Much less crotchety today. Does that make me quavery? Semi-quavery? Or minimy? Or brevey? I felt light and brevey.
Which way is up and which way down from crotchety? It's up to me to decide. And all sense says that quavery is worse than crotchety and brevey is the best thing you can be. Semi-brevey for days when you're pretty good, and yet ironically semi-quavery is the worst. No one in the world, as yet, has ever been demi-semi-quavery.
Just a little riff for anyone out there, who like me, got 100% of their Grade V theory.
I was good at music in theory, but not in practice. Probably because I didn't practice. But there's been a couple of days in the London run when my trumpet playing has been quite good and I wondered if I should give up the comedy and join a brass band. I was aiming too low with the
idea of joining Dexys. I can do so much more.
Given how many puns I have done in this entry alone I think that maybe the brass band is the way forward.
Not only did I start the day by writing a
genius Warming Up (I write each day's entry on the next day usually, as any fule kno - never read the books, but loved the cartoons), but then managed to make a little headway with my book, before running six and three quarter miles and then getting into the car and heading to Leamington Spa (after a bath, I'm not a skank, well I am but I'm not a dirty skank, well I am, but I am a clean dirty skank with a semi brevey attitude - everyone should have at least a semi) for the first of two gigs I will be doing in the town this month. It was a lot of fun to do non-Headmaster's Son material and also mildly impressive to be able to do a good 45 minutes without using anything from my current show.
On the way to the gig I stopped at the services for a sandwich. There were sandwiches at the gig as it turned out and so it seems
Herring's Third Law is "As a comedian, whenever you buy and eat a sandwich on the way to the gig there will be sandwiches provided at the gig, but whenever you don't, there won't." That held true for Winchester. I will let you know if it continues to work. I am pretty sure it's immutable.
I went to the loo before I set off, and saw a poster for an insurance company, which I had seen before without realising that it was a clever double entendre. "Make sure it's covered before you leave," it proclaimed. I had assumed it had meant that you were insured to drive your vehicle, but then I realised it had a second ruder meaning, reminding whoever was pissing near the advert to ensure that they re-covered their exposed penis before heading back out to shop in Marks and Spencers. This was sound advice and good to see an insurance company is not entirely concerned with making money, but also interested in preventing urinating men from breaking public decency laws. It is easy to forget to cover your penis after you have finished micturation. I am always doing it. Though stronger advice would be to put your penis back inside your pants and do up your trousers. Merely covering your penis, especially with your hand, can lead to more problems than just having it hanging loose. In my experience.
So good idea insurance company, and thanks for trying, but your advice does not go far enough and I will be citing your advert in my forthcoming trial as being at best misleading.
But then my amusement at this hilarious pun (maybe the advert is what set me off) turned to disgust, as I observed that the poster in question had been positioned above the small boys' urinal. For any female readers it might be worth explaining that in a row of urinals, especially in somewhere like a service station where families will visit, a row of individual wall mounted urinals, will have one or two urinals further down on the wall for use of children and presumably adults of restricted growth. On some occasions I can join the later group. My legs are a mere 28 inches long (that's each, not added together) and in some pubs especially I will find the urinal has been mounted just a little bit too high for me to comfortably use. Alas pubs don't usually have a child urinal so I am forced to stand on tip-toes and strain and occasionally this leads to the unpleasant eventuality where one's member only just peaks over the top of the urinal and it can touch porcelain. And given what has touched that porcelain already this is not a nice sensation.
So if you ever see me using a boy's urinal, that is why. There's nothing funny about it and anyone who says there is and that I get off on weeing where a small child has just weed is lying.
Anyway that is by the by. I realised that the advert was placed above the small boys' urinal (principally used by small boys) and that it was making a crude innuendo about covering penises to children who might be just five or six years old. What had once seemed amusing, now appeared sinister and wrong. You can't joke to a child about covering and uncovering his penis. Nor about insuring him to drive - he is too young. Will no one stop this filth? Will no one think of the children?
I decided I should record this obscenity for wider consumption, so that people who hadn't seen it and wouldn't have cared less can take umbrage and get semi-quavery with indignation.
But I realised that to do this that I would have to stand in a public convenience, taking a photo of the small boys' urinal with my camera phone. Is that appropriate behaviour? How would I explain myself if challenged? There were other men around. What if one of them had been in a toilet with me before and I'd been forced to use the small boys' urinal due to the high mounting of the regular urinals and now he saw me taking a photo of a urinal in which children as young as 5 might have weed?
So I took the photo quickly, which is why it is a bit blurred. But was left in a quandary, that probably speaks volumes about the society we live in. In order to make my complaint known I had to do something just as (if not more) morally dubious.
But anyway to prove that that was why I was taking the photo, here is the blog entry that entirely explains my actions as innocent, so if anyone wants to press charges then they will have to contend with this evidence.
But if a 41 year old man can't take a photo of a urinal designed for small boys to wee in, in which many small boys have recently weed, then Al Qaeda has won my friends.
