Yer Man recalls his best bits of the past year - Part 1

February - I’m of the opinion children don’t really need a half-term break. What’s the point having time off school during a period which is unaffiliated to an annual celebration like Christmas, Easter or Halloween. Letting kids loose at a nondescript time of the year is a recipe for disaster. Can they sing carols? No. Can they binge on chocolate eggs? No. Can they dress up as zombies? No. And that in a nutshell is the problem with half-term. If children took to the streets as carol-singing zombies and were rewarded for the efforts with chocolate eggs then at least half-term would have a bit of substance to it.
Graeme 'Yer Man' CousinsGraeme 'Yer Man' Cousins
Graeme 'Yer Man' Cousins

March - Somewhere close to me a horn beeped. I saw a man in a car to my left gesturing for me to wind the window down. I hit the button to lower the window while the man in the car opposite took a more novel approach, reaching his hand between a three-inch gap at the top of his window and pulling it down manually. His hands were like shovels and he was wearing a woolly hat. I’m guessing he was from the country.

“What do you think of the FSI Golf?” he asked enthusiastically. I was baffled, I’d never been asked to review a car before and the last situation in which I’d expected to be given such an assignment was by a man in a car adjacent to me while waiting for the lights to change at a roundabout.

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I am not a lover of motorised vehicles. For me a car is simply a way of getting from home to work and back again in time to give Lucy a bath and put her to bed. That’s why it took a while for it to dawn on me that the FSI Golf he was referring to was in fact my car.

April - Hours after Ben’s express delivery a lot of terminology I’d learnt at the time of Lucy’s birth came flooding back. Terms like meconium and colostrum, which you’d be forgiven for assuming were robots from the Transformers franchise, returned to my vocabulary.

Meconium is what the baby’s first ‘number two’ is made up of. It’s black and sticky and looks like something an adult would create if they’d spent a day on the Guinness.

Meconium’s partner in crime, colostrum, is the early ‘immunising’ milk the baby gets from its mother before the semi-skimmed variety kicks in. I’ve already tread a fine line with poo jokes so I’m not going to milk it with any breastfeeding gags.

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May - When my daughter Lucy sees a car she says, ‘Beep beep’. Cute as it is, her logic is tragically flawed. Let’s be honest, how often does the average motorist use his or her horn? To associate a car with an infrequently used function like the noise of its horn is like associating a woman with the words “I’m sorry, you were right”.

June - I totally disagree with the notion that the workplace is supposed to play host to suffering. Neither should one’s occupation be something about which they feel obliged to whoop and holler. A happy medium is required. And I’m not referring to Russell Grant.