A Bit about Slugs

We begin Friday night’s blog, the gateway to this bank holiday weekend, with a look at slugs. I have been having problems with them, you see, and they have been giving me a lot of trouble… I don’t mean that they have been rowdy, playing their music loud and having general anti-social behaviour… Mind you, they have been anti-social in a way. No, I mean they have been getting into my house. No, not breaking in a steeling the DVD player… but getting in and leaving their gross snail trails all around my dining room. There are no signs of the actual slugs, just the slime.

I have tried putting salt on the floor and have sealed my back door better… but they still get in! I have, today, put salt at the door outside, which I have tried before but to no avail. There are no holes or big gaps in the door in my kitchen/diner so how are they able to get in? It is so annoying waking in the morning and coming down to their silver snail mucus on the floor. I quickly rub it away with the soles of my slippers, but it can’t be good for the carpet can it!

They come sometime during the night, (not every night, they have time off) when we are all asleep, silent predators, creeping and sneaking. But how do they know it is night time… and how do they know there is no one around? I can go to bed at twelve and get up at seven and their trails will be there.

If you have any tips, then let me know.

If not, all I can think to do is one of the following.

1, Set my alarm clock for 3am, go downstairs with a large hammer and squash them all to death… or perhaps forget about the hammer and just pick them up and chuck them outside (however, they might be back).

2, Put salt all around my house. Problem is though that salt goes soggy and also people might think I am crazy.

3, Put slug pellets outside and kill all the slugs in the area? Tempting…
Perhaps I could…

4, Go back to choice one, but capture the slugs and send a message to their leader saying I will only set them free if they promise not to enter the house again. Could sign a kind of treaty, like the Treaty of Rome… call it the Treaty of Roam?? I did a similar thing with gnomes, called it the Treaty of Little People. They don’t like being called gnomes, it hurts their feelings.

But I digress. Which reminds me of another time I digressed, in the mid nineties, I was talking to a friend at work.

Anyway. Slug help needed. Slugs Out!

By the way, I have updated my settings on this blog so everyone should be able to leave a comment now without logging on…

A Bit about Bus Spotting

I will begin this blog with three words:

Bus Spotting… Why?

For those people who do not know and have not seen such a creature, they ‘spot’ buses. Yes, it is true… no, I am not lying. I know people have hobbies and I know we are all not the same, but come on… Bus Spotting? I can understand, in a way, how people like Train Spotting. But not Bus Spotting. I work next to a bus station and when I go out on lunch I see them with their cameras at the ready. They all seem to wear the same type of clothes too. Not duffle coats, but bland tops and black nylon trousers. They look in the need of a good wash too, as do their man-made leather shoes with the man-made leather uppers.

I recently saw a family of them drooling over a… well, bus. The dad was about forty, the daughter in her mid-teens and the son about eighteen. Why weren’t son and daughter out with their mates, or at the very least wasting their lives playing on their Xboxes? I did notice that there was no mother there, she had probably divorced dad years ago on the grounds that he is a complete and utter prat.

I usually see lone Bus Spotters as they snap their cameras at some double decker as though it is the Orient Express, or maybe the Hogwarts Express. I want to go up to them and yell, ‘It’s a bus, it’s a bloody bus!’ I want to shake them. ‘Snap out of it man… it’s a bloody bus!’ But I don’t, of course. But what makes a man think, Yes, I know what I will do, I will take pictures of buses for the rest of my life. I can accept people who collect stamps, or set physical challenges. Oooh, look at the wheels on that bus! Phew, what a sexy bumper that bus has!

If there are any bus spotters out there, then please let me know. I don’t want to offend you… but… why?

A bus is not exciting, it gets you from A to B. The wheels on a bus go round and round…


… all day long…

A Bit about Moaning

Tonight I want to discuss moans. Moans are all around us. There is no escaping moans, or moaners. There are good moans and there are bad moans. Moans are like things that live in the water, they can be cute little fish you want to stroke and love, or they can be floating turds you just want to get away from as quickly as possible. Where do moans come from?

People, of course.

I don’t mind people moaning or having a good moan about something if it is a good, valid moan, so don’t get me wrong here… You know what I mean about a valid moan: someone has a sick relative, has had a crap time, or other such reason… But I just cannot abide a bad, invalid moan from someone. You know the kind of person I mean I am sure. That work colleague/mate/relative/bloke in the pub who bends your ear for what seems like a lifetime going on about something so mesmerizingly … ridiculous!

When you are stood there thinking, What in the hell is this work colleague/mate/relative/bloke in the pub moaning about? And why is he or she moaning at me about it, and why in the hell are they moaning anyway?
Moans about the weather really get to me… It’s cold/warm/wet etc… Get over it won’t you! This is England! Okay, if it really is cold and you have had to scrape an inch of ice off your car windscreen that morning then have a moan… but don’t come to me a moan about it being too hot…! For 364 days of the year here in England the weather is crap, so when that one day of the year arrives when it is warm, don’t say to me, ‘Oh Borg, it’s just too warm isn’t it?’


‘No… it is not too warm… moan at someone else… leave me alone to enjoy this rare bit of warm weather.’

Some people moan about their favourite football/rugby/baseball (for all my US readers) etc teams. Why do you support them if all you want to do is moan about them? ‘Oh, they’ll get relegated this year, they’re rubbish.’ WHY DON’T YOU TRY TO BE MORE POSSITIVE, YOU, YOU… INVALID MOANER YOU!’

Oh, my boyfriend/girlfriend is a right git… Get another one, dump him/her!

My cat keeps trying to eat the fish… Why get a fish and cat together anyway!


So… moan about something worth moaning about, okay? Thank you.

A Bit about Parking Fees

I went to see Iron Maiden recently and to park up near the MEN in Manchester it cost us 10 quid. I also went to the Lakes recently and it cost me £6.90 to park at Grizedale Forest, £5.50 at Tarn Howes (for 4 hours) and (if I hadn’t found road parking it would have cost me) £7.00 to park in Coniston. This all makes me ask the question, Why The Hell is Parking so damn Dear in some places? And who comes up with such ridiculous charges for parking? Is there a panel of greedy bastards who sit around a table and think up the most expensive costs that they can get away with? Let’s face it, when you park up, you are only leaving your car for up to a day on a patch of land that it about 6 foot by 10. So why is it so dear?

You know, if I pay so much for parking, I feel I ought to get something extra, like maybe a free massage or a free map or lollipop. But oh no… You just get a parking spot and maybe free use of the toilet facilities, if you are lucky. And then there are clampers waiting in the bushes, waiting for you to leave without paying… shifty looking clampers… ready to clamp. They wait until you return as well, because if you are a minute over the time you have paid for, they pounce, they clamp…

A cheap day out in the countryside is marred by a high fee for parking.

A trip to the town/city centre for shopping is ruined when you have to pay a jaw breaking parking charge.

Do these people not realise that they will price themselves out of the market one day? Are they Stupid?

I know that it is dearer in other places, and I know it is cheaper in others. I bet you have a story to tell of a high cost in parking… we all have! But why do we stand for this robbery? Because, let’s face it, robbery is what it is and they have us over a barrel. You are not going to arrive at a car park in the middle of nowhere and decide to drive all the way back because the car park cost is a Rip Off. And what stupid prices too! £6.90!!! Who has 90p in change? Might as well just make it 7.00… But no, we let the bastards in there costing panels walk all over us and we say, ‘Ah well. Never mind,’ while they shaft us…

I don’t mind paying more for more, but this is just a rip off… and I hate it when I know I have been ripped off… take buying coke in a pub for example (but that is for another blog)… I don’t like to be ripped off…

A Bit about Farting

I am off camping on Saturday for four nights, so I thought I would slip in this blog before i go, on a subject we all know about.

You know, quite a few of my blogs seem to be inspired/thought up during my walk into work from the car. This morning as I walked into work, a guy (who was on the other side of the road to me) stopped, looked in deep thought, then farted. I carried on walking, laughing to myself, as that’s the kind of thing I do, and he farted again. They weren’t accidental farts too, this guy was proud of them.

Tonight, therefore, I want to discuss farting. I really don’t think we embrace (as a nation) the art of farting enough. People who fart are mostly shunned and grimaced at, when – let’s be honest – it is something we all do.

Farts have other names, too, like ‘trumps,’ or ‘poops’ or to ‘have wind,’ or ‘let rip.’ They can be silent but deadly, denied and supplied… But why do people shun them so? Heck (or hark), even Chaucer wrote about them. Flatulence is what we do… I fart, therefore I am. Yet we can sometimes be too ashamed of our trumps, especially in public places. I have a friend who brews them up and creates the loudest and smelliest farts imaginable. But would I fart in the office at work? Not a chance. Would I fart in front of the kids? You Betcha… Would I trump in a fancy restaurant on a first date? Nope… Would I fart while out with the mates? Heck, I’d let it fester so that I managed a loud one.

We mostly leave our farts for the right occasion. Not a good idea to fart in the middle of a job interview, for example. Tell me about yourself… Well, I am a keen worker, punctual… burrrrphhh…

Is it more a ‘man’ thing? Are men more proud of their farts than women? Or is it that men talk about trumps more? I could have quite an in-depth talk about farts. I wonder if anyone has filed for divorce due to their spouse’s excessive wind. That’s it, you have farted your last fart as my wife! You will be hearing from my solicitor.

Now, no one really comments on my blogs, even though I know I do have the odd reader or two, so please feel free to leave a comment – perhaps you can let me know another name for a fart?

Remember… it’s good to fart.

A Bit about Relationships...

I didn’t do a blog last week and this was mainly due to the ex, my daughter and living arrangements… I won’t go into great detail, but suffice to say that I was obviously to blame for it all, and more, and it was my entire fault etc…

But let's not go into all that, this blog is for fun, light-hearted stuff and hopefully) to make you smile a bit after a hard week… But as I was walking to work this morning, I did start to think of relationships and how they evolve… or should that be ‘transform,’ like a caterpillar to a butterfly, or maybe a mild-mannered person to a werewolf on full moon nights, or a cute little puppy into a raging, foam-mouth beast having caught rabies…

Not that having a relationship is akin to having rabies of course… not much anyway…
I saw a couple walking ahead of me… in fact I heard them first (her actually) giving him grief. They were only in their late teens as well. I thought: I bet they didn’t think their relationship would become like that when they first met that night at the disco… or wherever groovy young cats meet these days. And the same can be said about a lot of us. That dashing young bloke with the full head of hair, boyish looks, souped up Ford… how and when did he become that fat slob on the sofa drinking lager and wearing that white vest with dubious stains on the front?

That slim, cute brunette, with those sparkling eyes and great arse. Had aliens replaced her with that saggy old bag whose only purpose in life seemed to be to nag anything and everything she came into contact with?

I guess there will be more bits about relationships over the course of this blog as it is such a big subject, but I wanted to share this with you for now. I know we all don’t change like that, but it is not what we ‘signed up for’ is it. Perhaps that is why people get divorced. Is divorce not, then, another way of taking back your spouse to the shop and getting a full refund? ‘Sorry, my spouse isn’t working as well as he/she did when I acquired him… some of the parts don’t work, she is stuck in ‘nag mode…’ I want a full refund.’

Hmmm…

Those getting married soon, probably wise to keep a receipt… you know, just in case…

A bit about losing things...

Isn’t it annoying when you lose something? I mean losing something in the house, like your wedding ring or your phone. You search high and low, but to no avail… you retrace your steps, wrack your brains, ask yourself: where the heck did I leave it? I sometimes think it is gremlins, you know. That or mischievous ghosts, because the thing that went missing usually turns up out in the open in a spot you have looked over 100 times in your search for missing item.

Recently I had such an experience, but I am pretty sure it wasn’t gremlins or ghosts, and was probably just me being a bit of a plonker. I lost my watch. I looked around the house, wondering where it could be. I had been off work, and was planning a trip to Morries therefore wanted to find my watch before I set off. I thought, when do I usually take my watch off? When doing the washing up (I can’t afford a dishwasher). I checked in the kitchen.. nope, not there. When I am sat watching a DVD in the evening, chilling, might take it off and leave it one the chair… no, not there either. When I was going to bed… not there, not in my bedroom. It was not in the toilet, under the sofa, on the kitchen table, in the bin?

Then I had a thought. I took some washing upstairs the night before. I put some socks in my sock drawer… I went to my bedroom, and there it was in the sock drawer. I must have put the watch on my bed, and when I scooped my socks up to put them in the drawer had scooped the watch up as well. Either that or the gremlins and ghosts did it and wanted me to think I had done it.

So, the moral of this story is, if you lose something, then check the sock drawer… it might be there. This does not really apply if you lose a car in the car park… chances are that you parked it somewhere else. Or someone nicked it. You won’t find it in your sock drawer. But things like keys, phones, missile launchers, and of course watches might well be!