"... hot enough to boil a monkey's bum"

"Third Bruce: Blimey, it's hot in here, Bruce.

First Bruce: Hot enough to boil a monkey's bum!

Second Bruce: That's a strange expression, Bruce.

First Bruce: Well Bruce, I heard the Prime Minister use it. "It's hot enough to boil a monkey's bum in here, your Majesty," he said, and she smiled quietly to herself.

Third Bruce: She's a good Sheila, Bruce, and not at all stuck up."

My hat is duly doffed to the chaps of Monty Python ...

to doff. A verb that doesn't get enough of an airing these days I feel. Since those halcyon days of hat wearing, when doffing was the bane of a persons life, the verb has seemingly sidled into an anonymous siding, like the fat bloke on the team who's forever shouting out his team-mates names in the hope of getting the ball, only to be passed it in a prime goal scoring position and then shy maniacally at it only to see it miss by a margin that was more than was humanly possible to imagine given his proximity to the goal line.

Not really I know, but still, we'll let the analogy pass.

Write to your local ombudsman; petition your MP ... "Doff, because your worth it."

A thought for a Thursday post-meridien: if you can doff your hat, and by association your clothes, does that mean that dedoffing is putting them on in the first place? "I dedoffed this morning but managed to put my pants on back to front.", "I had to dedoff in the dark which is why I'm wearing odd socks."

Odin's day

You've got to love the cross cultural brilliance of what we in the west have adopted as the basis of our calendar system.

I mean is there anywhere in the world where Norse and Roman gods live side by side with egotistical Roman Emperors in a house whose walls are dictated by the universal wanderings of a large ball of flammable gases and a spherical lump of rock.

And to think that we wake up to this bizarre amalgamation every morning and barely even draw breath. In fact for the most part a minor gastric eruption is about as excited as we get, and even that seldom provokes comment.

What does it all mean?

Absolutely nothing, and that's the beauty of it.

There comes a time in every man's life, when he decides to inflict himself upon the collective global conscience, in a medium entirely foreign to those denizens of chronicling antiquity - Pliny, Pepys to name a couple - and in a manner that is both presumptious and egotistical. Presumptious because let's face it, without broadcasting that this exists, who in their right mind is going to either find it or indeed read it, and egotistical because it is all about me!

Who am I? That is a very good question. I am the person tapping this presently beige keyboard, filling this patch of virtual real-estate with little more than the cranial flatulence that is the by product of a mind such as mine. A mind that is at once over worked and under used. A mind who when lost in the folds of the A-Z of logical thought would prefer to amble directionless through the backstreets of partial lunacy.

What do I do? I attempt to educate ... make of that what you will. A hat. A brooch. A pterodactyl.

Where do I do it? Wherever I feel the urge. Presently in a boot shaped peninsular of European persuasion in the fashion capital of the world where bling is a byword for good taste and sunglasses are compulsory even in subterranean clubs at stupid o'clock in the morning.

Do you know me? How am I supposed to know that? Either you do, or you don't.

Time marches on it's stomach and so I must make like a heartless croquet fanatic, and post ...