Despite our plea to draw a line under what is now known as The Farce Of The Five Fridays, the carrier pigeons are still arriving with your insults and corrections tucked into their support socks.
Oh, and thanks for the note tied round the brick. We corrected the spelling and lobbed it back through the other French window. You can pick it up on your way to church.
A few of you emailed instead. Andrew Pope, Alastair Barron and Alasdair Donaldson all note that any 31-day month starting on a Friday will have four Fridays after it. Meanwhile, RM Campbell appends a positively Newtonian mathematical equation for working out why readers born in the 21st century get 11 when they add their age and the last two digits of their birth year, and not 111 like the rest of us. The equation itself we’re keeping secret. Sorry. Turns out if you read it backwards at sunset it gives you tomorrow’s Derby winner.
On the subject of Zingiber officinale, Aidan McLaughlin recalls a conversation between a customer and a waitress in the Gaiety Tea Rooms in Ayr. The waitress has just served melon as a starter. “Got any ginger for this?” asks the customer. “That’s no me, son,” she says. “I’ll get the wine waiter for you ...”
Returning to insults, the compedium of finely turned political jibes has had few new entries of late. So we’re delighted by the arrival of The Quotable Hitchens, an A to Z of bon mots from hard-drinking hack Christopher Hitchens. The stand-out entry so far – we’re only up to G – is his take on Al Gore: “Like a condom stuffed with walnuts.” Great stuff.
l Send us other top insults you’ve heard. Don’t bother if they involve the fruitier end of the Anglo-Saxon phrasebook or make no reference to anyone who has a superinjunction in force. We can’t print those.
Thanks to a flood of misheard song lyrics, we’re having to open the sluice gates and let some through. So prepare yourselves for Lesley Lang’s belief that The Weather Girls were singing: “Israeli men! Hallelujah!” in their precipitation-themed 1982 hit, and thrill to the thought of a young Anne Neilson bawling: “You ain’t seen nothing like the biting wind” to Manfred Mann’s The Mighty Quinn in 1968. (It was an appropriate mistake, she notes, given her childhood locale: Ayrshire).
Another mixed message, possibly apocryphal but definitely from Ron Williamson.
This one tells the story of the wife who asks her husband to go to the shops for a carton of milk, adding: “and if they have eggs, get six.” The husband returns to a puzzled face and a question. “Why did you buy six cartons of milk?” His reply? “They had eggs.”
Finally, however, a nod of the fez to Pam MacPhee. She sent her husband out for a Turkish Delight and he came back empty handed, proving the point that it’s better to come back with the wrong thing than nothing at all.
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