Mr William is 'Sitting on the fence'!

Cover of Frank Sinatra

Good Morrow, dear Reader from yours truly,



Yes, believe it or not, everything I tell you is true, with no embellishment. Just like Rupert Murdoch and James, I have had it all verified in advance by my ‘bank’ of lawyers, well, in my case, one very twitchy lawyer. I tell him to relax, as my ‘poetic license’ is fully up to date!



It was difficult to choose a title for these diary meanderings, as so much has happened, but I came down on the ‘fence’ in the end. (Very painful! I needed anti-inflammatory pills. Very appropriate! Better get out of parenthetical hell..). You see, as you may recall, the neighbour threw up a fence and I nearly ‘threw up’! It’s all wonky and it’s so big it can be seen from space, like the Great Wall of China, only next-door’s is wooden (Just like his brain!). I feel like he’s put up a second ‘Berlin Wall’! A cold war is developing in my backyard. I sounded just like JFK there, didn’t I? I might have to get David ‘The Hoff’ Hasselhoff in to sing or something and sort out my ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco!



Anyway, until ‘The Hoff’ gets here, I tried my diplomacy skills. I told my neighbour that the fence was awful, that he was blockading me out and asked if he had employed cowboys. I gave him my sketch of what it should look like. He calmly said he would look into it. I think I’m a loss to the Diplomatic Service. Clearly that calmed things down and no shots were fired. Mind you, I’m sure I heard the sound of tearing paper, followed by muted shrieking, but my hearing, like the handwritten plan, is a little ‘sketchy’!



What can I tell you next? Oh yes, it’s good to say you’re from ‘Norn Irn’ (Northern Ireland to the uninitiated.), after Darren Clarke became the third Ulsterman to win a major in short order. These guys have ‘putt’ us in the limelight for the right reasons for a change recently. By the way, do you notice the way they warn you about ‘flash’ photography coming up on TV? Well, I know some have to take care, but I think the photographers are just showing off! ‘Flash’? Please yourselves, as Frankie Howerd used to say. I’m a bit of a photographer and bird-watcher. You’ll often find me behind a bush with my ‘box-brownie’ and a cloak over my head, trying to get the perfect shot of a rare ‘Greater-Crested’ tit! (It’s all in your own minds and anyway that misunderstanding has all been cleared up!) Yes, I like birds of all sorts. They even call me ‘The Cock of the North’, which reminds me that my favourite soup is Cock-a-Leekie. Yes, it really is called that. (You’re writing your own script again, reader?) Thing is, sometimes I ‘cry into my soup’, because they rarely serve it piping hot in restaurants. I’ve had the hottest stuff India can provide (Stop that!) and my mouth is made of asbestos!

Talking about birds and cocks (I’ve warned you about this!), my daft son-in-law had to look after the vicar’s chickens for a few days. Firstly, the dolt got a jolt off the electric fence. I hoped it might shock some sense into him, but alas… Then he brings me an egg as a show off trophy and it turns out to be the ‘china’ egg for the clocking hen. I could have ‘clocked’ him after I cooked it and it exploded all over my kitchen! He tried to say it was it was free range. What a twit!



Did I tell you my feet were hurting again? Went to the podiatrist after she got over her bout of flu. Just politely asked her if she was still infectious. You should have seen the glare. She needs to work on her ‘bedside’ manner! Took the feet to my doc, Ima Gunna-Killya, she said it was probably stress, then the nurse took more blood than Dracula after 5 days in the Sahara! Mind you, stress has been my daily bread for a while. There was the saga of the Saga car insurance. When the renewal didn’t arrive I feared that the misunderstandings about lampposts and minor collisions had blotted my copybook. Turned out to be an oversight, but I still have paid the price of a small house each year, just to stay on the road! I was so financially fraught that I allowed the son-in-law to buy my lunch. That will cost me dear down the line!



Next thing was the ‘oilman’ arrived just after dawn for my delivery. He said he waited till I opened my blinds so as not to disturb me and asked if I had enjoyed my lie-in! I thought if he didn’t want to disturb me, he could fax the oil or talk to me through a medium! Everyone’s a critic! Then there was the stress of a family funeral. The daffy son-in-law was doing the eulogy and guess what he did? Firstly, he accidentally e-mailed the rev my last diary entry, where I slagged him off for texting while ‘meeting and greeting’. Then he only goes and delivers the eulogy with his mobile switched on. Yes, it rang and he made light by saying it was the deceased asking him to get on with it. What a wally! Never mind the deceased, we all nearly died when the phone went off! It was a lovely service. They played the deceased’s favourite and most appropriate song at the end, Frank Sinatra, singing ‘My Way’. The church was packed. It was empty at the start, then ‘The Word’ got out! (Just my little pun). By the way, flowers intrigue me. They are like life. beautiful, but inevitably wilt and die; they bring joy and colour, but fade…many meanings…all good in the end?



Back from the maudlin and sublime to the ridiculous. A lady asked me if I had a ‘bob or two’. I said I was well endowed. She raised an eyebrow, but seemed impressed! I mentioned to my daughter that a 30 something had caught my eye (No, I hadn’t dropped my glass eye!) She hissed between clenched teeth that the young lady was younger than my granddaughter. I had to do some serious back-pedalling! Did I ever tell you about the nurse in a Dublin hospital when I was 18. I got my tonsils out, but she got more than that out for the bloke in the next bed. Now that is personal care. The good news for me was she sent me a saucy pic of herself, yes; she was in the ‘nuddy’. I kept it with me in the army in India. I was very popular with the guys when I passed that round, for a small fee! What a goer! Not Goa, although that was close by, I think.



Any road, got to fly, literally. Going with my daughter to my younger daughter’s and other ‘rellies’. My lady ‘what does’ did my suitcase packing and I’m waiting for the son-in-law to collect me. Hope it’s not like last time, when he forgot to remind me to lift my ticket and passport and we had to zoom back here and get it. We were virtually on 2 wheels at times and I had to close my eyes. He drove like a madman. Well, if the cap fits… Unlike me, he’s not a good driver. Wish me luck! I’m sure there was something I had to remember to bring with me…..!



Yours sitting ‘on the fence’, yet always ready for lift-off,



The blogging Gogfather

Mr William thinks 'Laughter is the Best Medicine'!

Image via CrunchBase

Good Morrow, dear and steaming Reader,




I imagine you, like yours truly is feeling the heat of mid-summer (Not that place called ‘Midsomer’ on TV where loads of ‘white’ people get bumped off weekly! Surely you can only get ‘bumped off’ once and how is there anyone left in the village?) My old dad loved the quip from an air hostess to a nervous passenger who enquired as to how often their planes crashed. “Just the once!” Boom, boom! Sorry, you get that kind of humour when you live in Belfast, where they don’t always use bricks to build houses! Anyway, I’m in a funny mood and I think the several hours of heat we get here annually may have gone to my head. You see, I reckon that laughter is the best medicine. I may be 87 and a little forgetful, but I get up every day, 6 hours before the dawn chorus, and look forward to every adventure. If anything goes wrong, I go into a tailspin and then laugh about it. That’s why my dopey son-in-law has lots to write about. I have the fun, and then tell him and he writes it down, although his poetic licence is fully up to date and he tries to protect the innocent and passing horses!



Any rate, so much has happened that I will race you through what it’s like in ‘PeepsWorld’. (Maybe I could open a theme park? Ladies might need a chaperone and a submachine gun though. Although, if you can walk faster than a tortoise, you could elude me!) Mind you, sometimes I need a chaperone or Lady Gaga’s bodyguards. The other day, I was ‘in the hands of the Philistines’ at a church lunch, when a lady took a shine to me. She wasn’t my type. You might say that if the lady is breathing she is my type, but the truth is I go for brains and inner beauty…oh and they need to be gorgeous and younger than my daughter! You should see the looks my daughter gives me when I say that. I’d better be careful what she puts in my Sunday lunch? Back to the lady on the rampage, well she said she worked in a cosmetics shop at my shopping centre. She was clearly trying to catch me in her ‘Venus Fly-trap’! I made a mental note to invest in some fly-spray and a ‘sandwich-board’ saying, “Clear off! My end is nigh!” By the way, a little joke; thing not to mention on first date; “My family are all bonkers, except me, of course!”



Talking about churchy things, I was leaving the church and was about to shake the rev’s hand and thank him for his very short sermon, when I noticed he was texting on his mobile phone. Charming, I thought! He’s supposed to be ‘meeting and greeting’. Let’s hope it was something important. Unless he does in fact have a ‘hotline’ to the ‘man upstairs’? Mind you, I had put him off his stride during the service. You see, it was a baptism and I can’t whisper. So he brings the nadger down the church for the punters to have a dekko, when I spotted its physog and said, “Cor, it’s right and ugly. Worse than Churchill!”(The great statesman, not the TV dog. I don’t know, though?) The rev nearly threw the ‘baby out with the bathwater’!



Back to domestic matters. I was in a bit of a ‘flap’, when my letterbox flap jammed. I became temporarily incommunicado. Got son-in-law to get off his behind and sort it, but he did that builder sharp intake of breath thing and muttered about it being tricky to sort. The builders next door are doing that a lot about the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ they are constructing. You might recall my concerns there? Now they have erected an enormous fence. Even Nadal or one of the Wimbledon grunters couldn’t hit a ball over that! I see too that Andy Murray has gone back to being Scottish again after Nadal knocked him out. I think Nadal just distracted him constantly by rearranging his underwear before each shot!



Talking of being incommunicado, I lost the ol’ voice the other day. The son-in-law, the smart ass one, said my larynx was like ‘thoracic park’. Thinks he’s funny, but not as funny as that jalopy he drives. Barely gets up a hill without a push. Why can’t he get a shiny, crowd-pleasing, babe-magnet, ‘peepmobile’ limo like mine? Mind you, the limo was Mr. William Shatnered on from a great height the other day, just after going through the carwash. I blame the ‘Shat-Nav’, as I call it, in tribute to Captain Kirk (Very ‘enterprising’!). It took my past the ‘wild bird reserve’. The gleaming car obviously caught the attention of thousands of birds (Nothing new there!) This time they formed themselves into a Dambusters/633 Squadron and dive-bombed me! I couldn’t see out the windscreen for a week!



Must finish as I’ve got a new classic book from the pound shop, “Bull-fighting in Bulawayo” (Find your inner ‘bull’) by a Senor Juan Cornetto. Also I have to get the TV engineer out again, as my ‘bin-lid’ dish thing has blown off again. Richard Branson keeps writing to me telling me my street is ‘Virgin friendly’ (What is he getting at and how does he know?) I might stick with the ‘devil I know’, which in my case is ‘Sky’! although sometimes they are ‘the limit’? (Joke, my lawyer seems to have had another funny turn!) Talking about limits, seems the only Olympic ticket you can get now is for the ‘Catching the Javelin’ event! Also bankers still being ‘merchant bankers’.. former Lloyd’s boss on 100k per month ‘gardening leave’. (Maybe he could finish off next door’s garden for me?), but he’s probably too busy buying those gold bars from the vending machine in Westfield Shopping Centre? At least that nice Chinese premier says they’ll ‘look at human rights issues in our own good time’. Sweet!



Before I go, did you hear that ‘shrinks’ in UK say over 65s should take very little alcohol or they’ll go bonkers or something. Spoilsports! Look at me, am I bonkers? Don’t answer that! Liam Gallagher has decided to start early and go teetotal. It might be too late already? By the by, is a bod with no idiosyncrasies idiot-proof? Anyway, off to hang up that picture above my bed. It’s entitled, “The Rising Sun”. I might try that chat-up line with that lady I’m after and ask her if she wants to see the ‘Rising Sun’ with me? Wish me luck! Remember, unless you believe in re-incarnation, you only get one go at life, so enjoy it and laughter is the best medicine!



Yours a little ‘pooped’ on yet very jaunty



The blogging Gogfather