Our old friend Roland in Brisbane must have had a tune in his head (now it’s in mine, too). And they say that men don’t like sissy films such as “The Sound of Music”!
“That’s rather strange,” says Chris, looking at the words printed on the flower box that I’ve just put into the shopping trolley.
I hadn’t taken much notice of the printing – I just thought that the box of flowers looked pretty – but now that it had been brought to my attention…
“I suppose it is a bit funny, considering that it’s obvious what they are,” I agree with my astute husband.
“Well I think it would make more sense to paint out the ‘L’ and hang a little pair of pants on a line beneath the box!” laughs Chris.
No reasonable request is ignored in our household so, a few days later, a tiny pair of purple and white polka dot pants appeared. You may think we’re an odd couple….
You have to fancy an egg – don’t you? Why is it that sometimes even the thought of a boiled egg can make you feel nauseous and on other occasions you can look forward to one with relish? At times I may even vomit after eating an egg. I know it’s not just me – my husband Chris and my sister Mary also have the odd spot of egg aversion. What can be the cause?
I’ve noticed that nausea is more likely to occur when my boiled egg is not accompanied with buttered toast, so perhaps my empty stomach finds an egg too rich? Surely I can’t have an egg allergy or hypersensitivity (as suggested by others as possible causes) because it doesn’t happen every time I have an egg. Also, I don’t have a problem with fried, scrambled or omelette eggs… so long as they are eaten with bacon or toast.
Could it have anything to do with the freshness of the eggs? But I don’t fancy stale eggs!
Well, as it happens today I did fancy a boiled egg for breakfast. Owing to my current diet (always on a diet – not that you’d notice!), and mindful of my aversion when an egg is eaten alone, I decided to try boiled egg with crispbread… Not surprisingly, a week old sesame seed crispbread didn’t cut it, so a slice of small brown seeded bread went into the toaster. It came out very thin, brown, seedy and weedy… (not to be confused with seaweedy). Maybe I shouldn’t have had two boiled eggs…
I don’t fancy eggs anymore – do you?
(Found online:)
Eggs are delicious and nutritional. They are loaded with antioxidants and other valuable nutrients. Most notably, eggs are good sources of selenium, tryptophan, iodine, protein, molybdenum, vitamin D, vitamin B2, vitamin B5, vitamin B12, and the carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin.
That being said, experiencing nausea after eating eggs is typically the result of a food allergy, food intolerance, or salmonella food poisoning:
Over the weekend I was thinking a great deal about the old nursery rhyme “Cry Baby Bunting”, and if you think that’s a funny thing for me to ponder over, you must bear in mind that I was making twenty-five metres of pink and white bunting at the time! Believe me, there was little else to consider.
I wondered about the word “bunting” itself – what an odd word for flags. I kept thinking of Billy Bunter (the fat schoolboy from the Billy Bunter books penned by Charles Hamilton – pen name, Frank Richards). Then I wondered about the fat Prince Regent who built the Brighton Pavilions – I thought he was a William and might later have been the inspiration for the Billy Bunter character – but actually, it doesn’t figure because I was mistaken and his name was George IV! (Almost right!) But now I’ve checked it all to my satisfaction and copied and pasted some interesting snippets below (who’d have guessed that ‘bunter’ was a term of endearment?). Of course, it may be of more interest to you if, like me, you’ve spent much of the weekend cutting and sewing material into strings of pretty flags.
Personally, I don’t care if I ever see bunting again! And don’t mention making them – too much like penance!
The most common modern version is:
The term bunting is a term of endearment that may also imply ‘plump’.[1] The earliest published version was published in Gammer Gurton’s Garland or The Nursery Parnassus in England in 1784.[1] A version in Songs for the Nursery 1805 had the longer lyrics:
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The Grammarphobia Blog
Bye, baby buntingQ: I’m curious about the term “baby bunting” in this nursery rhyme: “Bye, baby bunting, / Father’s gone a-hunting, / Mother’s gone a-milking, / Sister’s gone a-silking, / Brother’s gone to buy a skin / To wrap the baby bunting in.” Any idea of the origin? A: “Bunting” has been a term of endearment since at least as far back as the 1660s. The origins of the word are unknown but it’s had a long association with plumpness, with bottoms, and with “butt” (both the noun and the verb). In Scottish, according to the OED, the term buntin means short and thick, or plump. A similar term in Welsh, bontin, means the rump. And in Scottish as well as in dialectal English, both “bunt” and “bun” have been used to refer to the tail of a rabbit or hare. The verb “bunt” was used in the 1800s to mean the same as “butt” – to strike, knock, or push. (Yes, this is where the baseball term “bunt” comes from, circa 1889.) And in a 19th-century Sussex dialect, to “bunt” was to rock a cradle with one’s foot (by pushing or “butting” it). The adjective “bunting” has been used to mean plump, swelling, or filled out since the 1500s. John Jamieson, in An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808-25), defined buntin as “short and thick; as a buntin brat, a plump child.” In the phrase “baby bunting,” the Oxford English Dictionarysays, “the meaning (if there be any at all) may possibly be” as in Jamieson’s definition. At bottom, if you’ll pardon the expression, the phrase in the nursery rhyme seems to be an affectionate reference to an infant’s plumpness or to its rosy rump. The earliest version of the nursery rhyme dates from the 1780s, and the longer version you quote has been traced to 1805. Surprisingly, the OED has no reference to the garment known as a “bunting” – an infant’s cuddly, cocoon-like, hooded outerwear. This sense of the word dates from 1922, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.). The name of the garment, according to our old Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition), is a reference to the “baby bunting” in the nursery rhyme. In case you’re wondering, the noun “bunting” has been used for another kind of cloth – the open-weave kind used to make flags – as well as for a family of birds (possibly because of their plumpness.) |
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Isn’t it funny how life just seems to get busier and busier? If I don’t write a blog post for a few days it’s usually because there has been so much going on, which has been the case this week.
As you will see from the photographs, when not on the farm, gardening or cleaning, I have been hard at work painting. Firstly there was my sister Mary’s birthday present – a painting of little Rosie, aged 19 months – and then I decided to finish the canal painting that I’d begun some time ago when I was giving an art demonstration at Sidmouth , and which was progressed at the art workshop I took two weeks ago. Both paintings were executed using acrylics, hence I was able to finish both paintings within a week.
And now for the joke which came to me by way of our friend Roly in Australia:
The Bank That Went Broke
“Dad, Dad!” shouts an eighteen year old girl as she rushes into the lounge room to find her father.
“Whatever can be matter? Now just sit down and try not to panic,” says her father who is trying not to show that he’s a bit miffed (because he’s watching the Grand Prix live on television – and it’s his favourite programme).
“Oh Dad,” his daughter sighs, “you know that bank you advised me to put my saving in?”
“Yes,” he nods.
“Well I think it must have gone broke!”
“What on earth do you mean?” he asks (quite sure that it hasn’t gone broke).
“Well I went to draw out a hundred dollars today and the teller told me, ‘Sorry dear, insufficient funds”!
“I really like that painting of the drowned lady,” said one of the four visitors to my studio last Thursday afternoon. He had a strong Liverpudlian accent.
He was no connoisseur of art, or women, come to that – the painting in question depicted a mermaid! In fact he was not even a guest. Just minutes earlier I had been lost in my own little world of painting whilst listening to an audio book when I had been startled by a girl, accompanied by three boys, knocking on the glass door to my studio.
“What are they doing down here?” I thought to myself (my studio is thirty-eight steps down from the main road… and they were strangers!).
“Can I use your phone to call my mother? We’ve been attacked by a gang of older boys,” said the girl (a sullen blonde of around fourteen years old).
No sooner had I nodded than the oldest boy (perhaps fourteen but younger looking than the girl) opened wide my door and the four barged into my studio. The boy who liked “the drowned lady” was twelve or thirteen and had big ears, which looked rather prominent owing to his new ‘short back and sides’ haircut; the older lad, too, sported a similar new haircut. The youngest, a boy of eleven, wore round tortoiseshell spectacles – he put me in mind of “Piggy” from “Lord of the Flies”, but he wasn’t fat.
According to the gang of four in my studio they were on holiday staying at a local caravan site and, having been down the town to have their haircuts, on their way back to the camp site they were assailed by twenty-one sixteen year old schoolboys…. at five-thirty… in dear little old Dawlish town! Apparently yesterday it was even worse – the older boys had been kicked and punched to the ground… and not a mark on them!
They asked several inane questions, and some searching ones, and the oldest boy clearly wished to enter the main body of our house – I had to close the door he had opened. At length the girl spoke to her mother who agreed to come and pick them up and my Chris came into the studio.
“I’m going to start locking my door from the inside,” I said to Chris upon returning from the roadside, “let’s be very vigilant for a while.”
As much as I didn’t trust the kids, I thought their main purpose was to con the girl’s mother into giving them a lift.
Whilst gardening the following afternoon I noticed that our two bikes, normally chained together, had been separated. I assumed that Chris had unlocked them in order to oil them before taking them out cycling, therefore I didn’t bother to mention the uncoupling to Chris.
Yesterday afternoon, upon arriving back from shopping, Chris discovered that his bike was gone. The “Golden Sands Holiday Park” is as big as a town. We didn’t locate the bike, the mother’s car or the band of accomplished lock pickers.
The police informed us later that there has been a spate of similar crimes in our area during the last few days. On the basis that neither we, nor the police, ever expect to see Chris’s bike again, we went out this morning to find a new one. My mum accompanied us and kindly insisted on buying her son-in-law a beautiful blue bike with butterfly handlebars, so now Chris is quite pleased with the outcome and we plan to register particulars about our bikes with the police.
On our way home we called into my niece’s place for a family lunch and we related the tale of the missing bike and the most likely culprits.
“I had heard about some recent incidents,” said Lizzie (whose husband Martin is a police officer), “in fact, one of my friends who has a hairdressing salon in the town told me that, on Thursday, a couple of boys ran off without paying for their haircuts!”
It’s a small world and Dawlish is a pretty small place.
“The Drowned Lady” – unfinished.
We have a couple of fairly new arrivals in our family. There’s two and a half month old Daynah, daughter of our daughter in Dubai (all the “D”s!”), whom we haven’t seen yet, and, even more recently, one month old Annalise, daughter to my niece Katie; Aidan and Rosie, the toddlers, now seem much less babies by comparison.
This morning I went to see Katie and Annalise, who was sleeping soundly when I arrived. The dear little babe was rather shocked when she awoke to find me there to pick her up… as you will see from the photographs!
Before the jokes I must tell you something funny that happened this morning. Recently we have started having guests through Airbnb (a great idea if, like us, you have spare rooms in your house) and, naturally, the visitors come from all corners of the world. Our latest visitors were a lovely couple from Northern Germany, which was something I must have mentioned to Roly (alias “The Bird Man”), our old friend in Australia, who sends me most of the jokes I relay to you via my blog.
Do you remember the 1970s comedy series called “Fawlty Towers”? It’s a much loved classic about the manic proprietor of an English guest house in Torquay (11 miles from here). After the episode when Sybil and Basil Fawlty had German visitors staying at the guesthouse the actor John Cleese became famous for his line, “Don’t mention the war!”.
Would you believe that at the precise moment while Chris and I were listening to Roland’s Whatsapp verbal message, when Roland was saying “Don’t mention the war!”, our German couple called out on the stairs, “We’re about to leave!” There were a few jumpy seconds when I struggled to turn off the verbal message… Luckily, either they didn’t hear or they weren’t proficient enough at English to understand. Phew! When you do Airbnb you have to remember never to mention “Don’t mention the war”!
And here are the two short jokes that our “Birdman” left us with…
Well-Bred Crows
A sensible murder of crows (that’s what you call a flock of crows – capital idea!) were escaping the harsh winter by flying south from the northern Great Plains states to one of the lower Plains states of Oklahoma. A fine-looking male, slightly bored with the long flight, spoke to a male on his left:
“Hey pal, bred any good rooks lately?”
The Happy-Go-Lucky Gynecologist
The happy-go-lucky gynecologist was highly popular with his patients.
“Thank you so much,” a lady said huskily at the end of her appointment.
“Always happy to be at your cervix!” smiled the gynecologist.
“And I’m always dilated to see you!”
In my vast experience of children (well I did have one and three extra who I love as my own… and I was one myself!) I would say that it’s rather uncommon, during a family gathering, for a child to think “I wonder if anyone would like me to make them a cup of tea?”. So when my Supergran mum says loudly to me, at said family gatherings, “Wouldn’t you think Daniel (now aged eleven) would offer make a cup of tea to save his grandmother’s legs?”, I always reply in the negative. Likewise, I’m never surprised to find that the great-grandsons have not rushed to do the washing-up of their own accord. I reckon they are probably no better or worse than I was at their ages and therefore it’s a bit much to expect such grand gestures without first being asked (or cajoled, or threatened).
Of course, Supergran is our family matriarch (not to be confused with “The Matrix” in the film of the same name which, according to Wikipedia, is the name given to a simulated reality created by sentient machines to subdue the human population – quite the opposite of my mum then). The grandmother whose legs she would like to be saved is my sister, but I hasten to add that Mary looks nothing like the archetypal grey-haired granny in a rocking chair (although she did break her leg badly last year).
Yesterday evening Chris and I went up to see my niece Liz and her husband Martin. All day long I had been working on a drawing of Rosie, their youngest child, which was to be a present for Martin’s birthday. Unable to frame the drawing in time for his birthday, I had taken a photograph and turned it into a card for him with the promise of the framed picture to come soon. Unfortunately, I was a day out – it was his birthday the day before – and instead, we should have gone to see my sister-in-law, whose birthday it really was, but by then it was too late. So we’ll have to see Fiona tonight and carry on with this day out birthday thing.
Even before sitting down in Lizzie’s lounge room she offered us a cup of tea, which we declined because we had only just finished our dinner and were full. Whilst we were all chatting Charlotte came down from the bathroom and I beckoned her to sit on my knee for a cuddle; she was in her pink pajamas, her hair was damp and she smelt of all things nice – like soap, shampoo and powder. The boys are of an age when they hate kissing and cuddling aunties but the girls, at one, eight and ten, are still a joy to hold. The average cuddle lasts about two minutes and then they are off. At the allotted time Charlotte dashed off to do some Kung Fu dancing but nobody took much notice and she disappeared into the kitchen.
Charlotte made rather a dramatic entrance back into the lounge. The eight-year-old stood coquettishly, her head at a beguiling angle to the side and her hands held together in front of her – she may even have coughed to get the attention of all. Once assured of everyone’s full attention she smiled and asked:
“Would anybody like a nice cup of tea?”
Mine was perfect – half a cup of very weak tea produced exactly as instructed.
It just goes to show that Supergran (the Matrix matriarch) is right after all. It appears that young children really do wonder if anyone would like a cup of tea. I wonder if that applies also to older children… l believe I shall be quite disappointed tonight at Rob and Fiona’s if my nephew Tom, aged twenty-three, doesn’t think to ask if we’d all like a nice cup of tea. And he can jolly well save our legs and take the “crocks” out to wash them up!
Chris and I had a hearty chuckle over the breakfast table this morning due to this joke from Roly.
The Blind Man and his Dog
A blind man went into a shop and started to swing his dog in circles above his head (which was quite a feat because the dog was a large Golden Labrador).
Rather alarmed at the antics of the blind man in his shop, the assistant went up to him. Whilst ducking and dodging the swinging dog he managed to maintain his usual professionalism and asked, as calmly as possible:
“Sir, can I help you?”
“No thanks,” the blind man replied, “I’m just looking around.”
