The Befouled Weakly News
5 July 2009 Good morning and I hope you’ve all had a most glorious Fourth of July weekend. After the numerous warnings of blizzards, gales and outlandishly treacherous winter weather warnings we have often made fun of, this week we enjoyed our first “heatwave” warning from the Met Office. Apparently, we were due to endure record temperatures with world-beating humidity and all the cattle, horses, old age pensioners and all manner of livestock would die of dehydration. Indeed the weather has been pleasantly warm throughout the week – a bit humid to be sure but otherwise perfectly acceptable. We did have a bit of rain on Friday and Saturday was a bit overcast but still very pleasant on the whole. Not sure what the point of the heatwave warning was but heck! We’re not complaining. As if the weather wasn’t sufficient to bring a smile to our eyes, on Wednesday we trekked down to Heathrow at the break of dawn to collect Adam, Sugar and a friend/colleague of Adam’s, Julia, on their arrival from Hong Kong. They have spent the last couple of days getting acclimatised before setting off on Monday on about a month’s tour of Europe. They will be visiting Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Venice, Rome, Geneva, Barcelona and then finally a somewhat more bucolic and relaxing end to the journey visiting our friend Joe Jefferies and his (by then) new wife Amandine in the south of France. Speaking of which, there will be no edition of the News next weekend – Ms Playchute and I shall be off to the aforementioned Joe Jefferies’ and Amandine Bories’ wedding in the south of France next weekend, an outing we are both looking forward to with immense pleasure and anticipation. We’ll let you know how it goes. Saturday we had a fine day and evening with much entertainment and amusement. We took Adam, Sugar and Julia to Radway and Edgehill and then, after the mandatory trudge up and down the hill, we made our way over to Burton Dassett for a picnic and some kite flying. Then, in the evening Beryl and Oz and Nick and Lucy made their way over for a barbeque of Sandy’s salmon pesto – as you can see!
I ran across the following on the BBC web site on Monday, the day the “heatwave” warning was issued by the Met Office. It’s an article explaining how to keep cool during the extreme temperatures. I won’t repeat the whole article – you can read it yourself here. The first piece of “advice” for beating the heat - paint your house white. As fast and efficient as Penny is, I don’t think that even she can get our house painted white by the end of the week. More on the MPs expenses scandal which, I have to confess caused a chuckle even though I would never condone direct action of this sort. It seems that a group of squatters has taken over and occupied the “main” home of an MP who lives in her “second” home which happens to be ten miles away (Remember, they are allowed to claim expenses for maintaining a second home so that they can be near Westminster). It’s actually the same husband and wife pair of MPs about whom we have written previously – he claimed one home as his “main” residence and claimed expenses for his “second” home; she claimed that his “second” home was in fact her “main” home but she was required to claim expenses for her “second” home which is, by a bizarre twist of fate, his “main” home. So, effectively, the tax payer has been paying their mortgage payments on both houses. It now turns out that they both live in his main/her second home and the other house, i.e., his second home/her main home, has been empty for more than a year. So, the squatters have moved in. You can read the full article here. As I said before, great work if you can get it. And finally, a good article in this morning's Guardian about the Tour de France which started yesterday. This year the organisers have put one of the most iconic mountain stages, the climb up Mont Ventoux, as the penultimate stage before the final day in Paris and the article is by an amateur rider who recently rode the same stage. Not sure that his article adequately conveys the pain and misery involved in riding up Mont Ventoux but you can read it here if you have such a desire. Yours, still avoiding the squatters in our first/main and, at the same time still remarkably cool and comfortable house in spite of the fact that it is not painted white during the oppressive and potentially lethal on-going British heatwave, Greg A husband stepped on one of those penny scales that tell you your fortune and weight and dropped in a coin. "Listen to this," he said to his wife, showing her a small, white card. "It says I'm energetic, bright, resourceful and a great lover." "Yeah," his wife nodded, "and it has your weight wrong, too." A married fellow gets home early from work and hears strange noises coming from the bedroom. He rushes upstairs to find his wife naked on the bed, sweating and panting. "What the hell's going on?" he asks. "I'm having a heart attack," cries the woman. He rushes downstairs to grab the phone, but just as he's dialling, his 4-year-old son comes up and says, "Daddy! Daddy! Uncle Ted's hiding in your closet and he's got no clothes on!" The guy slams the phone down and storms upstairs into the bedroom, past his screaming wife, and rips open the wardrobe door. Sure enough, there is his brother, totally naked, cowering on the closet floor. "You bastard!!" says the husband. "My wife's having a heart attack, and all you can do is run around the house naked scaring the kids?" The Dean of Women at an exclusive girls' school was lecturing her students on sexual morality. "We live today in very difficult times for young people. In moments of temptation," she said, "ask yourself just one question: Is an hour of pleasure worth a lifetime of shame?" A young woman rose in the back of the room and said, "Excuse me, but how do you make it last an hour?" Trying to do my share for the environment, I set up a trash basket at my church and posted above it this suggestion: "Empty water bottles here." I should have been a little more specific, because when I went to check it later, I didn't find any bottles in it. But it was full of water.
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