The Snowmanhood

At the weekend, my kids and I built a snowman.

Only it did not look like a snowman. It looked like a colossal penis, made out of snow.

I am not sure how other people make the conventional snowman-shaped snowman. Every attempt I made to create a body just ended up looking like a shaft.

And it got bigger. And bigger.

And every attempt I made to make it look less like a cock, only made it look more like a cock. Putting big round head on top, for example, was a project swiftly abandoned.

The kids, naturally, were oblivious to my growing discomfort regarding the social unacceptability of constructing a five foot tall fertility symbol on one’s front lawn.

Fortunately, Roger Jr saved the day with the suggestion that it should be an alien – and so a little decoration later, and behold! One giant space caterpillar.

And that – I thought – was the end of my troubles.

Until the following morning.

Whereupon, I transpired that the giant space caterpillar was not quite as solidly constructed on one side as the other.

And as such, had started to droop. As you can see, this created the unfortunate impression of just a hint of scrotum. 

By the following day – with a fresh coat of snow obscuring the carrot, stones and turnip which distinguish a space caterpillar from a giant penis – the angle of droopage had worsened.

And it was the same the next day as well.

Sadly, I did not take a picture on the last day of standing proud. By that time, it had attained an angle which was both mathematically fascinating and thoroughly obscene.

I returned home on Tuesday night, to see the mighty member lying prone and flaccid upon the ground. I was relieved, but also saddened. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. 

Post Script

I may not be able to build a child-friendly snowman, but I can make one mean snow whippet.  

Sic Semper Tyrannis

I am genuinely surprised to see the outpouring of grief for HMV and Blockbuster over the last few days.

Both are object lessons in corporate hubris and deserve no pity for their fall.

Both these shops priced their products as high as they thought they could sell them at (£4 for a 24-hour DVD rental? £17 for an “import” CD?) and only discounted what they couldn’t shift.

I don’t really have an axe to grind against HMV, but I have always hated Blockbuster.

• You always had to queue because there were never enough staff on – something I experienced in five or six different branches, and so which must be a deliberate matter of company policy.
• The fact that you had to (i) go to the shop, (ii) wait and pay and (iii) then come back to the shop was a huge pain the arse.
• They often didn’t have what you wanted, because (i) someone else had rented it or (ii) they just didn’t deal with a particular distributor.

We were early joiners or LoveFilm, which just blew Blockbuster out of the water – and like many others I am amazed it has lasted this long. Neither shop made any serious effort to adapt to the existence of a little thing that has transformed every aspect of life in this country...the internet...

E-commerce sites at least try to make you feel like a valued customer, not a nuisance who can be ignored, talked down to and kept waiting to part with his money. 

Will the high streets be poorer for the demise of these “institutions”?

Only if you think that town centres have to play the same role in the future that they have done for the last 50 years – that is, as dreary monotonous temples of retail.

I’m afraid to say that everything these shops did, internet providers do better and cheaper. If shops want to survive, they need to discover something they can do that the efficiency of the internet can’t.

And if companies expect any kind of affection from their customers, they need to not try and screw every penny out of them for as little effort as possible while the going is good – because it won’t last forever. 

It’s (not) Christmas (any more)!

Christmas is now but a distant memory, with only a cupboard full of unwanted chocolate and ever-greater discomfort around the waist to remind us it was ever here.  

Lots of amusing things happen over Christmas, don’t they? And yet because we’re “away from our desks” over the period and because once we’re back at them Christmas is the last thing anyone wants to think about, we rarely get an opportunity to dissect them.

Well, fret no more! ODHSNM once again strides out where the mainstream media fears to tread and features a Christmas-focused article in mid January.

Much like Tulisa, One Direction and other glitzy celebs, the Pope tossed off a book for Xmas this festive season.

And "The Infancy Narratives - Jesus of Nazareth” did not disappoint with its no-holds-barred, warts-and-all, nothing-left-to-the-imagination account of how the Christmas story is not actually true.

You sit on a throne of lies

It may come as rather a shock to you to hear this coming from His Holiness Benedict XVI – accustomed as we are during December to driving past empty-looking churches festooned with passive-aggressive posters insisting “if it wasn’t for Jesus you wouldn’t have ANY Christmas”.

Particularly in the light of the various absurd articles of faith the Holy Father has not yet seen fit to debunk.

But if Jesus was not actually born on December 25, then what is stopping us from having a staggered Christmas season?

Not that sort of staggering, you cheeky monkey you.

No, why can’t we just choose when to celebrate it? For example, shortly after the January sales? Everyone doing it at once is highly inefficient. It creates queues, allows businesses to ramp up prices, makes us all take a really quiet week in the office as leave etc. Plus the weather is always shit.

If we’re all getting the date wrong anyway (and I refer you to the Pastor aeternus of 1870 – the bit on Papal infallibility), Jesus would presumably not mind if we all got it wrong on some other, more convenient date of our choosing.

I told you this year’s theme was going to be calendar reform. We’re starting early.

Speaking of “starting early” one of the best things about Christmas is the expectation that you will – nay, obligation to – drink alcohol during the (admittedly scanty) hours of daylight.

WHY?

Not only that, but you are entitled to drink things that you would never consider drinking at any other time – such as advocaat, sherry or banana liqueur.  Or indeed red-coloured paint thinner with clove oil in it, also known as “mulled wine” at this time of year.

Nothing quite beats the feeling of settling down in a chair thinking “it’s 3pm, I’m hammered, I may well fall asleep and nobody is going to give me a hard time about it”.

And if it wasn’t for Jesus, you wouldn’t be allowed to do that so you really should go to church to make it up to him. He looks a bit annoyed.

But really, Christmas is a time for the kids (and if it wasn’t for Jesus, you wouldn’t have any kids).

What I really want to know is, when did it become necessary to have a set of wire cutters about your person when sitting down to open kids’ presents?

I have seen nuclear reactors less comprehensively sealed and 50-storey buildings less securely anchored than most of the things our boys got this year.

A plastic horse we got for Tancred (retail value, I dunno, about £5?) was (i) in a cardboard box that was (ii) taped shut inside and out and then (iii) attached to the packaging by tightly-wound wires around each foot and its tail.

The whole thing is completely crime-proof unless you...oh, I don’t know...STEAL THE BOX AS WELL.

As it was, my finger ends were bleeding raw by lunchtime from repeated attempts to separate box and plastic lump. 

Jesus really doesn’t like all that packaging. He’s tutting and pursing his lips right now.

But if you look round at him, he’ll pretend to be doing something else. 

Is there anything, readership, you would like to share about Christmas? Perhaps you bought ten lighters for a euro and some batteries at an English market in Germany? Or maybe you wonder why the official canon of Christmas songs ends at around 1986? Let's have your amusing observations below. 

Top Six Pictures of Things I Have Seen

And what I thought about them – at the time and later on. Let’s start 2013 with a bang!

By “a bang” I mean of course some random bits and pieces that would not warrant a blog post in their own right but which it is technically possible to argue have a unifying theme.

So here we go.

Walking my dogs in the woods, I came across this (left) carved upon a big stone.

It says “Solvitur Ambulando”, which is Latin for “solve it by walking”. Considering my largely unsuccessful attempts to solve my incipient obesity by walking last year, I was somewhat sceptical of the sentiment, but the more I have thought about it, the better it becomes.

There are not many problems that don’t benefit from a bit of a walk – although my wife (Elvira of Castille - you know by now) is not in agreement with Diogenes of Sinope that you can “solve” a dispute by “walking” away from it.

A little bit of wisdom found in the woods for you there.

A day trip saw us pass by the road to hell (above) and found the Sicilies in a very weird place called Botany Bay near Chorley, where we encountered this mysterious object to the left. What is it, you ask?

Why, a traditional garden obelisk, of course.

A what?

A TRADITIONAL GARDEN OBELISK! Obviously. 

It creates height and interest in beds and borders!

I must confess that have never come across the tradition of having an obelisk in one’s garden. Perhaps it’s an Egyptian thing.

Also at Botany Bay, I came across this, to the right. A spiked carving dish. So far, so mundane.

But what is that extra feature I see?

A GRAVY WELL!

All this time, we’ve been making our gravy from granules when I could have been hauling it up in a bucket from an underground stock aquifer in Denmark. Who knew?

Back to the real world and I show you Boston FC’s car park on Christmas Day 2012. 

As you can see, it was quite floody. The heavy rain had waterlogged the local vinegar mine as well. 

And finally, I give you the acceptable face of Lincolnshire racism. Stay classy Boston!