Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Indeed he would Spitty.

There is an ad out now for a spirit mixer (no, not a fella who hangs around with spooks), it states that three quarters of your drink is a mixer so why not use ours, it’s the best etc..

Now I’m not much of a spirit drinker these days, but when I did take a drop of whiskey it was taken with a small amount of spring water, and even at that old Paddy Farrell the innkeeper would gawk at me in shock and say “You silly young man!, it took 12 years to make that whiskey and there you go ruining it all by pouring water into it, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

Somehow I don’t think having three quarters of your drink lemonade or whatever is in the mixer, would go down too well in this country, maybe with the new generation of drinkers but not with the older ones, besides people think that the more you add to the spirit the less intoxicating it becomes, nonsense, if you buy a small whiskey and pour it into a pint of lemonade, you are still drinking a small whiskey because it’s in the same glass and ends up in the same stomach where everything is separated, the alcohol goes one way (to the brain) and the lemonade another, a mixer is only to take the rough taste off spirit drinks.

Another way to look at this is to take a pint of beer, beer averages about 4% alcohol, that means 96% of the rest of your pint is just a watery product, yet if you drank 5 pints you would be well on your way to happyland.

Before mixers in small bottles were thought of the publican would give you a ‘dash’ of lemonade for free, ask for more that a dash and you got a funny look and a snotty answer. They also had those large syphon bottles where one squirted in a splash of soda water, mind you I said a splash, not three times more than the good stuff already in the glass, that would completely drown it.

Ah well, times change, I never thought I’d see the day when folks would walk into a pub, sit down, and then pay through the nose for a round of water.
I wonder is there such a creature as a waterholic? I once knew a keep fit fanatic who drank 6 pints of water a day, he couldn’t face the day ahead of him without having his ‘fix’ of water before he left for work, no messin.

That reminded me of the waterholic’s song, remember this?

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Two things I will never know the answer to.

My mother’s father once told her a riddle when she was a very young child, she never got the answer to it as he went off to fight in the first world war, came back on a stretcher and died in hospital a few months later.
She repeated the riddle to my brother and me several times, maybe just to pass on the torment of never knowing the answer , but I remember every word of it, it went like this:
“If it took 24 yards of tripe to make a suit for Nelson, how long would it take a German sausage to walk a black pudding out of it’s mind?

The other one was not a riddle but a sort of warning from my father’s father, he was a grumpy old git, but he once lifted me up on his knee as a small boy and said.
“Jimmy me lad, let me give you a bit of advice, never trust a person called Melvyn”
That’s all he said, nothing else, I never knew what happened between him and Melvyn, I asked me granny, she didn’t know either, and she was his wife.
Thankfully so far I’ve never met a Melvyn of any description, let alone trust one, but I really would love to know what happened to my grandad to make him say such a thing to a small boy.




My missus can really snore, last night was particularly bad, she just hauls in the air like a giant vacuum cleaner and then lets it out again as a series of assorted weird noises, I even whispered a love verse into her ear to break the snoring cycle, but to no avail.
“Close your mouth and go to sleep
You sound just like a rusty jeep”

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Can you plant me in your garden Spitty? “I want to be a lawn”

Actually Greta Garbo insisted she never said that, what she actually said was “I want to be let alone”
Sort of like a rented lonely house.

There’s always some smart arse to come along and say this and that celebrity didn’t say this and didn’t say that, Bogart was not supposed to say “Play it again Sam” and Cagney never said “You dirty rat” Michael Caine never said “Not a lot of people know that” etc..
Why can’t they just leave it as it is, people don’t care if these quotes are word perfect or not, nobody is getting hurt or offended, so why not lay off, as my old teacher used to say to us when the quittin bell rang “Who said” “I go, you see me go?”, his answer was always the same “I did, just now” and he was out the door like a shot to catch his train home, he was one of the few decent teachers we had back then.

We have our own family crest as have most families, indeed many's the signet ring I engraved with chests I’m me day, our motto is in Latin but translated it simply means “Never depend on anything till you have it in your hand”.
Not a bad one, it avoids a lot of disappointment.
There are three fish featured on the coat of arms, no surprise to me, there have always been exceeding good drinkers in the family all down the line.

One old trick my great Uncle Dave would use in a bar was to bring up the subject of family mottos, then ask someone at the table what they’re motto was, when they spoke it he would say nothing and wait, after a while, the other fella would say to him “And what’s yours Dave?”
“Oh mine’s a large whiskey with a dash of peppermint please”

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

You are right Jem, I remember having disrupted the Class, my Teacher said "Spitty" why do you have to be so honest?
I would answer 50 years on, I dunno, it can take 50 years to reinforce the thought, no one has the facts.

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Now, no one has the Fax.

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Ah yes remember the fax thing, big deal when you had a fax machine.
It seems they are making a comeback, fair enough, lets hope they don’t bring the Yuppies back with them, what a shower of gobshites they were.

“Are fax machines obsolete?
The fax machine is a symbol of obsolete technology long superseded by computer networks — but faxing is actually growing in popularity. ... It turns out that in many cases, faxing is more secure, easier to use and better suited to existing work habits than computer-based messaging.Mar 10, 2019” Wiki.

Best to give the streets time to air before you venture out, you never know what could hit you if your not familiar with an area.

I remember when we first got a video recorder, the son was blue in the face trying to tell me how to set it up for recording programs, I still never got the hang of it, just as well for then came the digital age and out went the millions of video machines along with those awful tapes that would sometimes get stuck in the slot, then you’d lose your rag and forcibly yank the thing out with a chisel or a breadknife, ending up with tape all over the place.
But even now the CD’s are obsolete, most new PC’s don’t have any CD slots, I have hundreds of them gathering dust out in the shed after I transferred them all onto two hard drives.

Schools the same, you learn more when you leave, I hated it and only learned the three basics, reading writing and arithmetic. I was so happy in my work from the age of 14 that the years flew by and it was only when I was in my 20’s and married that I realised I could have done with a good education, but it was too late then and I was very busy at my job and had a young family to raise.

When I look back on school now I would have skipped the arithmetic and spelling had I known they were going to invent calculators and spell checkers , so dream on all you good daydreamers, anything you can think of has to be possible in the future, otherwise it could not enter our organic heads, we are all made of earth ’stuff’ when you think about it.

I always liked Sam Cooke singing this.

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

I just wonder where my certificates are now, 45 years on, at least I have my Birth Certificate, just have to hope, its worth the paper its written on.

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Birth certificate, I’m sure I have mine stashed away somewhere.
You could say we were all certified from day one and then we spend the rest of our lives trying to become sane so we can mingle with the rest of humanity,
The only certificate you're sure of getting is the death certificate.

There was a boy in our class who suffered from polio, there were a lot of polio cases around in the 50’s, the poor kids had to wear those horrible steel bars and hard leather brace things on their legs.
Anyway young Flynn in our class had a few other things wrong with him, his ears were huge and he had a lisp, he also had a bad stoop, but he was a cheerful plucky lad and gave as good as he got in the slagging department, and we all know what school kids are for slagging.

One day Fr Burke came into the classroom to examine the kids on catechism, he told us all to relax that he would not be asking any hard questions.

The first victim was a very well mannered boy.
“What is your name son?”
“My name is Nigel Father”
“Who made the World Nigel?”
“God made the World Father”
“Very good Nigel, sit down you passed”
Next up was another nice lad.
“What’s your name me lad?”
“Thomas Father”
“Tell me in your own words, what did God do for you Thomas?”
“Well he gave me a lovely mother and father, and we live in a nice house, daddy has a car and we’re very happy Father”
“Excellent Thomas, you passed also”

Now young Flynn was hidden down the back of the class, teacher put him there in the hope the priest wouldn’t spot him, but alas, the priest sees Flynn’s big ears sticking out from behind the head of Curly O’Toole.
“Now then, stand up you boy at the back” he shouts at Flynn”
“What’s your name son?”
It takes a while for Flynn to struggle to his feet with the use of his crutches.
“Larry Flynn Father”
“Now don’t be shy boy, I’ll be easy on you and ask you the same question I asked Thomas, tell us all in your own simple words what God did for you Larry?”
“He f…ing near ruined me Father”

Well they do insist in school that honesty is the best policy, seems it backfired on Fr. Burke.
That’s a true story, the class was in fits of laughter and as soon as the priest left Flynn got six of the best from the teacher.

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Talking about young folks slagging.

The old dance halls and record hops of the 60’s used to be great fun.

Girls were always first to dance and they would dance in pairs. A good idea for us shy lads was to “Split up a pair’ on the floor, that way the chances of being refused were halved, one of the girls might want to dance with you and that would lead to the other girl dancing too rather than sitting back down on her own, even if refused it wasn’t as embarrassing with two fellas walking back to sit down as it would be on ones own.

Fellas used to slag the girls across the floor, saying things like “Hey Bridie!, lends yer face, I want to chop sticks” (meaning she was a hatchet, which in those days meant the complete opposite of an oil painting), and “Hey Mary, next time your in a China shop trade in your eggcups for a pair of jugs”
All in good spirits I hasten to add.

Strangely enough, the real good-looking girls were seldom asked to dance for the simple reason the fellas knew they hadn’t a hope, and the thoughts of being refused in front of their mates and laughed at for the rest of the night was too much to risk, fellas were not as cocky back then as they are today, they were good at knowing where they stood in the mating game.
Ah yes, there was great craic back then, the whole experience was an education on life in itself, education you could never be taught or get get out of a book.

“She taught me to Yodel, yo dee low dee de…” Whatever happened to old Kangaroo eyes Frank Ifield, one of Gummy’s lot I believe. Phillis got a kiss from him when he sang in cabaret here back in the 70’s, she didn’t wash her face for a week after that, so thrilled was she.

We had many the good night boppin and a hoppin at the hop.

Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)

Watched the show at the time Jem, now I see the Fall Out, and wonder what it was all about, Much ado about nothing, maybe?

The Junior geezer may have been of the same opinion.