No Dead Dog On The Road

My prayers were answered: the little dog wasn't converted to road pizza [phew!]. My wife told me that what I'd written was "terrible". I thought she meant terrible as in "you should have rescued that poor little doggy!", but she actually meant "your grammar and spelling was awful!".

The joys of living with an editor...


The Goose Is Getting Fat

The shops - including the Sainsburys garage at the end of our road - are already decked out with the full load of Christmas decorations and piping out the usual array of Christmas tunes. It's a pet hate of mine: Christmas stuff should not be seen or heard until December, and even then, 3 weeks of it is 3 weeks too many. It is my opinion that the earlier Christmas tat goes up, the more it devalues the meaning of Christmas and dilutes the excitement of the Christmas holiday itself. Down with decorations is what I say.

That being said, I spent some of the weekend burning copies of my favourite Christmas CDs - including the complete Maddy Prior and The Carnival Band back catalogue (essential listening) - whilst Vic went into food-preparation overdrive: Christmas Day canapes, a big fruit pie, etc, etc. However, the cake wasn't baked because the supermarket ran out of glace cherries, claiming that the second weekend in November was apparently the weekend on which EVERYONE bakes their Christmas cakes and steams their puddings...

It's obviously not a disaster - the glace cherries can be bought next week - but in order to test Waitrose's explanation for their lack of stock, I took a quick straw-poll in the office.

Of 6 people asked, not one had made their Christmas cake at the weekend. So either Waitrose were lying in an attempt to disguise their stock mismanagement, or someone somewhere is stockpiling huge quantities of glace cherries.

Perhaps when David Blunkett warned us about a possible Dirty Bomb attack on London, he really meant a possible Glace Cherry ice cream Bomb instead.

Actually, that's stupid. Much more likely is:

[al-Qaeda Terrorist Man #1 in Tora Bora cave]: "How can we disrupt the Christmas celebrations of those stupid, evil, christian, western fools?!"
[al-Qaeda Terrorist Man #2 in Tora Bora cave]: "We could use Osama's billions to buy up all of their glace cherries... so they can't make any cakes, pies and puddings. That would wipe the festive Ronald McDonald smiles off their foolish western faces!"

Be vigilant. Sinister plots lurk everywhere.