Archive for September 17th, 2007

Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est

Grandad September 17th, 2007

I HATE BOOKKEEPING

Got that?

I have been doing my accounts all day and I’m sick of it. I have had enough.

So here’s the deal…………..

If I owe you money, the cheque is in the post. OK?

If you owe me money, I want it by the end of the week.

Or you’ll be getting a visit from Tiddles.

tiddles.jpg

There.

That wasn’t too hard.

Bookkeeping finished.

Who says blogging isn’t good for business?

Read the small print

Grandad September 17th, 2007

I just received a nice letter.

It was from Internet Register Ireland.

Interestingly, this company is also called DAD [any relation, I wonder?] and is registered in Holland.

Anyway, they want to include my site in a directory. All I have to do is confirm the details, sign it and send it back in the pre-paid envelope. Nice.

I read the small print -

scam.jpg

[actually, it's a bit bigger than that, but if you click it you'll see]

That is quite a lot of money to spend to be listed in a directory I’ve never heard of?

So I searched the garden and found one of Sandy’s turds. It was nice and squishey, and had a fine blue-green hairy mould on it. It was quite pungent. I put it in a plastic bag and sent it to Internet Register Ireland in their pre-paid envelope.

I hope they read the small print.

making a point of not being English

Grandad September 17th, 2007

I haven’t mentioned my mother much to date.

There are reasons for this that I won’t go into.

My mother was English and proud of the fact. Despite the fact that she lived in Ireland for the best part of 60 years, she always managed to retain the English accent, and would always listen to the BBC rather than RTE.

From the day I spoke my first words [I think they were 'f*ck off'?] I had English expressions and intonation drummed into me. After all, I couldn’t grow up like the coarse Irish peasents around me, could I?

This was all well and good [I didn't know any better], but things changed when I went to school. Back in the fifties, history was taught in a very unbiased manner in Irish schools - the Irish were downtrodden heroes and the English were a bunch of marauding invading imperialistic bastards. The teachers loved telling us about the Plantations and the Famine. They taught us expressions like “burn everything British except their coal”. I had a very balanced education.

However, because I had quite an English accent by that stage, I got a lot of stick. Or rather, I go a lot of compass.

compass.jpg

My classmates used to take great delight in waiting for some anti-British lesson to come up, and then they would whisper nasty things at me and then ram a compass into me.

I got the point.

I had to rapidly become more Irish than I actually was. I had to develop a thick Dublin accent and curse the Bloody Brits in every second sentence I spoke. It was a matter of survival.

I have matured [a little] since then. The thick Dublin accent is gone. So too is the English one. I bear no ill will towards the British. What happened in the past is ancient history. But when someone asks me if I’m English, I subconsciously wait for that sharp pain in the buttocks.

So if you want to instil a nationalistic fervour in your children - you can’t beat a jab of a compass up the arse.