Classic. Police are offering a £20,000 ($30,000) reward for the return of the missing Child Benefit CDs. "Police have appealed to workers at HMRC, the Treasury, and the National Audit Office to search for the CDs and have set up a confidential phone line for their return." That'll make a nice Xmas prezzie for someone. Will anyone wishing to claim the reward please form an orderly queue?
An image of Lorraine Kelly dressed as Santa has leapt unbidden into my head. <clickety> Well, how about that? I need to practice with skin shading, innit?
Just when I thought my illusions had been shattered, everything is good again. I had always wondered how they got that 40-foot spruce tree into Jenners department store. Do they remove part of the roof and drop it in with a crane? "No," said Mrs Farty, "they take it in through the front door in sections and assemble it." Gasp! You mean it's - sob! - artificial?Not any more. In a wonderful "back-to-basics" move, they've reinstated the traditional real tree and damn the pine needles! Hurrah!
Oh. They take off the shop's front doors.
This is not the time of year when you want things to start breaking down, but we've just had the "three things in a row" run of bad luck. First the DVD player turned into a doorstop, which was easy enough to replace, but then Mrs Farty's super-dooper steam iron broke down after only two years, i.e. one year past the warranty. It would cost more to send it off for inspection and repair than it did to buy, so we now have a new one with extended warranty.
And finally, we woke up on Monday morning to a flooded kitchen. The dishwasher, which we usually switch on last thing at night, had managed to burst a pipe. So for the past couple of days we've been washing dishes the old-fashioned way.
I sure hope it gets fixed soon, 'cos taking the dishes down to the river to bash them with rocks doesn't seem to work as well as I remembered. At this rate, we'll have no plates left to serve up Ecksmas dinner.
