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A common thing these days, when somebody is on the phone in a public place sometimes all you can hear is one half of the conversation:

“No I haven’t got one”

“But Dad does”

“What size? They don’t come in different sizes?”

“Oh a black beret? Like a hat? I thought you meant a blackberry like those mobile phones”

“No, Dad doesn’t have a black beret”

“But I think I’ve got a red one”

You can imagine the scene, a boy and a girl standing in the corridor by the toilets in the club. They are both a bit too young to really be there, but the doorman knows he needs as many young girls as he can get in these days. The boy got in because the bouncer couldn’t convince her to leave him at the door.

They are standing in the middle of all that noise and sweat and he asks her if she’ll come back to his. He’s planning to get lucky, and she just doesn’t want to know. She steps back and slightly further away. He knows he only has one more chance so he says, “but… I love you”.

It’s a parting shot, a last ditch attempt to save things, and while I keep you in suspense* about the outcome I’ll explain why it isn’t really a parting shot, in fact it’s a Parthian shot.

Back at the height of Roman times, the Roman Army felt pretty darn good about themselves. They thought they could really do anything. At the particular time of this story they had just conquered Gaul which was all of the land that they cared about to the west of them, but if they really wanted to rule all of the Mediterranean then they would have to conquer the lands to the left. These lands were held by the Parthians. And these guys were a little bit different than the Gauls.

The Parthians, came from the area which is modern day Iran. And their civilisation was so far ahead of the Romans that the Romans didn’t even understand how much trouble they were in. When they invaded they were suddenly faced with a cavalry something that wasn’t seen in Europe for more than 1,000 years.

The Romans ran is as they always did but were in big trouble, pretty quickly. The Parthian horsemen fired on the Romans from horseback with bows and arrow. And the Romans just didn’t know what to do. They were in big trouble. Then after a short time of this the Parthians played another trick. They fell back. The Romans felt they had suddenly started to win. The Parthians fell back and the horses started running away. The Romans started running after them to start the killing. But when you’re running you aren’t holding up your shield. The Parthians kept riding away but the men turned around and fired back into the approaching Romans. It was a concept that was completely alien to the Romans, up until then anyone retreating was.. Well… in retreat not attacking at the same time. This was the Parthian shot.

And over the years it has been turned into the parting shot that we know today. So really it is a Parthian shot.

So how are our couple doing? Well of course she came back towards him. With all the noise in the club it was difficult to hear exactly. He might have been saying he loathed her. But when she came back towards him and leaned in for him to repeat what he had said he used the opportunity to kiss her on the ear, and one thing led to another and they got to hook up. So happy ending?

Well unfortunately they were young and reckless and didn’t use protection. So she fell pregnant at the tender age of sixteen. So sad ending?

Well she dropped out of school to have the baby, but despite what her parents said the boy would do he too dropped out of school and got a job to pay for her and the baby and they got married. So happy ending?

Well after a few years of scrapping through, the boy had gone to buy his lottery ticket (like he always did every week) when he suddenly realised that he didn’t have any cash on him. So he didn’t buy a ticket. And that week his numbers came up. He was so distraught that he killed himself. So sad ending?

Well actually although the girl had appreciated the boy taking care of her for the first three years of their babies life it hadn’t been a happy time. He had become a drug user and was an angry drunk. So while she was devastated, in many ways it was a relief for her and the child. So a mixed ending? Yes.

* How do you keep an idiot in suspense? I’ll tell you later.

Sometimes by the side of the road you see people holding a sign up, begging for cash.

My friend US Nick* swears blind that he saw two kids holding up this sign by the side of the road:

Parents killed by Ninjas,
Need money for Kung fu class.

* This is to differentiate between US Nick who came to visit recently and UK Nick who you may have seen mentioned before.

I was reading an article on the guardian website the other day: Leave me alone… which talked about how corrosive interruptions are to modern life. My job is at the extreme end of this as I’ll often have three people vying for me to talk to them all at the same time standing around my desk while I’m trying to do something for myself. The average according to the article seems to be that most people are interrupted every three minutes which is pretty bad, but my question is about how many of these interruptions are things that we actually have to deal with now?

In the situation I described above you have to respond. Somebody has wandered over into your space and asked you a question. It’s the same thing with a phone call. If you don’t answer then the other person won’t go away (especially if you don’t have voicemail). But what about a text or e-mail? Or a reminder in Outlook. All of these make noises and stuff but then we’ve chosen that they do. None of these things actually have to be dealt with instantly. We can respond when we want to respond. We could put them all on silent. And then remember to look at a scheduled time (but without a popup reminder of when this scheduled time is how would you remember)?

The reason we don’t have all of these things on silent is that we like to be interrupted sometimes. And sometimes the thing interrupting us is important enough that it should be considered more important than what we’re doing. We kind of need a way of being able to judge where that importance level goes. The only problem is that you need a two way level of priority because if we left it up to the people who want us to do stuff for them then it would always be level 1 priority.

I’m not sure how it would be organised, but it would be something like this. You want to be able to rank people by a level of how much you know them, so junk mail and cold callers have a rank of zero, firms that you have signed up to deal with have a rank of one. Above that you have colleagues and then friends and so on up until you get to say your partner right at the top. Then each of the people sending you stuff can add a priority level to the stuff they are doing and if they don’t set anything then it defaults to zero.

We already have the capability for receiving e-mail. We could set complicated rules and automatically downgrade anyone who didn’t set an importance level to the e-mail that they were sending (if they don’t care enough to assign an importance level then they aren’t important enough to listen to). But what about phone calls? What about people just walking up to you and not noticing that you’re in the middle of something?

Perhaps the only solution is the one suggested at the end of the article… I’m off to saw off a bit of all of my chair legs. Oh wait a minute. Sadly it turns out that I work in an office in the modern world and all of the chairs have wheels on the bottom.

I was at a theme park some years ago in up state New York and I was standing on line* for a slice or two of pizza and a beer.

I was standing with a friend of mine and we were looking at the choices available. The line was long and so we got to discussing what was a better deal: two small slices or one big slice. I was suggesting that the single larger slice was a better deal. No, my friend argued, it couldn’t be because you actually got less pizza. No you didn’t I argued, although the diameter numbers looked that way you had to take account of Pi. I almost certainly made a joke about how Pi was a factor in choosing your pizza pie.

It was a pretty geeky conversation, I know that I probably don’t come off well from it, but somebody comes off less well in a moment, just hold on.

Suddenly a voice from about three feet below me calls out up to her father, “Dad make that man stop talking, he’s making my brain think”.

*Look I was in America so I was on line. If this really upsets you then feel free so substitute queuing although it’s not really the English way.**

**Generally in English if there is are multiple words that can be used in a situation that’s what becomes adopted. Although that can seem counter intuitive actually it makes sense because our language much more flexible. Although some English speakers deride people’s splitting of the infinitive it is to the fundamental benefit of the English language that we are able to do it and still be understood. Variation is the spice of life***

*** indeed, variety is the point.

On the south side of the Thames is a full size model of the Golden Hind. The original Golden Hind was the ship that Francis Drake used to travel around the world*. When he went around the world in his ship he was the first Briton to circumnavigate the globe and it took him three years. This replica Golden Hind has also been around the world before returning to its mooring place on the south of the Thames.

But it is the dock rather than the ship that I’d like to talk about. The dock is known as the dock of St Mary Overie. And the dock has a story as fantastical as those told about the Golden Hind itself.

On the site of the dock many many years ago lived a man who made his money by transporting people back and forth across the river to their jobs in the City of London. He was a horrible miser who tried to save every penny he could. He was always trying to come up with new schemes to save himself money. And finally he thought he had come up with a really great one he’d pretend to die.

He thought it would work something like this, he would pretend to be dead and his whole family would go into mourning. The best thing about mourning, as far as he was concerned, was that you had in those days to not eat anything for the entire period of mourning. This would save him a whole lot of money as he thought it would mean he wouldn’t have to feed his entire family for three days.

However the plan didn’t work out quite the way that he’d imagined. Instead of mourning when he seemingly died the family were quite happy as they all really hated him. So Mary, his wife, sent for her lover with news to come and join her for a big party that they were going to hold that evening. He was so excited by the news that he might get hold of the Miser’s money that he set off immediately for their house on the fastest horse he could get. Unfortunately he was in such a rush that he failed to pay attention to what was going on around him, his mind was so focused on the money, that he didn’t spot the branch of a tree that the horse (rather more sensibly ducked under) and he was killed instantly.

While all of this scheming and plotting had been going on the Miser had been quietly lying in his coffin thinking of all of the money that he’d been saving, it was only once the party started going that he began to realise that his money saving plan wasn’t working that he jumped out of this coffin and ran towards the party.

What he hadn’t quite realised was that his one virtuous daughter was sitting in the room with him praying for his eternal soul when he had jumped up out of his coffin. So convinced was she that she had just seen the devil’s work that she grabbed the nearest shovel and whacked her father on the head with it repeatedly until he really was dead.

Mary was so distraught by what had happened that she realised that she had to change her ways. Her husband and her lover had been killed and her daughter had become a murderess all in the pursuit of money. So Mary decided to give it all away, and became an incredibly charitable woman who worked tirelessly for the poor of London. She founded a nunnery which was known as St. Mary Overie. The nunnery was destroyed in the reformation but the church part became the church known as St. Saviour. Then in the 1900s the church became Southwark Cathedral.

* When the ship left England it was actually known as the Pelican but was renamed during the voyage. Drake renamed it just before reaching what was imagined to be the really treacherous part of the journey: the straights of Magellan. In fact that bit was relatively easy for the ship, it was the pacific ocean which was a big problem some months later. Those on board must have been especially pleased at this point as they had not been told when they left England that circumnavigation was on the cards. They thought they were going to Africa. Some people complained about the whole round-the-world thing but Drake killed them.

This post requires some pretty heavy duty swearing so if you have problems with that then you shouldn’t keep reading. Here’s a post that you can read today if you don’t like swearing (you can read it if you like swearing and then go on to the one about swearing of course).

There seems to be a lot of diving in football. So wouldn’t it be good if you added a five minute penalty for diving. It would work like this if you stay on the ground for more than five seconds after you fall on the ground then you must go off of the pitch for five minutes.

You can stand back up and complain but if you lie on the ground then you’ll have to leave the pitch for five minutes. I think that’s the only solution to stop diving. Go on then? What’s wrong with it?

I’m going to give us all some space to just get used to the idea that there is going to be some heavy duty swearing now.

And now we have had some space lets get on with it.

I was in a pub watching the England football game on Sunday. It was a quite big match apparently. I don’t tend to watch football, but I had been walking home when I bumped into my brother. He was on his way into a pub to watch the second half of the game (he does watch football but he’d been caught on a train which meant that he’d missed the first half). So on we went to the pub to watch the second half of the game.

The pub wasn’t the kind of pub that I usually go to. It is usually a pretty rough pub, and then when you throw in a large number of drunk shouty men then it gets even less of a nice pub.

One of the England players during the game made a slight mistake and one of the shouty men in the pub shouted out, “Fucking Yankie Cunt”.

Now I don’t know much about football but I know enough to know that there is a player on the England team (Owen Hargreaves) who has been getting some stick because he was born in Canada. The thing with what he’d shouted out was that he’d obviously gone for “Yankie” because he didn’t know what the derogative phrase for a Canadian was (it’s Canuck by the way). But even so, even if he didn’t know about the derogatory word for Canadian surely he should have gone for, “Fucking Canadian Cunt”. That works much better. Obviously had he known it, “Fucking Canuk Cunt” would work well too. But even though I knew enough about football to be able to correct him, I also knew enough about the situation that I was in to know that if I corrected him, he would have corrected me with his fist.

I currently live on, and indeed am about to move to a cul de sac. It’s one of those strange bits of French that have crept into the English language without us really knowing what it means. Some people might not even know it’s French.

In American English they have removed many of the French words from their language. So cafetière becomes French press and the American President says “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for Entrepreneur”*. Cul de Sac does remain in American English however. The average English speaker who has never learned French will know approximately 15,000 French words.

So what does Cul de Sac mean in French? If you put it into any translation engine you will find that it means “bottom of bag” which kind of describes the shape of the road, especially as many cul de sacs** have round bottoms. But actually that isn’t quite the end of the story as actually the word Cul isn’t the word for bottom in French that most people will have learnt at school (or wherever it is that people learn French these days). The word they would have learnt for bottom is Fond.

So what does Cul mean? Well literally it can mean bottom but more often when it is invoked it means something more akin to Arse (Ass if you’re American). So if you live in a Cul de Sac then you live in the Arse of a bag, try putting that on the particulars of your house and see how many people try arrange a viewing.

* Of course this story isn’t really true – it just seems true – and has been widely circulated. Supposedly Baroness Williams was told this joke by Tony Blair. But Alistair Campbell has said that Tony has never said this comment – so it definitely can’t be true then!

** Or is it Culs de sac?

Goldfish aren’t really Gold. Not really. Goldfish are really specially bred carp.

And their main lot in life seems to be that they want to change colour and also remember that they’ve done it. Despite the very common story that they have a three second memory this has been proven to not be true many times. Goldfish are very good at even recognising humans.

The food that they eat and their stress levels are factors in changes of colour, but the main issue is one of genetics. Often in a single goldfish’s life it will start as bronze then move on to a washed out white or orange colour with black tipped fins and then they change to orange with black tipped fins, then to all orange and then they end up as orange with white tipped fins. In the wild a goldfish would have been an olive-brown colour.

The food thing is an interesting factor because it’s often considered to be a big factor in goldfish colour. But genetics are more important here. For some animals though colour and food are important, like the flamingo. Weirdly the pink colour is from carotene (the stuff that makes carrots orange) it’s found inside shrimp too and it makes the flamingos pink (in the wild they don’t often eat shrimp but mainly get their carotene from algae. We feed shrimp to flamingos in captivity though to generate the pinkness). Those bred in captivity are more often just white. The one thing that doesn’t change in flamingos is their black feathers. They all have 12 black feathers, these are the feathers that are actually used in flight. The pinkness shows how good a mate they are because they can provide food to the young. But the black feathers show that they can actually fly.

This idea of animals changing colour due to their diet has been known about for a long time. In fact some of the earliest explorers thought that the reason that different races of people looked different was because of their diet rather than thinking that these people were actually different than them. It was often, but not always, those who came later who caused the racial stereotypes. And it seems like an easier thought process. The idea that the new people that you’d met were the same as you but simply looked different because they had food with new spices or rice or some other food you weren’t familiar with makes some kind of sense rather than the more horrible idea that the new people were somehow inferior.

Anyway, so although a change in diet can bring on a change in the colour of your goldfish, in this case you really are only speeding up (or slowing down) a process that is genetically pre-ordained. The only reason that our goldfishes are gold is because of the royal house of china whose colour was gold. In the same way that the only reason that carrots are orange (and not purple) is because of the Dutch Royal family.

So to sum up, a goldfish is basically just a show off carp. So here’s your round up of carp to finish the article:

Show off Carp	Demure Carp	Coy Carp

I was talking to my Lithuanian hairdresser the other day and he asked me straight out a question I wasn’t expecting, “do you go to church”?

This, it is fair to say, is a very very unusual question from a hairdresser. From a hairdresser you expect the following kinds of questions:

“Enjoying (or, perhaps more usually, what about this) weather we’ve been having?”

“Going anywhere nice on your holidays?”

“Something for the weekend sir?”

Or if they are particularly feeling risqué, “how long would you like your hair to be at the end of this haircut”?

They are certainly not supposed to ask you anything that sounds remotely like religion or politics. And this question sounded very much like it fell into the first of these categories.

Actually it turned out that he was merely trying to figure out something to talk to me about after I had casually admitted that I hadn’t “seen the big game” which happened to be the world cup. Actually that’s another rich vein of conversation in hairdressers but it’s one that passes me by so I didn’t include it above.*

He had by this point found out that my family is from Russia and was literally wondering if this would mean that we might go to the same church which is, perhaps a different question. I had to tragically disappoint the poor lad by revealing that I don’t go and therefore would see him there. His face dropped and he looked despondent until he remembered a funny story which he then told me.

He was telling me about the very first occasion that he had arrived in the country and after a short time had decided that he’d like to go to church (I suppose to catch up on what God had been up to in the intervening weeks).

He didn’t know where the local Russian orthodox church would be so he decided that the simplest way would be to go into a British church and ask them where it was. So that is what he did. He strolled up to some Anglican church and asked them “where is the nearest Russian Orthodox church?” and the vicar said, “it’s in any small garden” which our hairdresser thought might be a bit deep. It sounded he said like one of those Buddhist things. Like he was saying God is all around us.

But he didn’t want any of this theoretical stuff he wanted to actually go to church so he decided to go to a different Anglican church and a different vicar and ask him instead. And so he asked the vicar and the vicar replied that the Russian Orthodox church was “in any small garden”.

At this point our man decided he wasn’t going to take being messed around like this, he said “no I want to know where the physical church is, I’ve looked in several small gardens and it’s not there. I want to know where it is”.

It was at this point that the vicar smiled that special grin he reserved for dealing with the elderly and the very young and said, “no I’m afraid my son you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. It’s not in Any Small Garden, it’s in a road called Ennismore Gardens.”

* although I did include “Something for the weekend sir?” even though nobody has ever actually said it to me.