For Science!

I was on the train last night from Helensburgh to Waverley. By the time I got on, the train was more or less empty: I picked the nearest empty group of seats so that I could take the giant Eskimo coat of warmth off and was about to settle down to reading Darwin’s Watch and texting Kreetch, when I noticed something weird on the window for the seats opposite.

Taking a closer look, I realised that they didn’t just look like chocolates stuck to the window, they were chocolates that had been stuck on the window. Someone had taken five little moulded chocolates and fixed them on the window glass.

Weird.

The Wonderful GAY

“Time lies frozen there. It’s always Then. It’s never Now.” The Cardinal was afraid of Now, for Now has warmth and urgency, and Then is dead and buried. Now might bring a certain knight of gay and shining courage –

Crdinl Keith O’Brien has confirmed he will no longer use any of the letters in the word ‘gay’ and stressed

he was embarking on the phonetic moratorium because he did not want to be ‘prt of the problem’.

His spokesman said:

“Luckily ‘safe words’ include Jesus, communion, crucifix and Keith O’Brien.

“However he has had to change his job to title to ‘Crdinl’.

“Also, half the word ‘Mary’ is off limits so from now on he will refer to the Holy Mother as ‘Ethel’.

“It’s not blasphemous if it’s part of a bulwark against depravity.”

The spokesman added: “Golgotha comes out as ‘Oloth’ and Calvary is just ‘Clvr’, so Easter is going to be tricky. Especially if he’s calling it ‘Ester’.”

We confirmed with the spokesman that from now on the Crdinl says

Special Needs?

She’s in her late 40s now: we first met when we were both teenagers. She was a trainee nurse, I was still at school – there was just over a year’s age difference between us. She had become a nurse, she told us cheerfully, because the careers adviser at her school knew three things to tell girls: be a secretary, be a nun, be a nurse. She couldn’t type and didn’t believe in God, so that left just one option.

We’d been friends for twenty years before she finally admitted that wasn’t exactly true.