People who add items to the shopping list in this house have plenty of opinions:
Small test, see if you can guess what the item that looks like “unandell” might be.
Not Touching
Herself: What is your life expectancy?
Me: I don’t know. Don’t worry, it’s really long.
Herself: What exactly?
Me: It’s an average, you know, I could live longer than my life expectancy.
Herself: But what is it?
Me: Maybe 80.
Herself: You’re not middle-aged any more then.
Touching
Mr. Waffle came home from football with a nasty cut on his arm from a fall on the astroturf. Daniel asked anxiously whether the physio had been called on to the pitch.
After Sales Service
I was chatting to a woman whose father used to work as an engineer at Ardnacrusha recently. This is Ireland’s most famous engineering project – so famous there is even a great, almost Soviet style picture of its construction. She tells me that Siemens still sent a man over from Germany to check on it every year when her father was working there in the 70s and 80s and, for all we know, they still do today.
She also told me that at 10 he showed her how to float concrete. Whatever floats your boat and all that.
Contraband
A friend asked me for book recommendations for her great nephew who is the same age as Michael and Daniel. I consulted with the boys. They had somewhat different recommendations but top of the list for both was Captain Underpants. I reported this back. My friend told the boy’s mother who said, “No thank you, my son has a reading age of 12 and doesn’t need to be reading about farts and poo.” I was sorry all round – sorry for the little boy and sorry for my friend and sorry for me. The boys inquired whether the Captain Underpants had gone down well and I told them my tale of woe. Michael pointed out anxiously that one of the books which features Dr. Poopy Pants has very little farting but I felt that he was missing the point. He took it very much to heart. The next time he saw my friend, he took her aside and whispered in her ear, “I can give you my Captain Underpants books and you can smuggle them to your nephew.”
Tell me, do you have small boys in your house? Where do you stand on the question of the wonderfulness of Captain Underpants? A google search tells me that the internet is somewhat divided.
Like a Fine Wine etc.
Daniel and Michael are reading the Narnia books and they are using the editions I got myself at their age which are falling to pieces due to extensive re-reading over the years. Michael asked me whether they were valuable. “No,” I said, “they’re not first editions or anything, why do you ask?” “It’s just that, if you had them when you were a child they must be really old.”
That’s right, that’s why they’re printed on vellum.
Related: Michael is on “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and has taken to running around the house shouting “poop deck, poop deck!” See how each generation gets new meaning from these books?