a word in your ear

dear readers, here you have an action shot. it is not immediately obvious what the action is but believe me, a lot of action was involved. yesterday, herself was just putting away the hoover, after cleaning up the chaos caused by her re-covering my chair and mending our dogbed again, when the phone rang. it was himself.

"i'm in the pub," he said, "do you want to come and join us?" it appeared that himself and mr snake-charmer had been so exhausted after running after-school football club at the school where they work that they could not quite make it home and had to seek refuge in the local hostelry. with them was the young snake-charmer, still in her school uniform. herself and my boy did not need asking twice. herself had quite a thirst after all her exertions with the dogbed and my boy is great friends with mr snake-charmer, who laughs at his often rather opaque jokes.

the pub in question is one which allows dogs, but young dave is under-age so we agreed to stay home and try out the new furnishings. however, as always, the peeps filled us in when they returned. no sooner had herself and my boys been furnished with drinks than my boy started causing strife.

"i'm going to count how many words there are on this beer mat," he announced. the beer mat in question had quite a lot of words as it was telling people not to drink and drive. why anyone would think it was a good idea to get behind the wheel of a car after ingesting a substance that makes the room go round is beyond me, but i digress. within minutes everyone round the table (with the exception of herself, who cannot count, so photographed it instead) was arguing about how many words there were on the beer mats. mr snake-charmer is my boy's smiths teacher so he has a certain authority in the field of numbers. but it soon transpired that my boy was playing a prank.

"my devillish plan worked!" he said, triumphantly. you have to admire him. within 30 seconds he had everyone round the table counting the words on the beermats. and this was before drink had been taken.

herself, fearing all-out war, changed the subject by telling the snake-charmers about paneity. this did nothing to calm things down. mr snake-charmer felt that if someone were to find themselves turned into a loaf of bread, the last thing they would be doing would be contemplating the nature of breadness. herself tried to explain that it was a philosophical concept but was drowned out by the assembled crew discussing what they would do if they were suddenly enbreaded. views ranged from accepting the situation with good grace, and embracing one's fate, to finding someone to eat you and put you out of your misery. mr snake-charmer, in spite of his initial scepticism, could not resist contemplating different categories of breadness, and even did a rather wonderful impression of a miserable sweaty white loaf in a plastic bag on the shelf of a happy shopper store.

seeing that discussing breadness was not helping, herself changed the subject again by hooking out her notebook, where she had fortuitously asked the young pirate to write down some other wonderful words.

"how about sesquipedilian?" she asked. it transpires that this is a long word meaning long word. at least i think that is what it means. my lurcher brain was not really designed for abstract thought. my boy seemed to think it meant foot-and-a-half-long.

"or petrichor?" piped up herself. this word i like. it means the smell of the earth after rain. i like this smell. it usually means a walk is in the offing.

alas, a walk was not in the offing when the peeps returned. the rain was so torrential that even young dave and i did not fancy venturing out in it. but today i am looking forward to sniffing a bit of petrichor...