Published on 15 March 2005
in Humour.
I’m sure I’m not the only parent who’s relieved that today’s children are growing up in a cotton-wool bubble, protected from any form of danger. When I think back to my infancy in the 1970s, I begin to wonder how any of us survived. All those teddy bears with spikes for heads, and big trousers presenting a clear tripping hazard, not to mention those vinyl LPs with their fearsomely sharp edges. (Or was it just my dad who sharpened them up on a grindstone then gave them to us to play with? Anyway, I digress.)
The point is, today’s kids – our kids – will never have to know of these horrors. They are part of a charmed generation, where even getting them to carry their own juice into the living room is so fraught with the threat of litigation from the authorities that we just daren’t.
And then, this morning, what do I find in my daughter’s school bag?
A skipping rope.
That’s right, a skipping rope.
Hell’s bells, I felt like Cinderella’s father must have when he spent all that time banning needles from the kingdom, only to find a ruddy great spinning wheel at the top of the highest tower (i.e. angry and betrayed, not to mention in the wrong fairy tale). I mean, just imagine: small kiddy… length of rope. Surely I’m not the only one who can see the danger there? Just imagine if she’d been skipping in the playground, and there was a cement mixer there, and a meteor had landed just next to her and thrown her to the ground… but her hand had landed in the cement mixer!! She’d have been condemned for life to go around with a barrel-shaped cement block for a hand, which she would have needed to transport on a little specially-made buggy. And that’s just one obvious example I can think of: I’m sure you can think of many more, specific to your own circumstances. The point is: my child took a skipping rope to school. The school knew. My wife and I knew. And yet nobody did a thing to stop it.
For God’s sake, we must stop this child carrying own skipping rope madness now!
Look closely at this picture, scanned from the 1998 Tyneside Yellow Pages.
Pay particular attention to the two chaps’ tight shorts. Or rather, what’s poking out from the shorts.
I heard the tennis club complained when they finally noticed.
I was in Japan for a week at the beginning of 2003. One day we went out for lunch in a cheap diner-style restaurant in a shopping arcade. While we waited for our food, I noticed a sign on the wall next to us and asked our host, Kuwahara, to translate. He told us it said you should ask the waitress if you wanted more rice.
Being a curious type when it comes to languages, I asked him which symbol represented rice. He hesitated for a moment before pointing out two characters. They looked like this:
(Thanks to this site for the Kanji.)
I told him I was amazed that Japanese has to use two characters to write “rice”. I’d just assume that Japanese, with its complicated and expressive writing system, would cut right to the chase when talking about rice at least. It’s a bit like the old line about eskimos having seven different words for snow.
Kuwahara then indicated the second character and said: “This character means rice, but it is very impolite. We say…” – and at this point he cast a glance around the restaurant and lowered his voice to a whisper – “meshi“. He raised his voice again. “But this is impolite. Very rude.” He then pointed at the preceding character. “This one, we say go. This is polite prefix.”
“Ah, got you,” I said. “So the polite phrase is go-meshi?”
“No,” he replied blankly, as if I’d missed something glaringly obvious. “Not go-meshi. Go-han.”
We were all so thrilled by this – both the pronunciation oddities, and the fact that the legendary Japanese courtesy extended to alternative rude and not-so-rude words for “rice” – that he offered to write it down for us. And so here it is, complete with Kuwahara’s annotations. I count this scrap of fax paper as my most treasured possession from abroad.
I love those new snacks shaped like Othello and Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. They’re so Moorish.
This is insane: a bloke who’s building his own life-sized R2-D2. So far he’s done the legs. I can’t help wondering if he gave up at that point after George Lucas suddenly equipped those same legs with rocket boosters in Attack of the Clones. That’ll teach the nerdy little twat, George probably thought. He should be out driving fast cars and chasing girls, goddammit! Now where did I put that modelling cement…?
But I digress. I’m sure I’m right though. George keeps an eye on these things, you mark my words. If our plucky hobbyist manages to work his way around this one, expect R2-D2 to suddenly be made of liquid metal and be able to morph into a desk lamp at will in time for Revenge of the Sith.
Clearly it doesn’t mean the same in American…
I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to get too excited by a millionaire in a purpose-built flying-round-the-world plane managing to fly round the world in his plane. I’m even less whelmed than I was when that woman in a purpose-built sailing-round-the-globe boat sailed round the globe. There was a lot of comment then about how the Age of Adventure had died and been replaced by the Age of Global Circumnavigation by GPS and Laptop, and I suppose we can expect more of the same now for whatsisname Gusset.
But, you know, it doesn’t have to be like that. There are loads of ways round the world that would still amaze me. People just need to be a bit more creative. For example:
- Around the World by Zip-Line. Our plucky adventurer would start off climbing the world’s tallest ever ladder (gasp!) – possibly into the, like, outer stratosphere or something (oooh!) – then holding on to a rickety T-bar and descending for around 2 weeks until they reach the bottom of the ladder again having gone round the WHOLE FUCKING GLOBE! Imagine that! I’d wet myself!
- Around the World by Home-Made Segway. This would have to be accomplished by George W Bush who, as we can see, struggles to get around the block on a real one.
UPDATE: He’s just got a problem with two wheels, full stop.
- Around the world by Schwinn Giraffe (a.k.a. a 6-foot acrobatic unicycle). This would need to be accomplished in full clown costume because otherwise you’d just look silly.
- Around the World by My Brother Simon’s First Car, a Second-Hand Vauxhall Chevette with Sick Down One Side. This was our means of transport each day one summer from my mum and dad’s house into Crosby village – a distance of some 1 mile. The “car” could make it to a distance of about 0.9 miles before overheating, cutting out and making a funny smell. Our workaround to this (short of getting it fixed, obviously, because that would have cost money) was to drive it as far as the roundabout just next to Sainsbury’s car park then stick it in neutral, jump out and push the rest of the way. No, really. If some bugger managed to get that heap of shite round the globe they’d be on the front page of every newspaper for a year.
I decided to blog this just because it will make my brother Simon cry.
(Favourite comment on tha page: the one that accuses the perpetrator of being “racist”.)
When I have a whole day to spare and I want to spend it getting a headache, I like nothing better than to attempt the Guardian prize crossword. They’re usually set by Araucaria, a setter of fiendish reputation. Probably his best known crossword clue was an enormous anagram to do with Jeffrey Archer.
Sadly that one was before my time, but I am glad to have encountered another gem of his in the prize puzzle on the 5th of February:
Wee dram for a Glaswegian: the rot’s mended: ‘Who wrote a Zimbabwean Othello’ (5,3,1,9,4,5)
I pretty soon figured out that it was an anagram of “Wee dram for a Glaswegian: the rot” but I couldn’t make head or tail of the rest. A good deal of head scratching later, it finally clicked that the answer was the first line of a purpose-written limerick, of which the second line was “Who wrote a Zimbabwean Othello”. From the letters available and the pattern of the answer I could even get as far as “There was a [something] from [somewhere]“, but it still took another fair while and a couple of paracetamol before I finally cracked it. Ever since, I’ve been chuckling every time I think about it:
There was a tragedian from Gwelo…
