50+ and proud of it.

Far too late in the day (so to speak) I've been tracing my family history. And, I've been doing really well - simply because my Mom is still around at 95 with a razor sharp memory for anything prior to rationing finishing (which, spookily enough, was nine months before I was born). She can remember her grandparents and consequently remembers the stories they told to her about their grandparents - which I think takes us back to about Henry VIII. Having researched the BMD Indexes and Censuses and found a few anomalies there were a few things that needed clearing up. We went to visit last weekend. "Hello Mom, can you tell us about your uncles and aunts?" "Yes, Uncle Harry was Mayor Of Wolverhampton and Uncle Frank's son, Norman was Mayor too at some point." "Wow, that real interesting, were you proud of them?" "Nope, bloody Labourites all of 'em, not like my friend Enoch 1 , he was lovely he was, he came to visit here once you know...&

This happened to my work colleague yesterday. He took the department's pool car into Kwik Fit (the tyre & MOT people) to get the tyre pressures looked at as the dashboard was complaining that one of them was low. The fitter drove the car into the bay whilst my friend waited in the waiting room next door. A few moments later, his iPhone rang. It was his girlfriend. "Where are you?" "In Kwik Fit, why?" "Are you alone?" "Yes, there's no one in the waiting room, why?" "Great! I thought we could have phone-sex..." Yeah, brilliant, he thought. "Go on you start." There was a slight pause and he could hear his girlfriend talking, erm, softly, but with the background noise from the fitting shop, he was unable to make it out clearly. After a longish period of barely audible whispering and then silence he assumed that her signal had gone. The fitter walked into the waiting room. "I just thought you'd like to know tha

Over the course of the winter we, like most other people, had very cold weather. Also, as a result of the previous heron debacle, I'd fashioned a crude temporary wire mesh cover for the pond. I also know for a fact that if you leave on the "water feature" (aka cheap filter from Argos) then the pond surface does not freeze, thereby not suffocating the fish below - which I no longer have. When I fitted (i.e. threw on top) the mesh I took one last look and saw no fish, not one. "Have you counted them?", "Yes, twice". I retired hurt, working out if the penalties for budgiecide was applicable to herons and resigned to restarting the pond in the spring. About a week later I heard an odd noise from the pond. The water flowing from the fountain was landing on the mesh and promptly freezing - forming a spectacular ice carving all the way to the pond edge and the excess running off into the garden. The result being that the pond had nearly emptied and the filte