Laghouat

I was one of the lucky ones.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,
then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you,
for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Hemingway

If anyone who thinks that bungs do not exist lives in cloud cuckoo land. Even my handicapped daughter expects a bung (£1) whenever she sees Gunther, a friend.

If it needs a Lord to make a judgement then I just cannot believe it, and what will his bill amount to?

This would apply to the staff of Poole Potteries which announced their closure today.

Dear Employee,

As a result of the reduction of money budgeted for department areas, we are forced to cut down on our number of personnel. Under this plan, older employees will be asked to take early retirement, thus permitting the retention of younger people who represent our future. Therefore, a program to phase out older personnel by the end of the current fiscal year, via retirement, will be placed into effect immediately.

This program will be known as SLAP (Sever Late-Aged Personnel). Employees who are SLAPPED will be given the opportunity to look for jobs outside the company. SLAPPED employees can request a review of their employment records before actual retirement takes place. This review phase of the program is called SCREW.
SCREW (Survey of Capabilities of Retired Early Workers). All employees who have been SLAPPED and SCREWED may file an appeal with upper management. This appeal is called SHAFT (Study by Higher Authority Following Termination). Under the terms of the new policy, an employee may be SLAPPED once, SCREWED twice, but may be SHAFTED as many times as the company deems appropriate.

If an employee follows the above procedure, he/she will be entitled to get: HERPES (Half Earnings for Retired Personnel's Early Severance) or CLAP (Combined Lump sum Assistance Payment). As HERPES and CLAP are considered benefit plans, any employee who has received HERPES or CLAP will no longer be SLAPPED or SCREWED by the company.

Management wishes to assure the younger employees who remain on board that the company will continue its policy of training employees through our Special High Intensity Training (SHIT). We take pride in the amount of SHIT our employees receive. We have given our employees more SHIT than any company in this area. If any employee feels they de not receive enough SHIT on the job, see your immediate manager.

Your manager is specially trained to make sure you receive all the SHIT you can stand. And, once again, thanks for all your years of service with us.

This is what the weather reminded me of this morning when my car heater wouldn't work and I had no scraper to clear the windscreen:-

WHEN icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

It's pleasant to dream of those faraway places again , I still have itchy feet and I expect , in a mad moment to get up and go. The only trouble is once I am there I'm still not content, plus I have spent a lot of dosh.

I am not being facetious, but does anyone know where to get, and what it's called, the slippery powder that you can put on dance floors?
This is for the slow, slow, quick quick slow type.

A few years ago when I was short of money and it was nearly Xmas. My buddy at the time suggested that there was money to be made in plucking turkeys, so I ventured forth to the turkey farm. I don't remember who drove us there. Anyway suffice it to say, there we were ready to pluck.

To pluck turkeys you need a pair of pliers to get the big wing feathers off, not only that the turkeys have to be as warm as they can be so they were killed with an electric shock tool stuck down their gullets.

It took me half an hour to to pluck onr female, the males take longer.

If anyone tries this,it's OK but you have to be a bit hard up to try it.

Hugh

I half-listened to that fanatic Olmer, who is nothing but a low life.

My brother Kenneth has today sent me a 200ml bottle of sloe gin, he picked the berries locally in Kilwinning where he lives, and made the resultant liqueur.
This is guaranteed to get up my wife’s nose when she knows that I now have the well-wrapped package . She dislikes Kenneth and she dislikes me having alcohol.
I could have a slug of it right now. But no I’ll weaken and let Diana have the lot.
Any thoughts?

In a recent blog a friend mentioned drying their hands on a dish towel instead of a hand towel.

There are people who store their coal in the bath,it seems a reasonable place.

Too short.

When in Egypt we would play (at) bridge of an evening with American friends. When asked if the husband played the short club opening his reply with his strong southern accent was
“sometimes ah do and sometimes ah don’t”
A well known person was playing bridge and being not being very successful with his bidding,
said to Goren , “How should I have played that hand?”
Goren’s reply was, “Under an alias”.

This was quite interesting, my work was at the inlet end of a gas compressor station at Marsa el Brega, not too far from Benghazi. The gas was pumped to the receiving end near Tripoli. The contractors were Russian, and how they ever got into space baffles me. They were useless apart from one or two of the hands-on men. I also had an interpreter called Tanya.
I was in hospital there. I had had a deep vein thrombosis in Egypt. All was not well, but when I think of the hospital where they were jack-hammering the operation theatre which we were all pleased about, which meant at least they couldn’t operate.
We had to provide our own food so my friends would pass by and have to throw the packages up to the balcony where I collected them.
There were a lot of other nationalities there, but one thing which I think about was when we had a dust storm. The doors blew open with the wind so the walking patients man-handled this fellow’s bed to keep the door shut, unfortunately he had received an injury to his neck and was in agony.
I did get out and back home to a not much better welcome.

Can someone tell me what a meme is ?please.

It appears that it's reckon that it's all up to the shape of the sink, although I don't know. I checked Google. See if anyone can come up with a decent answer.

Does the water go straight down the outlet when you live on the equator?

Hugh

How’s about Nassau in the Bahamas? This was some fancy place. I worked for one of Sir Harold Christie’s firms, the Nassau Engineering Company, I lived in Nassau for 4 years and have stacks of stories to tell. The trouble is they are a bit out of date. Let’s put it this way I had a helluva good time in Nassau and the Out Islands. I met some wonderful people and memories of those people stay with me.

There is one thing which nobody can steal and these are memories.

The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

I used to work here

Khartoum and all that, General Gordon,Omdurman, etc.,Wad Medani,
I worked in Sennar in the south of the Sudan, on the construction of a sugar plant,
And I suppose that’s it.

I have this problem that I have interesting stories to relate, but am not able to.