Dinnerplates for her Cats

What with it being a light and sunny midsummer's evening and all I was going to amble round to the new bar/delicatessen/not-post-office-actually-thank-you and avail myself of a couple of bottles of something cloudy and probably Belgian, all the better to sit in my backyard and watch the sun setting over the continental Superstore. But I'm running scared of being inveigled into another pop quiz and having my inability to distinguish 1980s Top Ten songstresses from one another paraded before le tout Levenshulme, so I am instead contenting myself with something fizzy and massproduced and Polish from the latenight off-licence across the road (the one run by the musclebound Jamaican bloke who converses in 90mph patios with the regulars (well not with me, with the regulars who can understand 90mph patois) and who has a tiny portable TV set secreted under the counter to watch the soaps on (Emmerdale Farm being his avowed favourite).

I nearly didn't make it to the Jamaican off-licence in time because I foolishly spent the best part of 10 hours at work (the last hour and a half of which was spent trying to write a tricky and strategically vital email, and failing, because I'd used up all my energy during the previous 9 hours on tidying up my files and other futile displacement activity). I had another 10 hour day on Tuesday (which also wasnt as productive as it could have been, because I arrived at a meeting a full hour early and was forced to wander round the streets of Old Trafford, eventually alighting on a bustling Wetherspoons named The Bishop Blaize in the shadow of the football ground where I read a freshly-purchased Guardian, nursed a half a coke and watched Arsenal's Jack Wilshere being interviewed on Sky Sports News on fifteen televisions all turned to mute).

This weekend was a bit on the busy side as well, featuring the summer fayre at Frank's school, where me and Charlotte reprised our role as proprietors of the bric a brac stand. It pleasingly followed the exact pattern of previous years, complete with scorching sun, an early appearance from the Eccentric Old Lady Who Buys Dinnerplates For Her Cats, and hitsquads of Well-to-Do Asian Ladies haggling furiously over unwanted wedding present teasets still in their boxes. A bloke in his twenties dived upon a 'Carry On Camping' mug like it was the Elgin Marbles and looked very pleased indeed with his 50p bargain. An ashtray featuring Elvis Presley in his Las Vegas period went for a similar price. Myself, I picked up (and paid for, in case the committee is listening) a kitchen timer shaped like a boiled egg to replace the one shaped like a chef which I bought last year and which broke into pieces when it fell off the cupboard.

And that, I think, is where we are up to. I'm off to the backgarden to watch the sun fall over the A6, but before I go a question from Frankie, who has become suddenly obsessed with Gases And Their Properties. What would happen (the boy would like to know) if you filled yourself with helium?

Answers in the comment box please.

Comments

[Tim]

Too alarmed at the thought of 90mph patios to contemplate the helium question. Erm. You'd float away and by the time you popped - floating too close to the sun, etc. - only the birds would hear your squeaky distress and would laugh at you. A pretty rotten demise.

[looby]

I'm not sure but it sounds like fun.

I'd have had a similar attitude towards the Carry on Camping mug myself. I once clamped my hand greedily around a sexist Bamforth postcard mug featuring two well endowed young ladies working in a nursery,a horticultural job which requires the wearing of tight blouses and short skirts, who are somewhat alarmed to hear the manager shout "A couple here ready for bedding Bill!"

[ISBW]

If you filled yourself with helium, you would sound like Geddy Lee for ever and ever and ever.

[Cocktails]

Judging from my experience of both helium and balloons recently, all would be happy and dandy at first. You would bob around perkily and be immensely popular with all but the most callow people. Then suddenly it happens, just when you're starting to look a bit saggy and neglected but still ok you know really, you're wrenched from your special post by a bunch of teenage boys who think no one is looking and who then proceed to attempt to kick you down the street.

Life, eh...

[Nexus John]

You would float higher and higher 'til the air became light and the magnet of gravity brought you back safely to Earth.