Friday, September 04, 2009

Coming soon... and a joke.

Coming soon...


... sloe gin.

Quite a busy day. Walks and lots of purposeful talk with Rosie and Porridge. Well, Rosie and I had purposeful talk, and maybe Mol and Porridge did too. Then warm enough to sit outside with A and C and the Quiet American, who gave me copies of The New Yorker which I've never read, and we lent him Matthew Glass's quite bouleversant 'Ultimatum', which I finished in the hairdresser (during my thrice yearly visit) yesterday because I had to wait and for once I wanted them to take a bit longer fussing over the highlights of the woman next to me because my heart was thumping and I needed to know how it was going to end.

A and C have grown the best cherry tomatoes I've ever tasted, and we ate loads of them with our wine.

So only time to share a joke. Sparky electrical nephew-in-law told it when I was over there, and then I remembered it this evening.

Baby Balloon always sleeps in his mum and dad's bed. Dad decides enough's enough of this, and says it's time for him to sleep in his own bed now. Baby Balloon trudges forlornly off to his own bed, but wakes in the night sad and lonely, and wants to be in bed with mum and dad again.

He creeps into their room, and sees that they are sleeping very close and there really isn't a lot of room for him, then has an idea. Ever so carefully, without waking them, he unties their knots, and lets a little air out of each of them, then does the same to himself, and finds he can snuggle in between them quite comfortably.

But in the morning when they wake up, and Daddy Balloon sees what he's done, he looks at him with disappointment.

'Son,' he sighs 'you've let me down, you've let your mother down, and what's more, you've let yourself down.'

And so to bed. Goodnight.

9 comments:

julie said...

Cute :)
I've been wanting to say, I love your photos this week! And this one is no exception. I look forward to visions of sloe gin...

HLiza said...

Ha ha ha..

Zhoen said...

Ha.

Have you read The Quiet American? It's quite good.

Are you going to make gin in your bathtub?

Rouchswalwe said...

Why doesn't anyone ever think of making fast gin?

The Crow said...

HA! Good joke, Lucy.

:)

PurestGreen said...

The joke made me groan. Nice one for a Saturday morning (for that is when I am reading). The wine and cherry tomatoes sound divine.

Lucy said...

Thank you all for your forbearance.

It has occurred to me to make a study of how much English humour is based on the subversion and manipulation of phrasal verbs, and to wonder to what extent this humour works with non-native speakers of English...

I will make the gin in a large spring clip jar; I might drink it in the bathtub. Fast gin is tempting, but the more time you leave it to macerate the better.

I confess I have read very little Graham Greene, and have only seen the film of The Quiet American, which I enjoyed; Michael Cain was very good, I thought. I refer to our QA as such because otherwise he has the same initial letter as another friend, and it describes him quite well.

However, though he intrigued Rosie on one occasion by speaking rather darkly of how he'd lived and worked in far-flung locations on 'American Government business...', and though he was working behind the scenes in Vietnam at one time in a non-military capacity, his actual work was in aid and development, and he probably wouldn't care for the epithet, as he dislikes the Agency with feeling, since, he says, they intruded on, compromised and endangered his people.

As far as I know he doesn't read here.

Roderick Robinson said...

Only read a little bit of Graham Greene? For shame. Try one of his shortest and funniest (and possibly his obscurest): Loser Takes All.

Joky anecdote. We were returning from a holiday Yugoslavia in 1965 and had saved bags of spondulicks which we decided to blow on a meal out in Paris (La Chaumière in Les Halles, since you ask; both now alas a distant memory.) Prior to this my brother decided he needed a haircut. The hairdresser said he needed a shampoo first and arranged his head leaning backwards over the sink with a curious board arrangement to conduct the water away. The board worked imperfectly and when my brother stood up there was huge arc of dampness below the collar of his mohair suit jacket. This caused him to become quite cranky. Oblivious, the hairdresser said: "And now monsieur you look like a new man." My brother surveyed himself in the mirror, "Aye, a bluddy Frenchman." No tip.

Meggie said...

Hideously, I feel, I laughed aloud at the poor deflated balloons. Then I thought about the strange fact that most of our egos could stand a bit of let down! which, somehow is even funnier!