Peter Rhodes: Wicked older women, pet-snoggers and muffling the bells for remembrance
THANKS for your emails about cars with strange names. I still can’t find a definitive answer to the claim that Ford deliberately never produced a special injection version of its Ka saloon because no-one would want to be seen sitting in a Kasi. Urban myth, perhaps?
AS Parliament agonises about the latest rash of sex scandals, one reader wants to make the point that not all victims of sexual roughness are scarred for life. As an airmen in the RAF at the age of 19 and 20, he was regularly stripped and groped by about a dozen older women at the local laundry. Far from complaining, he recalls it was ‘rather empowering, being an object of lust or desire’. No wonder some blokes recall National Service so fondly. The key word in all this, of course, is consent. By coincidence, another male reader writes to say he’s still traumatised by the ‘initiation’ he suffered as an apprentice at an engineering works in the Black Country, courtesy of the women from the machine shop. They stripped him and smeared his nether regions with engineering grease. He recalls nothing but ‘anguish, pain and suffering’.
THE Yorkshire Vet (C5) introduced us to a particularly revolting habit – kissing pets. A woman repeatedly allowed her dog to lick her on the mouth. Do these owners never watch what their pets are up to? As they snog their cats and dogs in full view of the rest of us, do they ask themselves what was the last thing the animal was licking?
ANOTHER unpleasant habit is exposed in the Lidl TV ad – the ‘Double Dipper’. He, or she, is the charmer who sticks a biscuit in one savoury dip, bites off the tip and sticks the well-gummed other half of the biscuit into another dip. You might as well spit in every bowl. I recall one party where a guest, a teacher who might have been expected to know better, took his fork from his mouth and stuck it in the pickled-onion jar. My apologies if you are reading this over tea.
IN one of those little annual rituals that barely gets a mention in the media, bellringers all over England have been preparing for this sacred weekend of remembrance by fitting leather pads and straps to the clappers of their great bronze bells. This creates what is known as the ‘half-muffled’ effect. If you ever wondered why the bells sound different on Remembrance Sunday, that’s why.
THE timing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, was down to fate. Another victory or defeat on the Western Front could have brought the ceasefire forward to spring or pushed it back to mid-winter. As it is, remembrance sits very well with mid-November. The chilly closing-down of the year reflects the sad drawing-down of blinds in bereaved households. It wouldn’t be the same if we gathered at the war memorial in shorts and T-shirts.
IN a perfect world, the avalanche of Christmas adverts would not begin until after Remembrance Sunday. Fat chance.
