Things that make you :)

[kevinlms]

But kept the default US spelling!

 

 

[franciswilliamwebb]

[Hroth]

33 minutes ago, franciswilliamwebb said:

 

Ideal for submitting samples to yout GP...

[sir douglas]

 

[KeithMacdonald]

Wallace and Gromit:

Vengeance Most Fowl

Everything you need to know about the new film coming this Christmas

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/articles/2024/wallace-and-gromit-vengeance-most-fowl

 

[Deeps]

7 minutes ago, KeithMacdonald said:

Wallace and Gromit:

Vengeance Most Fowl

Everything you need to know about the new film coming this Christmas

Well, at least there will be something worth watching (other than another screening, if we are lucky, of The Railway Children).

Edited 17 hours ago by Deeps

[The Johnster]

3 hours ago, franciswilliamwebb said:

 

Quite appropriate given my opinion of peanut butter.

[The Johnster]

2 minutes ago, Deeps said:

Well, at least there will be something worth watching (other than another screening, if we are lucky, of The Railway Children).

 

Trains and Jenny.  I've come over all unneccessary now, time for a cold shower.

 

One of my schoolteachers suggested that our juvenile erectile functions could be dealt with by 'a brisk rub down with a rough towel'.  Might have worked for him, but anything involving brisk rubbing was the last thing we needed...

[Hroth]

17 minutes ago, KeithMacdonald said:

Wallace and Gromit:

Vengeance Most Fowl

Everything you need to know about the new film coming this Christmas

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/articles/2024/wallace-and-gromit-vengeance-most-fowl

 

 

What I want to know is how come Gromit ends up clinging to the roof of a narrowboat half-hanging off the Pontywhatsit aqueduct in North Wales? 🤔

 

It'll be a must for Xmas viewing, given the utter carp that'll be available for viewing the rest of the time!

 

 

[The Johnster]

Utter carp being what they eat for xmas in Poland (and actually most of the Slavonic countries).  It is bought live about a week before and cornfed in the bath. 

 

But you're right about the tv of course, a new Wallace & Grommit will be the high spot.  The xmas special Gavin & Stacey might be worth a squiz as well...

[KeithMacdonald]

1 hour ago, Hroth said:

What I want to know is how come Gromit ends up clinging to the roof of a narrowboat half-hanging off the Pontywhatsit aqueduct in North Wales? 🤔

 

Pontcysyllte?

 

Gromit to the rescue, in pursuit of that dasdardly Feathers McGraw again?

 

Is Feathers McGraw from Wales?

[jcm@gwr]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

 

Trains and Jenny.  I've come over all unneccessary now, time for a cold shower.

 

One of my schoolteachers suggested that our juvenile erectile functions could be dealt with by 'a brisk rub down with a rough towel'.  Might have worked for him, but anything involving brisk rubbing was the last thing we needed...

 

It also depended on who was doing the brisk rubbing!

[The Johnster]

McGraw sounds like an Irish name to me.  According to the Irish, us Welsh are the Irish that didn't learn to swim; I prefer to think of the Irish as the Welsh that did.  Actually, we are different branches of ethnic Celtic, Brythonic and Gaelic (Goedelic). 

[The Johnster]

2 minutes ago, jcm@gwr said:

 

It also depended on who was doing the brisk rubbing!

 

Not really, not in my teens; pretty much anything would set us off, and 'brisk', and 'rubbing' would do so simply as thoughts.  All in the past for me after radiotherapy for prostate cancer, but I have some lovely memories.  On the other hand, I'm a bit like St Augustine of Hippo, who stated that, once old age had dampened his desires, it was 'like being unchained from a maniac'.  This was the early church hard-liner who'd come up with 'Lord, grant me celibacy.  But not yet...', suggesting there may be more story to tell.  He was known to be a purchaser of slave girls.

 

Then there's St David, our own Dewi Sant.  He used to stand naked up to his neck for hours at a time in a freezing river to 'calm the demons of the flesh' while being teased by local girls.  My reaction to this goes in two stages, like this; 'what a plonker!', then, 'hang on, hours, up to his neck, teased by local girls?  It took hours to calm his demons, in freezing water up to his neck?  What a guy!!!'.

[jcredfer]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

 

Trains and Jenny.  I've come over all unnecessary now, time for a cold shower.

 

One of my schoolteachers suggested that our juvenile erectile functions could be dealt with by 'a brisk rub down with a rough towel'.  Might have worked for him, but anything involving brisk rubbing was the last thing we needed...

 

Matron at the school I went to in Devon, had one of those large Kitchen serving spoons.  This was applied, with substantial vigour, should an inappropriate reaction be experienced whilst an injury required a massage / treatment in an area close to the privates.  It seemed to work very well and had the added benefit that, more caution in the participation of sport, reduced the rate of injuries of that nature.    😱

 

She was, otherwise a lovely, helpful lady.....

 

 

[Matt37268]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

 

Trains and Jenny.  I've come over all unneccessary now, time for a cold shower.

 

You should go for a little Walkabout… 😜

[jcredfer]

11 minutes ago, Matt37268 said:

You should go for a little Walkabout… 😜

 

Naughty, naughty boy, you're just trying to make it worse for him.....     🫢 

 

 

[Sidecar Racer]

 

 

 

[CameronL]

3 hours ago, The Johnster said:

juvenile erectile functions

I thought that meant building things with Lego.

[The Johnster]

Yes, he's not helping much even if all that stuff is just a memory, is he?

 

1 hour ago, jcredfer said:

She was, otherwise a lovely, helpful lady.....

 

Cue Doris, headmistress of the girls' grammar school next door to ours (separation was enforced by different break and overlapping lunch times, some of us thought girls were just boys with lumpy chests,  Now, Doris looked the part of someone who'd been there since before the war (this was the 60s) and she had, stern, tweedy, spinster-lady, old-school headmistress; they don't make 'em like Doris any more, and they didn't then, either. 

 

Story as told to me by Susan Maunders, one of her charges and a pint-sized bundle of fun, lovely girl.  Doris had occasion one morning in assembly to give her 'gels' (like I said, old school) the morality lecture, and made the mistake of using the line 'gel, remember that an hour of pleasure can result in a lifetime of shame', to which someone in the back, quite possibly Susan, she was more than capable of it, piped up 'please, miss, how do you make it last an hour'.

 

Our own headmaster, Bob Griffiths, equalled that some time later, again with an assembly announcement.  'Boys', he said, 'I am happy to report that I was approached yesterday by a 6th form girl'.  He never got any further and we never found out what the announcement was about; cheer, 'go on, sir', clapping from the assembled staff, wolf-whistles, mayhem.  Poor Bob just faceplanted, there was no more he could do.

 

As I say, the sexes were kept apart quite rigidly, except that the orchestra, choir, and a 6th form debating society called the 61 club were joint with the girl's school.  Guess what everybody, without exception, joined (despite which the choir wasn't actually that bad.  Orchestra was appalling!).  Our music master, Cliff Bunford poor sod, went on to become Head of Music at Llandaff Cathederal, and was highly regarded in local classical circles, and no mean keyboard player!

 

61 club was ahead of it's time, or rather exactly of it's time, debating stuff like 'This house condemns the police brutality shown at the legitimate Grosvenor Square war demonstration' (several of us, yours truly included, were there, I hid at the back with the nurses running the impromtu first-aid triage, hero of the revolution that I wasn't, but I saw plenty of blood.  The police were certainly breaking heads and beating people up in the backs of vans, but it should be remembered that they kept the protesters away from the Marines outside the embassy, who would have made Kent university look like a picnic),  and 'This house utterly condemns the NCB's mishandling of waste removal following the Aberfan disaster (this was genuinely disgraceful. as was the appropriation of disaster fund money by the NCB to carry out this work, though that came out later), and such open discussion did not sit well with authority, especially Bob, but the club survived, sedition or not.

 

It met at 7.30 on a Friday evening, at the school. and finished a 9, following which all in attendance decamped across the road to the Maindy pub, then called the Maindy but now the North Star.  We behaved ourselves and the landlord, who knew perfectly well we were mostly under 18, tolerated us.  It was here that weekends were sorted out, parties, picnics in summer, the beach, gigs, cinema, and where pairing up was done.  Not always in the general way; the collective decided that everybody needed to be paired, and without any input from either of us I was duly 'with' a girl called Janet Durnley.  She was a gentle soul, and good company, likeablej but there was never any real attaction between us, and I later found out that she resented the arrangement. though didn't blame me for it as I was as much a victim of it as she was.  She correctly asserted that our 'official' pairing had not helped our real search for boyfriends/girlfriends. 

 

And, talking to a girl called Mary Dodge who remembered me in a pub many years later, I discovered that this gentle soul was hell in hockey boots on the field, and had several broken shins to her credit...  Mary brings me back to Doris, because a lad called Martin Prosser (he was ok but nothing remarkable) got her up the duff. and she decided she was going to keep the baby and raise it on her own, which she did, and said she'd never regretted that decision.  Doris. who had of course seen it all before, now showed her true colours; completely non-judgemental and practically supportive, couldn't do enough for Mary and the baby, arranged special  tutoring to get her through A levels and into university including doing some herself, voluntarily, and was in general an absolute 100% brick for the girl, tweedy spinster or not.  Her parents were supportive as well, and remember there was still a fair bit of stigma around teenage pregnancies in 1969 especially for middle-class grammer school girls...

 

Since then, I won't hear a word against Doris!  Sorry, that turned into a bit of a ramble...

Edited 13 hours ago by The Johnster

[Stanley Melrose]

I had a brief flirtation with a girl when I was 18 or so.  She's just invited me to her 80th brithday party . . .

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, CameronL said:

I thought that meant building things with Lego.

 

No, that was the US knockoff of Meccano.

 

@The Johnster  You were lucky, our headmaster got religion and had his thoughts set on higher things than education.  A total waste of space.

 

[Sidecar Racer]

 

 

 

[Sidecar Racer]

 

 

[jcredfer]

2 hours ago, Stanley Melrose said:

I had a brief flirtation with a girl when I was 18 or so.  She's just invited me to her 80th brithday party . . .

 

Maybe there's hope for you yet.....