Biting the Lager Queue

So much grass, so little time. It's why I haven't been blogging much. I wonder if my reader noticed? And when it's not the garden, it's something else. A neighbour wants me to construct the missing mechanism from a metamorphic sofa she is restoring. I went to see it yesterday. It was in a barn full of hens, and smelt like hen-poo. She said she would jet spray it before I started, but that it was a good, antique piece underneath. Memo: remember to jet-spray the antiques when I get home.

I'm reading Barbara Trapido at the moment, enjoying her love of linguistic quirks. I like these too. Song titles and lyrics are particularly ripe for misinterpretation. I think it was Denis Norden who referred to Malashkin's 'Oh, Could I but Express in Song' as the 'Buttocks Pressing Song'. Barbara T has her characters sing a round which goes, 'Life is butter, melon, cauliflower'. Work it out.

The other evening at dinner someone asked Megan what she'd like, and she replied, 'Shloer please', which sounded so like a viral infection that, after a moment's pause, everyone cracked up. I have a connected, and no doubt tiresome, habit of spoonerising phrases - transposing the initial letters. Sometimes the results work better than others, as on Saturday, when muttering that I was going to bite the lager queue.

This sort of reminds me of a laconic conversation I once had walking to school with Robin Waterfield (now an author and academic living in Greece), which may qualify as amongst the shortest on record. It was doing that halfway house between mist and mizzle. I said, 'S'wet'. Robin replied, 'S'not'.