Parental control?

Yesterday I suggested that Sunday should be a day of rest, even from my crusade to help people avoid paying their banks excessive fees for foreign exchange by introducing the. To the delights of Currencies Direct but I do not feel rested more restless. Sunday lunch was the usual riotous affair with discussion turning, perhaps inevitably, to the alter ego’s we are supposed to be constructing for our trip to Cuba starting in ten days time.

Slash and Burn Thornton Allan (referring to his manic desperation to clear swathes of the Valmasque forest with a chain saw, not as was suggested yesterday in the comments section by our resident god botherer The Reverend Jeff “a dose of clap”) was keen to revisit his wish to be known as a designer gynecologist and coined the phrase “designer vagina”. I appear to have the choice between being known as Boysie after the character in “Only Fools And Horses” or a lazy lay about atheist whose family have not worked for generations due to being publishers of the Gideon Bible (catch phrase “Thanks The Lord”). It is a shame when one has to report on the physical manifestations of over indulging in alcohol.

Talking of alcohol, Peachy Butterfield took a particular shine to my five litre bottle of table wine I bought in Italy as a joke to point up his requirement for quantity not quality when it comes to drinking red wine, declaring good and then proceeding to demolish two-thirds of it himself over the course of the afternoon. This took a great deal of pressure off the stocks of the 2004 St Estephe Grand Cru.

Earlier during my normal morning constitutional around the Valmasque (where I saw sights that would make Slash and Burn salivate given the number of trees and branches felled the recent snow) on the edge of the forest I spotted a house with a satellite dish protected by an umbrella as my picture shows.

No, I cannot explain it either

Now what is the owner thinking? I assume satellite dishes are designed to live outside? Is this some kind of parental guidance as to what is actually received? Maybe he has a fixation about the Weather Channel? It is a mystery I doubt I shall ever solve.

As usual when I walk I am accompanied by two dogs (although not by that nice lady decorator because of her ankle) one called Max, the lovely old but now profoundly deaf springer spaniel and the other called Banjo who I wish was profoundly dead. Banjo is a 36 kilo cocker spaniel, a mutant by any measure and with a character and aroma for which the word mutant does not do full justice. Unsuspecting people pat and stroke him until they realise that they need to wash their hands in order to avoid funny looks and people giving them space due to the stench. He is of course not my dog but is owned and fawned over by that nice lady decorator but with her injured ankle it falls to me to be responsible for him and his actions falls when out walking. I must have done something very evil in a previous life to have this foisted upon me.

He was on top form yesterday, trying to bite a tiny little dog a twentieth of his size, defecating in the middle of the path (although reserving a particular noxious example to deposit it on my lawn later) , barking at plastic bags and generally being a nuisance. His new foul habit is to eject a glob of doggy saliva into the laps of anyone stupid enough to let him near. His one redeeming feature is at least to provides some column inches for this daily tome.

Chris France