» Crazy Relatives

My uncle Sid...
..was an engineer at Fords so he knew his way round a car. One day, however, his beloved VW camper van finally gave up its last ghost. Try as he might, he couldn't get it going. He called his brother to see if he could help (he was also a mechanic) but even with the two of them on the case there was no joy. After discussing the possibilities for a couple of hours (over many, many cold beers), Sid and his brother agreed that the van was properly dead. At this point they decided, with the ineffable wisdom of the truly hammered, that since it was dead, a proper Christian burial was in order.

They rolled the van into the garage and, over that afternoon and the next day, dug a huge pit in the back garden of Sid's house, complete with a slope at one end. When it was deep enough, they rolled the van into it, put the windows through, filled it with dirt and buried it - carefully replacing the turf afterwards. My Auntie ended up with the biggest rockeries and flowerbeds in Dagenham. As far as we know it's still there now (Sid and Margaret have both long since passed on, sadly). Whoever lives there now has no idea what's lurking a foot below the lawn, but heaven help whoever decides to build an extension on the back. And as for what the archaeologists of the future will make of it...
(Mon 9th Jul 2007, 15:36, More)

» Why I was late

Not me, but my best mate...
Dave (I shall call him) is late for just about everything, ever. One day he was over an hour late for a beer on a Sunday lunchtime. When he finally arrived I pointed out that an hour was a bit much, even for him (he lives about five minutes' walk from the pub). His excuse?

"I got out of the shower, dried off and put my pants on. there was a wasp in them. It stung me. On the bell-end." Ouch! Dave is a roundhead, BTW, so no foreskin for protection.

"Fuck me," I said. "Did you kill it?"

"No," he replied. "I had rather more pressing matters to attend to, like seeing exactly how cold a domestic shower can get."

I asked if he was so late because he'd been to the chemist for some Wasp-Eeze, but he said no, that would have made him miss the pub, and he'd promised to be there. He was standing there (in tightish jeans) with an untended wasp sting on his helmet, just to meet us. Kudos to the man of iron. Mind you, when the last bell went he was over to Tesco's pharmacy for some spray pretty damn sharpish.

Length? Legendary, but not nearly as legendary as his (temporary) girth.
(Tue 3rd Jul 2007, 14:23, More)