» Weddings

This image is still burned onto my retinas....

Mate of mine was marrying his lovely Italian girlfriend in her home country. Her folks were very devout, so it's a full on Catholic wedding ceremony, hundreds of guests, they've flown in the 60 year old Irish priest who baptised the bride etc etc As my mate is a Scot, all us lads were in full dress kilts, including one particular buddy of ours 'Smurf'. A few months prior to this Smurf, at the age of 30, had declared himself to be gay, but wasn't having ANY luck finding himself a fella and was getting rather desperate. But then, if you will refuse all dental treatment since birth and drink enough beer to give the appearance that another, only slightly smaller, man is living in the bottom of your vest, it can be difficult to get laid. Bless him, but Smurf's no oil painting.

Wedding is delightful - on we go to the reception. Lots of wonderful food, and more importantly wine, which Smurf is chucking back with his usual haste and enthusiasm. He, it seems, is not the only man at the wedding with an extreme thirst though... Night wears on, I'm chatting away to female mate when suddenly she stops mid-sentence and goes as white as a sheet, staring in utter horror at something over my shoulder. The rest of the room has fallen strangely silent as well - I turn around to see what's going on. There's Smurf, at the bar, in a full-on French kiss with the fucking PRIEST - who meanwhile has his hand up Smurf's kilt and is giving him a vigourous and obvious tug-job in front of two hundred gobsmacked guests. Both of them had got wasted on free booze, presumably exchanged significant glances, then just fallen on each other like starving wolverines... Bride's mother, who I don't think was the most homosexually-tolerant woman on the planet anyway, storms over, grabs an ice-bucket full of ice/cold water and douses them with it. They don't even seem to fucking NOTICE, let alone stop... They had to be physically prised apart in the end and the Bride and her family were so traumatised that they declared the reception immediately over. Pity, us Brits all agreed that we damn well NEEDED more booze after seeing that. Fair enough, everybody deserves love and affection, but full on toothless-lardie-boy against 60-year-old-priest stylee action I can do without having to watch...

No apologies for length. You know you love it really.
(Mon 18th Jul 2005, 14:46, More)

» Workplace Boredom

The claw is your master!

So, 'Toy Story' had just come out and I was working in the absolute shittiest of my shitty, shitty early-twenties-and-all-I-want-is-beer-money jobs. To keep ourselves sane between 'No I don't want to do a market research survey on the phone, fuck off' conversations, my colleague Lex and I had started playing 'The claw is your master!'. Pretty simple - smuggle a post it note with the words 'The claw is your master!' scrawled on it into the opponents possessions - wait for the opponent to discover it - trill 'The claw is your master!' at them in the manner of the little three-eyed vending machine dwelling aliens in the aforementioned animated film. I know, I know, it sounds fucking lame - and I have no clue why we latched onto that particular phrase - but the cackles came from the increasingly devious places we found to secrete our little notes. Sure - we started out simple, just spamming each others paperwork. I then escalated: Lexor leaves the office on a rainy afternoon only to find the inside of his umbrella coated with claw-missives, and, whilst swearing on the pavement, is serenaded with 'The claw is your master!' from an attic window. Fine - he cuts out a precisely measured circle of post-it, be-claws it, laminates it, and wedges it in the bottom of my coffee cup: *glug* - *splutter* - "BASTARD!" etc etc. Within a couple of weeks we've both gone seriously Howard Hughes - paranoia, hawk-like mutual surveillance and bladder-straining refusal to go to the toilet unless the other was going as well. Whatever - it passed the fucking time. But eventually one of us was going to go too far - whether they intended to or not.

God knows how he got into my flat. But get in he did - teaching me a valuable lesson in the process. Specifically: even if you've got a woman you've just met in a club back to your bedroom, AND persuaded her to get her knockers out, she will not shag you if she slides under the duvet and suddenly finds herself stuck to 200+ post-it notes all informing her that something referred to as 'The claw' is now her 'master'. Instead she will run for the fucking hills.

Thanks Lex. Thanks a bunch.
(Fri 9th Jan 2009, 0:05, More)

» Amazing displays of ignorance


Popped into my local for a pint. Bought said pint with a £20 note from the barmaid I'd never seen before and received... £2.70 in change.
"Sorry, but you haven't given me enough change."
"It says £2.70 on the till."
"That's how much it COST."
"It says £2.70 on the till."
Nice Mr Landlord hustles over to sort it out - his face indicates this is not her first mathematical screw up today - I get my change. As I wander away to drink my pint I hear:
"Enough's enough love, I'll pay you for 2 hours but you're out. I thought you were at Uni - how did you even get there?!"
"I take the bus mostly."
(Fri 19th Mar 2010, 16:58, More)

» The Police II

All the proof they needed, and more.
My beloved grandmother was in hospital for a quite a while last year (it's alright, she's out and about again now) leaving her flat empty for around 3 months. One night - admittedly quite late at night - I popped in to grab a few things to take with me when I visited her the following day. Although I wasn't there very long, it was obviously long enough for one of the other old dears in her sheltered housing complex to spot lights on in Mrs Delight's flat when they knew she wasn't there... Suffice it to say, just as I'm hustling out with a big bag under my arm a police constable appears and asks me who I am:
"This is my gran's flat officer."
"Can you prove that sir?"
The complete photographic record of my development from newborn to mid-30's-guest-at-family-weddings that hangs on my gran's wall was deemed sufficient proof of my right to be there...
"Goodness me - what an extremely ginger little boy you were sir. Good night."
(Sat 7th May 2011, 11:34, More)

» Out of my depth

Window cleaning is the most dangerous job in the UK - here's why...
My firm makes industrial safety products that are really REALLY important and on which people's lives depend. I do marketing and PR however and have no engineering qualifications AT ALL.

I recently attended a meeting, as an observer, at British Standards Institute (the guys responsible for kite marks). The meeting was to create a new standard for the type of kit we make, and I had jotted down a few suggestions just in case I WAS asked to contribute.

If only anybody else had done the same.

Suffice it to say that I was the ONLY fucker with anything to contribute AT ALL and the new 'standard' consists in fact of the uninformed bobbins I came up with on the tube to Chiswick. This, it seems, is the way or country's health and safety beaurocracy works and I feel we should ALL be afraid.

I do not wish to identify what it is we make but I will say this: if anybody is reading this at the top of a ladder - come down now. SLOWLY.
(Wed 20th Oct 2004, 11:08, More)