room to hide behind the counter.

The ceilings would have to be really tall and then up at the top you would employ dwarfs to climb around taking things off of the shelf to make it seem even further away than it is.

It would be a totally odd operation, obviously. But if you sold every kind of sweet and you had the shop in central London – Covent Garden suggests itself to me – then you could make it a tourist destination. Probably best to get the Tussauds group involved to have a steady supply of actors and so on from places like the London Dungeon and have a bit of cross promotion.

People would go into the shop just to have the experience of going to the shop. “When in London,” people would say to each other, “you have to visit this crazy sweet shop”.

The only problem is that I don’t have a name for the shop. What do you think? Something old-fashioned sounding would be ideal.

Many years ago George Orwell wrote an article specifying what the 10 things that he thought the perfect London pub should have. Country pubs were different and he didn’t go in to the details. His ideal pub was called “The moon under water”.

Rather terribly there is course a chain version of these pubs now. This supposedly was the template for the Wetherspoons chain of pubs. The only thing that they seemed to listen to George about was his dislike of music. Everything else they seemed to get wrong. Wetherspoons pubs have had a complete atmosphere bypass, and I think the idea of several pubs all being exactly the same, being exactly as crap as each other and using his name would have wounded George. One line from his article is thus,”If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere.'” On that rationale, would you ever choose a Wetherspoons?

Actually here is the article…

—-

Evening Standard, 9 February 1946

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of “regulars” who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere.”

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece —everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies’ bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.

Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women —two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone “dear,” irrespective of age or sex. (“Dear,” not “Ducky”: pubs where the barmaid calls you “ducky” always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone.

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch —for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shillings.

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.

On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children —and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.

The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be —at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

I know pubs where the beer is good but you can’t get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

—–

So what on earth was Tim Martin thinking when he used the name for his pubs?

There are some changes that have happened since Orwell’s article. Almost every pub serves stout now (sadly, generally only one kind). And there is no chance of bringing smoking back to the pub. And of course sacrilegiously I sometimes like music in a pub. Not always. It depends on the general noise level. I can deal with what my father calls “Wallpaper music” when the pub is quiet. That way the pub never feels totally empty. But it should never upset the possibility of conversation.

But what do you all think? What makes the perfect boozer for you?

One of the things I find so difficult about writing a novel is that you have to have a plan. Even if you don’t think you are planning anything, then you have to remember that you have planned to write a novel. And even that thought can upset some kind of delicate balance in your mind. Things are different with a plan.

Surely, though, you would think that there must be some planning going on, even in a short article. Even then you are deciding to write about a particular topic. Not really. Not for me anyway. I tend to start, write, do more writing. See if I can find a strand of an idea in there and throw away the other stuff.

For example… And this is absolutely true… Last week’s short story about Amber started off as an article about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. I didn’t decide at one point, to shelve the Gladwell article and start writing fiction. The Gladwell stuff went in the edit. I don’t think there is any connection between the book and the short story even. As far as I can objectively tell the two are separate. I think the story had more to do with the Laura Marling album I was listening to at the time.

I got a bit stuck on stuff to write about the Gladwell book and so I noodled off onto something else. I’m guessing other people don’t do the same, but I don’t really know. Perhaps I am an outlier after all?

The book is interesting in that it talks about how you have to work hard (more than 10,000 hours work before you become truly proficient in anything). It also talks about how society, timing and luck are very important to your likely success. In many ways, it is the opposite of a self-help book. Too many books offer the promise of “how to succeed in 14 and a half steps” this book says, “to succeed you need to work like crazy, for ages, and even then it’s not likely to happen”. It is a bit of a downer, I guess. Not because that’s depressing, it isn’t. It’s bound to be really hard to be commercially successful, otherwise it would be devalued and everyone would be doing it and then it wouldn’t exist. Successful by that rationale means being surprisingly more successful than others. It’s only because you have lots more money than people that your large bank balance means anything – just ask somebody in Zimbabwe what they think.

The depressing thing is that this is what is seen as successful. Being a good and decent person is success. Being happy is success. Being rich means something else.

In Gladwell’s book he talks about outliers and at the beginning he talks about a town in the United States where people are the least likely to have heart disease. It’s not that they eat better than people in other places nearby. It’s not that they do more exercise. It is that they are less stressed. Working too hard is stressful, so is working too little (somebody is always after you for something). Most people know each other, most people check in on each other and see that they are okay. Most people learn to live with each other. They live in a community rather than near a community like most people do today. It’s no surprise that we’re all looking for books on how to be successful. It’s just a shame that so few people get a chance to discover what success really means.

Wow that was lots different than what I wrote last time about Gladwell. Maybe this is me just trying to justify why I haven’t finished the novel yet. I mean, maybe I don’t have to finish the novel to succeed. Yeah, right.

Fish and chips is in some ways the English national dish, and I love it. But there are some important considerations about fish and chips that you have to bear in mind. Personally I think mushy peas are a very important ingredient. And then we have controversial salt and vinegar situation.

There is no question for me. I believe the only option is to have both; adding the vinegar first and the salt second. Some people will tell you that you want the vinegar second so that it soaks the salt in. Nonsense! The vinegar washes the salt off. No question. And that’s just wasting salt. People don’t die in salt mines just so you can waste some of their hard mined salt!*

I like mushy peas but it’s easy to go too far with them. My friend fourstar and I can no longer eat in a certain pub after fourstar demanded peas with menaces.**

But most recently a plate of fish and chips got me in even more trouble. I was out at the pub with a bunch of Formula One related friends from sidepodcast. One of them ordered fish and chips and then I was hooked (sadly that pun was intentional). I decide I needed a plate for myself.

A short while later the food arrived. But due to overcrowding, my plate of fish and chips was hiding a terrible secret. Under half of the plate is a table, just as you would expect, but under the other half of the plate is simple fresh air.

I carefully unwrap my knife and fork from their napkiny delivery blanket. I take the fork and gently cut some of the fish away from the main body. Then I stab the chunk I have created and a the plate goes for it. It makes the suicidal leap onto my lap. For a moment I foolishly try to keep everything together on my lap before the oily fish slips down my right leg to its destiny.

I collect everything back together on the plate. I decide I probably can’t be trusted with anything more. A short while later our waitress returns to ask if everything is okay. She notices that I don’t seem to have touched mine.

“Ah, yes,” I say, “I accidentally dropped mine on the floor. I think it’s probably ruined my trousers.”
“Would you prefer something else less dangerous?”
“What do you have?”, I ask.
“A packet of crisps?”

I decided that while a packet of crisps would be less dangerous, the moment had passed.

* Unless of course you spill some salt in which case you must throw more salt over your shoulder to stop dragons from coming and eating you.

** To be fair, fourstar simply asked them to substitute the vegetables that came with the pie for the peas that came with the fish and the waitress refused. Fourstar said we’d never come back if they didn’t. They didn’t. And we haven’t been back – except once by accident.

Katherine and I have enjoyed the restaurant Domali in Crystal Palace. It’s got good food, but it’s vegetarian – which is clearly wrong. We don’t really go for the food though, we are much more interested in the Happy Hour cocktails.

They have a “Dark and Stormy”* which Katherine is particularly partial to. I do mix things up quite a bit, I am always interested to see what options they have. However I don’t see this as a venue for the constant cocktails game…

Joe and I invented the constant cocktails game one time in a Giraffe on the South Bank (near the National Theatre in case you are interested in the actual scene of the crime). We had been going to a recording of the television programme QI on my birthday. Katherine hadn’t been able to come sadly. I had got the tickets for the two of us. Joe had stood in at the last minute. The night before my birthday there had been an unexpected football match. Apparently in European football things can happen that result in matches that you don’t expect to happen or something. And the Arsenal had had one more match than they expected to have – or something.

Alan Davis is an Arsenal fan of football and so they cancelled the recording of the show the night before my birthday. This meant that all of the friends of the show and hangers on and so on didn’t get to go. So all of them were given free tickets to the next night. This meant that we didn’t have a hope of going on my birthday. There were simply too many hangers on. Joe and I decided that we needed to turn those frowns upside down. And that the best way to do this was with a cocktail or five. So we headed to Giraffe.

The problem, we discovered quite quickly, is that cocktails actually come quite slowly. They involve a lot of shaking it, moving it and making it. I knew we shouldn’t have ordered a pair of Zigazigahs. So I made a bold suggestion to Joe. Why don’t we order the next cocktail with the person who brings us this one. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We did it. I didn’t realise I was starting a trend, but 10 cocktails later we knew we were on to a good thing. That is the constant cocktails game.

…Back at Domali Katherine and I ordered a pair of Dark and Stormies. They arrive, we order another pair. Maybe it is a constant cocktails venue after all. I drain mine and leave Katherine nursing hers. I need the loo. It’s upstairs. On the way I spot a fridge. It has a sign written on it which says, “Cakes in cheese fridge”. The fridge is unplugged and miles away from the bar. You imagine the situation… The fridge doesn’t work and so they move the cakes to the cheese fridge. They write a sign. All efficient. Then somebody says, “lets order a new fridge”. The new fridge comes, it’s installed, it starts to perform its fridgely function of keeping the cakes at the ideal temperature. And somebody says, “what do we do with the old one?”

* Dark rum and ginger beer, with lime juice, if you want to make one.

I once used to go out with somebody that I didn’t respect very much. This is not a very good idea. The problem is, of course, that you think you might only ever be loved by that person and this can be a bit difficult to deal with. I often wanted to say things like, “maybe you should be a bit nicer to me”. But obviously I couldn’t because if I told them anything approaching the truth – at all – then I would immediately remove the only thing they liked about me, which was my supreme ability to lie. Or at least that’s what I didn’t think.

I say didn’t think because it was impossible to realise at the time that I was as screwed up as I actually was. I knew that the one thing I had as a life skill was being myself and yet I also knew that I had to deny that if I was going to be with this person. I should have run away as fast as I could, but of course, like a great big stupid idiot, I didn’t. I just hung around waiting for nice things to happen to me in exchange for lying. Men and women are idiots. Just so you know.

I said, up there in the opening paragraph, that I didn’t respect her. But that’s not entirely true. I respected her taste. That’s the thing that’s hard to get away from in these situations. They fancy you so of course it’s hard to deal with the fact that you feel they have no taste. If they have no taste then what does it say about you?

It turned out that she had even less respect for me than I did for her. Over time I realised this. She thought I was stupid, that my friends were stupid, and that our outlook on life was stupid. Luckily we were all teenage boys so we were right!

However, with the space of time between then and now I know one thing is true. We were totally different people. I wanted to have a fun time, I wanted to make people laugh and I didn’t mind if I was made to look stupid to achieve this. And she thought that all anyone should do was make money, worry about their bank balance and worry about appearing cool. There’s nothing wrong with the different approaches I suppose. Just that we weren’t suited.

Anyway on the way to Reading Festival one year we were walking along the streets of Reading and she slipped on a banana peel. I had never seen anyone, in actual life, actually perform this comedy stalwart. And despite the situation basically demanding sympathy I am afraid to say I laughed.

I am a magpie for little phrases and verbal ticks. I don’t just store them away, I also find myself using them quite a lot. I do think that some of my conversations would be close to incomprehensible to strangers.

These little phrases and oddities are the special sauce that oils the conversation. They are half-remembered phrases that evolve into a life of their own. Perhaps you would like an example?

Katherine is quite likely to call something that is broken, “busted”. So first I picked up busted, then because I’m a tinker I would say, “that’s a bit Charlie from Busted”. Busted having been at one stage been a popular beat combo. This would be most regularly used to describe oneself so it would be, “I’m feeling a bit Charlie from Busted”. Which essentially means, “I’m feeling a bit peaky”. Then it started to get shortened to just “Charlie”. However I know somebody called Charlie. At one point when I said something about Charlie, Katherine said, “is that Charlie from busted or Charlie from your school”. Which of course means that the phrase is now “Charlie from your school.”

So hopefully you get the idea with all of that. Bearing that in mind, here are some of the other phrases that have been swirling around, coming from all sorts of places.

The tragedy of the self mong

The word mong is clearly very offensive and not a good thing. If you are unaware it refers to people who have Downs Syndrome as being mongoloid in appearance. And particularly it associates being stupid or doing stupid things with having downs syndrome. When I was at school that was the de rigeur choice of insult along with spaz of course. Not good. If it’s any help, as I was a weedy geek at school (versus the rotund geek that I am now) these words were mainly used about me rather than by me. I don’t remember using them, but I’d guess I did. With all that said, there was another thing that people did which was to put ones tongue between ones teeth and lower lip and make an “uuuurgh” noise. This was “to mong” somebody. And again it was used as an insult along the lines of “you’re an idiot”. But the worst thing you could do is make this childish face and then realise moments later, generally still while you were making the face, that the stupid one who had misunderstood the situation was you. This was the tragic self-mong as the face fell realising that this insult had backfired. Although now we realise that every mong is tragic.

Small Doggy Style

This is the moment, earlier on in the process of… well you get the idea, where the man hasn’t quite focused on the correct area and seems to be more interested in the leg for some reason. Well, I think I’ll leave that there.

Monkey Sheets

This is what you say when the bed is a bit cold when you get in. More precisely what you say when you get in to bed is, “oooh ahhh oooh ahhh ooooh ah, this bed is a bit Monkey Sheets”.

Shat on the queen

This is a phrase you can use to describe the look someone gives you when you say something which they find truly extraordinary and somewhat unsavory. For example, when I told Katherine’s mother that I didn’t take sugar on my weetabix she looked at me like I’d shat on the queen.

Columbo of Amazon

This is what Katherine accuses me of being, because I always want to buy “just one more thing”.