Nah-nah-na-Naria

I had that Prince Caspian round the other day. He don't half like jam. In between shoving toast into his mouth he kept going on about this bloody lion thing. Supposed to be a great bloke this lion. What he does right, he turns up at the end of wars when almost everyone is already dead and says some stuff about bravery and that. Then everyone loves him yeah? I can't pretend it made any sense to me. I don't know much about Christian allegory but I do know I am now completely out of apricot jam, as they old saying goes.

Greedy little git, he must have had at least six rounds of toast. I guess I'm lucky the lion never turned up. Small mercies eh?

The Garlic Farm.

"But I don't even like garlic" she whispered into my ear as she slowly removed one wellington boot and then the other revealing a pair of thick woollen socks.

"That's OK. You don't have to eat any. Just be friendly to Bob. He's worked really hard setting up that garlic farm." I was trying to reassure her tomorrow would be nothing to worry about but it was hard to concentrate with her looking right at be whilst loosening the chin strap on her sou'wester.

"Yeah, Bob's alright. But won't Sandra be there? I don't think Sandra likes me." She asked as she seductively placed her rucksack on the bed.

I was starting to ferment inside as she undid her welding mask and lifted her industrial apron over her head revealing a skimpy little life-jacket. "Don't be silly" I managed to say through my excitement, "Sandra likes you. She is just a bit shy, that's all."

"I'm just being stupid, I know. It will be nice to have dinner out for a change" she said as she let the life-jacket slip to the floor, revealing the sexiest bee-keepers outfit I had ever seen in my life...

Who or whom?

It doesn't matter now I suppose. Now that the air lock is broken. Now that the oxygen is running out. Now that we are putting on our spacesuits to give us a few extra hours grace for the rescue shuttle to turn up.

I can't believe we lost so much cargo. God. Look at me still talking in euphemisms. Cargo.

I can't believe we lost so many people.

There are only six of us left now. Six from seventeen thousand. Even we only have a day at most.

...

...

I'm still pretty sure it should be whom though.

Any Questions?

So by using millions of tiny robots we can infiltrate the ambassador via his Ribena. Then, when the robots expand, the ambassador will literally explode. Then all we do is shrink the robots again and smuggle them out in a pigeon or something.

Job done.

War over.

I made you a macrame owl...

Don't leave me. I made you a macrame owl. Please. I remember your favourite yogurt. I know what to do with the spiders. I let you have all the jelly babies. I won't interfere when you have friends round but I'll always be there when they leave you. Please. I know the first names of all your teddy bears. I'm no trouble. All you have to do is believe in me. I'm your best friend. Remember when we made that tyre swing? We could do that again. Don't stop believing in me. Talk to me. Please. Don't...

If you won't let me be your imaginary friend anymore I'll die...

If I die I'll haunt you as an imaginary ghost...

I'll miss you...

I didn't think it was on yellow

First of all, I wasn't supposed to be on this shift.

Secondly, I didn't even know we kept iguanas.

Thirdly, I really can't see how there is that much difference between a Bactrian and a Dromedary. A camel is a camel right?

Fourthly, no I was not aware the squirrels had escaped.

Fifthly, it was not me who told the schoolchildren that tortoise's shells were stuck on with Velcro and that one of them could 'have a try' at removing one.

Sixthly, if I had been aware that giant ant eaters were that big I wouldn't have ordered one.

Seventhly. I didn't think it was on yellow.

Eighthly. I was under the impression that penguins, like cats, always landed on their feet.

Ninthly, I thought that 'they' were extinct.

Tenthly, I was hungry. I'm sorry.

Eleventhly, how was I to know 'that' wasn't an option with tropical fish?

Finally, I would ask you to take my spotless track record into account when making your decision on the future of my position.

Thank you.

There's a cat in there you know?

It was no bigger than a shoe in my opinion though Tony claimed it was at least the size of a cloud, whatever that means. Nevertheless, in the middle, surrounded by spaghetti, was a very small cat wearing a pair of robin-egg blue mittens and a ruff. The cat was far from communicative, mumbling little more than "put me in an egg would you, you orange bastards" from time to time. We tried to ask him what had happened but he didn't seem interested in telling us so we soon got bored. We left him dangling off the side of the bridge where we found him.

The problem with robots

Is their insistence on wearing silly hats. There are times when a fez just isn't acceptable head wear. Try telling that to a robot!

This one that turned up this morning had a top hat on that was about three foot tall. He looked like a metal Cat in the Hat. He stayed about twenty minutes; dismantled the vacuum cleaner, ate a couple of vases and said something unforgivable to my cleaner. Bloody British Robot Corporation.

One of those vases had a picture of Bradley Walsh on. You can't just find them in the shops you know.

lemonade

The lemonade stall is doing well. We are thinking of getting Art Garfunkel to front the brand. The ad people say he might not be available and would I consider Leo Sayer as a compromise. I will not. They say we could get half of Hall & Oates but they won't specify which half.

I wouldn't mind but it has been one compromise after another. My original idea to have the two policemen from CHiPS arrest Art Garfunkel for drinking "too damn much lemon-freaking-ade" while on the soundtrack Missy Eliot freestyles about lemonade over Garfunkel's 1976 number one single Bright Eyes has been diluted to Reg from the Bill cautioning Leo Sayer while MC Tunes raps over Leo's 1978 number 22 'smash hit' version of Buddy Holly's Raining In My Heart.

I can't help feeling my vision has been lost in the interpretation.

Ants

Imagine my surprise when I found instead of water, ants were coming out of my taps. This was not the result of some local infestation but a problem stemming from the water supplier. For not only is the flow of ants controllable by the taps but cold ants come out of the cold taps and hot ants out of the hot taps!

I decided to ring our new water suppliers, Antwater, (alarm bells should have rung then, I know, I know) but I was almost immediately put on hold. I decided to make a cup of tea while I waited but this was made extremely difficult by the ants eating the sugar each time I tried to add it to the mug. The washing machine trundled in the background, its cargo of laundry and ants tumbling gently over each other.

Lost

Last night Uncle Trevor turned up unannounced with twelve bottles of K Cider, a camp bed and a boxset of the first series of Lost on DVD. I was not, as you can imagine, overjoyed to see him.

Things are complicated further by the fact that Uncle Trevor is a seven foot tall polar bear and and further still by the realisation that I could see, from the briefest of glances at his enormous incisors, that stuck between them, at irregular intervals, were bits of what was left to the world of Mrs Matthews from next door. This, I felt, was going to be another 'police night'.

Funnily enough when the policeman did turn up the first thing he did was ask where we had got K cider as he was sure that they stopped making it years ago. Uncle Trevor refused to divulge his sources making some excuse about Finnish state security and the Gaymer Cider Company based in Bath.

Then, of course, the policeman asked if Trevor would accompany him to the local station. Uncle Trevor, being a polar bear, and thus having no concept of the sanctity of human life or the trouble he was in, and also being an alcoholic, and thus relatively suggestible, agreed to his proposal without too much fuss. Which left me alone to inspect the remains of my lounge. It is surprising quite how much damage one bear can do in such a small amount of time.

There was also the matter of Mr Matthews.

Uncle Trevor isn't actually the polar bear in Lost but he is, to those who are relatively unfamiliar with arctic mammals, reasonably similar in build. I decided Mr Matthews would probably find the fact of his wife being eaten slightly less upsetting if he thought she had been consumed by a minor celebrity and so on the post-it note I affixed to the Lost boxset and then left on Mr Matthews step as a sort of making-the-peace gesture I'm afraid I may have told a white lie.

It seemed, under the circumstances, to be the most neighbourly thing to do.

Squirrels

The squirrels are at it again. Bastards. As if it wasn't enough that I had to put up with their constant scurrying and eating cashew nuts they have now embarked on a mass leafleting campaign to advertise their embroidery club. What is perhaps most preposterous about this sorry situation is that I know for a fact that neither of them can sew and that the callouses on their little squirrel fingers are not, as they claim, from that time they had a fight with a magpie but the self inflicted scars of a lost weekend trying to sew an extra pocket onto a duffel coat. How they expect to manage to master the complications of the various forms of chain stitch required to produce say the 'written embroidery' of a Hungarian Kalotaszeg is frankly beyond me.

It was exactly the same when they started giving Pilates classes at the local sports centre. Neither of them had even a basic grounding of the exercise techniques used in the method and yet they managed to convince nearly forty people to sign up for a six month "absolute beginners fun course". Luckily the majority of these managed to avoid the casualty department but I am afraid to say that Mr Josephs may never quite regain full use of his knees. Of course the council reimbursed everyones fees but the gesture was somewhat spoilt by their letting those bloody squirrels set up again only six months later with a Alexander Method Made Easy Masterclass. Apparently the local surgery ran out of neck braces and had to start sending people out into the world protected by nothing better than half a dozen hastily taped together balaclavas.

And now it is embroidery. Bloody squirrels.