Lesbian question has Sainsbury's canteen in uproar. Well, choking on their bacon sarnies maybe...
There were at least two audible tea splutters and a dropped fork in Sainsbury's this Saturday when our nine-year-old asked the question: "Mum, what's a lesbian?"
I nearly choked on my bacon sandwich while my wife, caught off guard, bought herself some time with a coughing fit as she scrabbled around her mind for a suitable answer.
Her big mistake, once she'd regained her composure, was to say: "Sorry darling, what did you say?" in the vain hope she'd misheard. ("A thespian you say, why it's another name for an actor." She wished ...)
His response was to repeat his question. Only louder.
At this point, the rest of the customers in the cafe put down their knives and forks, folded their arms and, stopping short of ordering popcorn and nachos, sat back waiting to hear how she was going to wriggle out of this.
Most parents, I suspect, have been on the end of the socially awkward but innocently-asked question before. I know I have.
Our Bradley, aged seven, shouting across a playground if I knew what "bum fun" was, being a particular favourite.
He was hanging upside down from a climbing frame at the time, reading the graffiti scrawled on the high bar.
He proceeded to bellow to all the mums and dads in the playpark what phone number I could ring for the aforementioned bottom-centred good time.
Back at the cafe, my wife, in her most politically-correct and child-friendly language, explained the term to our boy.
She ummed and erred her way through while he sat there blank faced, sucking on a Fruit Shoot.
"Oh," he responded when she eventually finished and quickly switched his attention to the far more interesting packet of Quavers he'd just opened.
Rather than enlightened, he was clearly disappointed to discover a lesbian was not, as he had imagined, a grotesque alien creature capable of scaring grown-men witless but something far less fearful.
Having said that, he's hasn't seen Pam St Clement playing Pat on EastEnders.
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"What I'm sick of," wrote B Crute, of High Barnes, in the Echo this week, "is Heather Mills always bringing to the attention of the media, in one way or another, the loss of her leg.
"It doesn't matter what she does or where she goes it always comes up somewhere along the line."
Yeah. And if she's not harping on about her leg, she's bleating about that bloke she used to be married to. You know? Him what was in the Beatles.
It's time she moved on and simply got on with the business of being plain old Heather from Washington. How much more interesting she would be if she hadn't lost her leg or ever met that McCartney fella in the first place.
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Funeral pyre campaigner Davender Ghai has won his right to be burned to a crisp in the open air.
Good for him, but I sincerely hope his grieving loved ones will be better than me at starting fires.
We have a wood burner in our dining room which has, as advertised, proved to be great for the environment – because I can't get the ruddy logs to burn.
It takes at least 40 minutes, 10 boxes of matches, four newspapers, eight fire-lighters, two bags of kindling and a gallon of lighter fluid just to get a gentle glow from a single log. Turn your back for a second and it goes out.
And that's doing it indoors. An outdoor funeral pyre in Elswick on a wet October afternoon may not be the blazing spectacular send off Davender is hoping for.
I suspect he won't so much be cremated, as poached.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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