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I found a pair of shoes from America the other day. While looking a them I realised something was a little odd but I couldn’t figure it out. Several days later I twigged what the cause of my discomfort was.

In America they have a slogan which ou see from time to time side by side with their American flag. It says, “Don’t tread on me”. An odd sentiment for a flag one would feel considering much of it’s life is spent hanging on the end of poles up in the sky where there is little footwear present.*

But then that was the problem with the shoes. They had an American flag stitched right in there on the instep. How could you avoid treading on it?

* The story of the “Don’t tread on me” slogan is actually quite interesting. It actually doesn’t refer to the stars and strips flag at all but a different one altogether called the Gadsden flag. But sometimes the whole thing is combined. The Gadsden flag precedes the stars and stripes but then it’s subject, which is a rattlesnake, actually even precedes that.

The story begins in the French and Indian war. The colonies were wavering in their support for the battles. Some wanted to side with the French others with England. Benjamin Franklin realised that this was a very dangerous time for the United States. He drew a cartoon of a cut up snake with 13 pieces, which represented the 13 colonies,. It played on the superstition at the time that if you cut up a snake each piece of it would form a new snake. The slogan was “Unite or Die.”

The message was a powerful on and spread far and wide. By the time of the war of independence it’s significance re-emerged. In 1775 the colonies created their first joint forces these were the Marines. Because they were a joint forces they had not got a flag at this time. On the barrels of gunpowder the familiar symbol of the snake re-emerged. This time it was a rattlesnake and it had thirteen bands on its tail. The barrels were bright yellow to warn of their dangerous properties which is why the Gadsden flag is usually yellow. It also had the words on each barrel “Don’t tread on me”.

Later that year Benjamin Franklin wrote an anonymous letter to the Pennsylvania Journal. And explained why he thought the rattlesnake should be the national animal. He noted that the only part of the snake that changed was the number of rings grew as it become older. And he pointed out that the rattlesnake was a decent animal. It never attacked except when extremely provoked. And it always gave a warning of attack with it’s rattle which said “Don’t tread on me”. Franklin also believed that the Bald Headed Eagle was a bird of low moral character.**

**Yes this footnote is longer than the original article.

Have you ever wondered why it was that people, chiefly women, used to faint all the time but don’t seem to any more? No. You probably haven’t because you’ve probably assumed that it was something to do with corsets. Women used to wear corsets and apparently whenever they got excited it would mean that they couldn’t get enough oxygen and that was it.

But was it? Really? I think it was something else and I think that something else was Narcolepsy.

The most common thing to cause Narcoleptics to go to sleep is shock. And suddenly falling asleep looks remarkably like fainting. Especially if nobody knew what Narcolepsy was.

Now in my extensive research for writing this article I was sitting in somebody’s flat when they fell asleep. They were watching television and it was late so I thought nothing of it. However when they awoke they told me that this was something that happened often to them and that they never usually felt tired before it happened. So I started asking around and all the people who I asked who were women complained that they usually didn’t feel tired before they fell asleep on the couch but all the men said that they usually only fell asleep on the sofa after they had felt tired for a while.

Now I’m not discounting the corset theory. I just think there might have been additional factors at work. Although whether they were NarcoZzzzzzzz.

I’m going to teach my grandmother to suck eggs. Now, I know what you’re going to say. The whole point is that this is something that you’re not supposed to do. But surely the only reason you’re not supposed to teach them this is because she’s supposed to know how to do it already. My grandmother doesn’t, at least… I don’t think she does.

Apparently albumen is good for arthritis. Now I don’t think she necessarily has this. She says her legs feel like balloons. But this sounds more like something soft than the kind of feeling you would normally associate with arthritis. Anyway they also say that the Albumen is good for keeping your dentures clean. My grandmother does have dentures. And she also has toothpaste problems. In fact this might explain them. (See past article for details: here)

I walk into the living room clutching a clutch of eggs in my hand.
“Grandma,” I say in a proud and happy voice, “I am about to teach you how to suck eggs.”

She sits there in a sort of stunned silence.

“What you do is make two tiny holes.” At this point I should mention that I have carefully placed all but one of the eggs on a side table. All of these eggs have rolled to their doom. I ignore them and continue. “You should make sure that the holes are far enough apart and then carefully apply one hole to your mouth leaving the other hole free to the open air. Then purse your lips and suck.”

My grandmother kindly asked “what are you trying to do kill me?”
“What?” I enquired.
“I’m diabetic. I can’t go about eating eggs, It would be the end for me for sure. And have you even considered Salmonella?”

I am sorry to say that I had not.

I was just going past the MI5 headquarters in Vauxhall trying to find a cup of coffee. And I thought how strange it was that everyone now knew where the MI5 building is. Surely if you wanted to find out who the spies were you could just take lots of pictures of everyone who enters and exits and soon enough you’d know every spy in the country. Well all of the ones who were British and didn’t work from home.

But it led me to thinking about who the perfect spy would be. Surely you’d want somebody who nobody, no matter what, would expect.

The answer is obvious the spy mastermind in Great Britain today is Boris Johnson. He is a journalist, with a former brief to cover Germany at the time f the Berlin wall. He’s now an MP. He can go anywhere on a variety of pretext and nobody would ever suspect him. He could walk out of the MI5 building and my first thought would be, “oh he must have been interviewing someone,” not that he was getting his orders.

He should be the perfect spy but he cant be because I just guessed it was him. So therefore he isn’t the perfect spy after all.

My Grandmother has solid toothpaste. I don’t know why this should bother me so much but it does. I was visiting her the other day and went to brush my teeth. I pushed the tube and after some difficulty some paste came out. I added some water to the toothpaste as is my common practice. It’s been something that I’ve done ever since my earliest days of tooth brushing and is quite a common occurrence I believe.

It’s difficult to know what’s normal in the bathroom department as most people do the same things their entire life and deem that to be the normal approach. And people can often go through their entire lives not realising that there are alternative views. This is due to the generally solitary approach to bathrooms. You’re never confronted with the alternative.

I’m guessing that it’s a fifty : fifty split on wiping your backside. With half standing for this operation and half sitting. With both thinking that the alternative sounds completely alien.

I do a strange thing in relation to brushing my teeth which is that to get at the water to rinse out my mouth. I wet the brush again and again and then suck the water off the toothbrush. I know I could use my hand to get the water or lower my head but this is the method I’ve always used.

Anyway so I wet this toothpaste and nothing happens. It stays exactly the same texture. This is a bit weird, I think, and then when I put it in my mouth it’s so incredibly chewy. It actually stays as one lump all the tie. In the end I just had to spit it out and there it was still one lump. Most disturbing. IN the end I got some new stuff from my aunt. But the event lives with me to this day. Which is good considering it only happened 4 days ago and I’m not quite that forgetful. Not quite.

I’m slightly batty. Batty is an interesting word because it can mean at least two completely different things nowadays. If you say someone is “batty,” just by itself then you generally mean they are a little bit nuts. If you say that somebody is a “batty man” you are implying that they are gay.

Where do these meanings come from? Perhaps the mad definition is the most obvious one. It sounds like it probably comes from having bats in your belfry. But where did that come from? Well who do we know from the annuls of literature who lived in a belfry? There was the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Maybe it has something to do with him? He wasn’t really crazy, just deformed, and I’m guessing here, probably a little deaf. So this doesn’t really seem to be leading us anywhere.

I guess the belfry is in the head position of a church, if we are comparing a church to a person. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. “How is a church like a person? In no way at all”. This is why it sounds like a joke, rather than actually being one. So, back to the point. It could be anything living in the belfry but bats sound better than owls, vicars, or the Hunchback of Notre Dame for that matter.

So what about being gay? What possible link could there be? Well how about this leap? It’s all to do with cricket. You’re playing for the other team, it’s not cricket – which is exactly why it is cricket for the purposes of this argument, and so while I’m fielding the question and you’re playing for the other team you must be batting, but because we are into the brevity thing it becomes “batty”.

In other words I don’t know.

“So when are you going to grow a beard?” said a drunk bearded man at a party. No really even his beard was drunk!
“Oh I tried last week,” I ventured.
“Tried? What’s to try? Beards are clearly the way forward.”
“I can’t grow one. It just doesn’t work for me. You remember the other week when my father had his wisdom tooth out?”
“No?”
“Well he did.”
“Was it painful?”
“Yes.”
“Oh dear.”
“Right. So he couldn’t shave because of the pressing on the mouth area would have hurt him.”
“That makes sense.”
“So. In solidarity with him I stopped shaving too. On the last day I was still visiting with him he had a full beard. And he said to me ‘so did you not shave today?'”
“And?”
“Well, I hadn’t shaved in a week and it only looked to him like one day’s growth.”
“Ah.”
“Exactly.”
“So don’t grow a beard then.”
“I won’t.” I sat back thinking that the conversation might have come to an end. But then suddenly he started talking again.
“Have you ever thought about a moustache?”

The driver came out of his… Is it a cabin or a cockpit or what is it on a train? I think it’s almost certainly a cabin. But then when we’re on aeroplanes we don’t end up with the pilot sitting in the cockpit driving his aeroplane, and us all sitting in the cabin driving trains. I mean, for one, your incredibly unlikely to get them all to want ot go the same way. Everyone would be leaving Gatwick wanting the plane to fly over their house so they could take a picture out the window. And despite repeated requests, whenever there is turbulence on an aeroplane, the air hostess (or steward – why not air host?) has refused to tell me where the winder for the window is. I only need a little air and I’ll feel much better. Well it works in my car.

Have you ever stuck your head out of the window to see where you were going in your car because your windscreen was too dirty? Well, I haven’t obviously because I’m a decent upstanding citizen.

Anyway, so the driver comes out and asks if any of us want to get out of the train. We all say no and he looks very relieved. Unfortunately, he tells us, the doors aren’t working in our carriage because of a minor electrical problem. As if to emphasise his point as he’s talking to us somebody walks up to our carriage presses the button, the door opens an they get onboard. “Oh”, he says, and buggers off to wherever he came from.

My brother has invited an Italian to move into the flat. I was standing on Waterloo East train station on the phone to him when he broke the news.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I forgot to tell you that we’re going to have an Italian student living with us for a bit.”
“Right,” I suggested.
“I’m going on a foreign exchange so he’s got to come here. It’ll only be for a couple of days. And don’t worry I go to their house after they come to ours so if they mess anything up then when I get there I’ll trash the place.”
“Okay,” I add, “that sounds good.”
“Yeah and they might even be fit, or a bloke.”

“So have you always been blind?”
“Oh no. I used to see thing, it’s just now I can’t.”
“that’s a shame. About teh4 now stuff not the havening been able to see of course>”
“Well I don’t know about that. Now I can’t see and I can remember what stuff used to look like and log for it. Which isn’t very nice but at least I’ll never have to see Lawrence Stevenson again”.
“Lawrence Stephenson?”
“Yeah he was this guy I knew. He used to be my best friend and then he double crossed me. Right before I lost my sight, which happened very rapidly. I said to him, by way of a parting gesture, ‘I’ll be happy if I never see your face again Stephenson’. And I never have”.
“That’s quite weird.”
“But good! I had many an argument with my wife about old Larry Stephenson. She argued that if I hadn’t said what I ‘d said about seeing his fat ugly face I’d still be able to see. Which you and I both know is rubbish. But she believed it. She called me a damn fool. And then I didn’t see her any more.”
“What she left you over it?”
“No. I was blind by then. Do try and keep up.”
“I see.”
“Well I bloody well don’t and that’s the point.”
“Sorry.”
“So you see even though I’m blind I can be happy about it because it means I will never have to see Larry Stephenson again.”
“But wait a minute., you said that you could remember what things look like.”
“Yes.”
“Well then surely you can remember what he looked like.”
“Of course. The vision of him turning away from me on that very day is burned in my mind.”
“Well I can hardly remember anything I see, especially people I don’t care about. Mainly because I can always go and look at new things. Whereas I would have thought now that you can’t see you’ll spend a lot more time ‘seeing’ this man than you would have otherwise”.
“Great now you’re just depressing me.”