KEEPING IN TOUCH

The welcome return of our errant Naked Kayaker has brought great relief to his Burrow friends, who were becoming quite sick with worry over his unaccustomed silence.

Why he went offline for so long is his own private business, and it isn't for us to pry. But knowing that Zola, Anticant, and some of our other regular blogging friends suffer from ongoing health problems, we in the Burrow would like to suggest that when any of us intend to stop blogging for a while we should post a note to this effect on our own blogs so that our friends won't be having nightmare scenarios about our being at - or through - death's door.

Welcome back to the Snug, Zola! Ben is serving fee drinks all round, Mrs Malaprop has donned a brand new pair of woollen stockings, and the Beadle has promised to turn a blind eye to a little discreet knicker waving. Dame Barbara has embarked upon a new epic, Paddlers' Paradise, involving intrepid canooing and canoodling in the Arctic, polar bears, virgins marooned on ice-floes, etc. etc. Order your discount advance copy NOW!

TALE OF TWO [FAT?] NUNS

It now seems that Pimpernel Zola has been hobnobbing - or nob-hopping - with two fat ladies, and is well oiled. [See his site.]

This tall tale reminds Ben of the following recent gleaning from the ether:

"A drunk is staggering down the road when two nuns are walking in the opposite direction.

As the nuns approach him they wonder which way to walk to avoid him as he staggers.  The road is busy so they can't walk off the pavement, so they decide to separate, with one going each side of him.

As they pass the drunk he stops.  Then after a moment he turns around, stares at the nuns, and says:

"How the f__k did she do that?"

BURROW NEWS

Since returning from his brief holiday in mid-September, Anticant has attended five outpatients' clinics at different hospitals - two for 'procedures' - and several more loom between now and Christmas [including yet another unpleasant 'procedure' at the end of this month].

All this makes him feel his new, octogenarian, age and is not conducive to skipping the light fantastic inside or out of the Burrow. We therefore ask our Snug 'regulars' and other friends to be patient while more energy is generated for creative invention. Even Dame Barbara is suffering from writer's block at the moment. Pink gins are at a premium.

There is still no news from Zola, who has been AWOL for over two weeks now. We trust that all is well with him, and look forward anxiously and eagerly for further tidings. Ben, the Beadle, and Wooffie would gladly sally forth bearing brandy and other comforts if they knew which direction to head in, but even Miss Marple is more clueless than usual. Only Mrs Malaprop is keeping her head above water, cossetting Anticant and the Dame and keeping a wary eye on the Crafty Chambermaid.

ZOLA ALERT!

Zola has not been online for nearly two weeks now and his friends in the Burrow are becoming increasingly anxious as he has not responded to an email enquiring if he is OK.


Dear Zola, if you see this PLEASE post either on your own site or here, and let us know that all is well with you.


And if anyone else has news, or means of contacting Zola, please report back.

ANTICANT IS 80

Today I’ve been on this planet for eight decades. Survival is worth celebrating, I suppose, and a couple of years ago I didn’t think I would last this long. But I’d rather be 40 than 80, and I don’t expect to reach 90. So the question is: how best to spend the relatively brief remainder of my life?

Eric Berne, the wise ‘father’ of Transactional Analysis, once said that the most important problem every human being has is how to pass the time between being born and dying. In the wicked world we are living in, far too many people don’t have much choice in the matter, and the majority of those who can choose make what to my mind are some pretty rotten choices.

One choice I am making on this birthday is to spend less time in future on the supposedly serious blogosphere. I’m getting increasingly fed up with the ceaseless outpourings of anger, intolerance, and irrational opinion which clutter up so much blogging, and in particular the inability – or unwillingness – to follow a line of discussion through without veering off into irrelevant and intemperate rants and slanging matches. We are living through a self-tormented period when what Jung called the ‘dark shadow’ seems to have taken over the bulk of humankind, who purblindly see nothing but good in themselves and project all badness onto the supposedly demonic ‘other’.

With such almost universally one-sided views being peddled from conflicting standpoints, and so little inclination to compromise, I’ve almost given up hope of finding much constructive thinking or sensible answers on the internet [or anywhere else] to the increasingly menacing self-made plight of humanity, and reluctantly conclude that as the lunatics and thugs are well on the way to taking over the global asylum, there’s not much point in bashing my feeble brains around serious issues in the few short years I may have left to me.

Anyway, I’ve said most of what I want to say in previous posts, so anyone interested in my views can browse the Arena archive. No doubt I’ll be popping up every now and again in Anticant's Arena, but mostly I shall indulge in sheer escapism by frolicking in my Burrow, which I increasingly find a much more congenial place than the real world.

AH, BELLA ITALIA!

During the court adjournment, Ben fished this out of the internet joke pond:

A woman goes to Italy to attend a two-week company training session.

Her husband drives her to the airport and wishes her to have a good trip.

The wife answers, "Thank you honey, what would you like me to bring for you?"

The husband laughs and says, "An Italian girl!"

The woman kept quiet and left.

Two weeks later he picks her up at the airport and asks, "So, honey, how was the trip?"

"Very good, thank you."

"And, what happened to my present?"

"Which present?" 

"The one I asked for - an Italian girl!!" 

"Oh, that," she said, "Well, I did what I could; now we have to wait for eight months to see if it's a girl." 
 

WOOFFIE'S EVIDENCE

Wooffie lurched into the witness box, hiccupping slightly. When told by Dame Barbara to bark once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’, he nodded blearily.

‘Now, Wooffie’, said Dame Barbara, ‘do you recognise the defendant?’. Wooffie barked once.

‘Do you trust her?’ Two barks.

‘Have you been keeping an eye on her?’ One bark.

‘Have you watched her through bedroom keyholes?’ One bark.

‘Oh, the treacherous hound!’ exclaimed the Crafty Chambermaid.

‘Did you see her rummaging under beds?’ One bark.

‘And was she concentrating on her cleaning duties?’ Two barks.

‘Did she remove any items of Miss Marple’s and Mrs Malaprop’s personal belongings?’ One bark.

Cross-examined by Miss Marple, Wooffie indicated that he had followed Dorcas into Burrowville, and had sneaked after her unobserved into the saloon bar of the Anticant Arms, where she was joined by a man who Wooffie identified as Snoopy Scribbler. Pretending to be asleep, Wooffie had seen, out of the corner of one eye, Dorcas talking into a tape recorder and then putting a large bundle of bank notes into her apron pocket.

Asked how he felt about this, Wooffie suddenly vomited and was hastily ordered by Dame Barbara to leave the witness box.