D’ya hear yer man

Spring in my step

I walked to work with a spring in my step on Friday morning. That’s the last time I borrow a pair of shoes off Zebedee.

Crook in my back

By Sunday the spring in my step had gone. At some point during Saturday afternoon’s rugby match I must have done something which has disagreed with my back. By Saturday evening I was in a bad way. I was genuinely crooked.

That’s the thing about injuring your back. If you break a leg or a nose or get a black eye at least you look like a battle-scarred hero. When you have a bad back you just look like an old man. And feel like one too.

Recently I’ve been told off for waking Karen from her sleep for no good reason. Strangely enough Karen does not want to be shaken from her sleep to be asked if she can remember where I put the spare batteries for the remote, nor does she want to be transported abruptly from the Land of Nod so she can hear a full synopsis of my latest nightmare. Speaking of nightmares, I had this dream the other night where I was cutting carrots with the Grim Reaper. Talk about dicing with death.

Anyway, when I awoke from my sleep on Saturday night and needed a drink of water I was faced with a dilemma. Both our bottles of water had ended up on Karen’s side of the bed.

I got out of bed to fetch my bottle of water. Or more accurately I got halfway out of bed and my back locked. I was like a rusty hinge that needed WD40. I had no choice but to lower myself softly onto the floor. In other words, I fell out of bed. With Karen still soundly asleep I crawled on all fours in the dark, avoiding the sharp corners of the bed... nearly. I stifled my cries of pain as my ankle met the angle of the bed and, soldiering on, I eventually made it to my oasis in the desert, my bringer of life, my holy grail, my bottle of tap water. I glugged aplenty. I thought about sleeping on the floor, but eventually plucked up the strength to heave myself back into bed.

In the morning when I told Karen of my night time adventures she said, “Why didn’t you wake me?” You just can’t win, can you?

TV times

Credit where it’s due - even when she’s not in the house Karen is able to decide on the TV viewing for the evening.

Last Tuesday we were both working late, but for once I got home before Karen. I settled down to my tea and the Manchester United game which was on Sky Sports 2. I’d finished my hearty meal of pork and potatoes and was starting to get interested in the finely-poised game when a message flashed up on the screen telling me that ‘Silk’ and ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’ were about to start and if I wished to continue watching the Champions League football I’d have to choose one of the recordings to cancel.

The message might as well have said, “What do you think you’re doing sitting down to watch the football? There’s housework to be done. I bet you haven’t put away those boxes in the roofspace like I asked you. And what about the mess you made in the study? The bedroom isn’t going to hoover itself, you know?”

The Man Utd match finished 2-1, not that I really cared. The battle for the TV had finished with a comprehensive 2-0 victory for my wife.

Innocent mistake

I heard an interesting story from a bring and buy sale which took place recently. A young child, who was setting up a stall, asked one of the organisers, “How do you spell adult?” He was told the correct spelling and went about his business of setting up the stall. It was only when the organiser visited the stall he realised to his horror what the child had been up to. The urchin had been sorting out a bunch of DVDs. He’d put all the DVDs for children to one side and put a sign up to indicate the other discs were ‘Adult DVDs’. An innocent mistake, but needless to say the sign didn’t stay up for too long.

Weekly teaser

The answer to last week’s teaser was: the man standing in the parking space was a snowman and the person who made the complaint was the owner of the parking space.

Here’s this week’s teaser: A man pushed his car until he arrived at a hotel belonging to a good friend of his at which point he became bankrupt. Why?