Rob's Blog
... clearly I can't focus on work today. Thought I'd share my lack of concentration with the world.
I spent most of Saturday gardening. I don't want you to imagine me me wearing a floral apron and kneeling on a KneeProtect
TM whilst carefully trimming the petunias. That's not how I get down.
I was gardening like a true man, cutting down large areas of brambles. I'm pretty sure that bramble slashing is the most manly of all gardening activities. And here's why:
- You legitimately get to use a long handled scythe; the weapon of choice of the Grim Reaper. That's right. You can swing away with wild abandon safe in the knowledge that you and Death have the same taste in horticultural weaponry.
- Bramble slashing does not involve 'cutting back', 'trimming' or 'pruning'. It involves 'brutalizing', 'killing' and 'slashing the shit out of'. That subtle difference in vocabulary makes all the difference.
- There's no grey area in the war on brambles. They're evil fuckers, short and simple. It doesn't matter how much protective clothing you wear, by the time you've approached them they will have brutally scratched you on the arm, eyeball and/or testicles. This constant barrage of physical harm provides excellent ongoing motivation. If you feel like yelling such things as "don't make me put my carbon-footprint up your ass!" and "you're jam!" that just adds to the entertainment value.
- When slashing brambles nobody ever says "if you put the effort in now it'll really pay dividends in late July". You can see the results instantly. The pursuit of instant gratification is one of the corner stones of being a man.
- It doesn't require a vast amount of intelligence. Provided you can tell the difference between your leg and a patch of brambles then you're well on the way to being able to write a thesis on bramble slashing. That's not important because men don't have the capacity for intelligence, it's important because it means we can be thinking about other things at the same time. Nothing would epitomise the very concept of manly gardening like returning to the house and announcing “I slew 12 square metres of bramble this afternoon, and came up with an economical solution for world hunger. All while thinking about sex.”
Right, on that note I'm off to sharpen my scythe.
Almost every time any someone tells me they're going on holiday I ask them to bring me back a monkey. Not a full grown gorilla, just a small monkey.
Obviously a monkey would make the greatest pet in the world. I'm fairly sure that training it to open and deliver cold beers from the fridge would only take a matter of months.
Girls would love my pet monkey because it would be exotic, cute, and have lovely eyes. The lads would also like my pet monkey because it would be trained to take sneaky up-skirt pics with their mobile phones. If my pet monkey got caught whilst gathering voyeristic porn he would plead 'cuteness' and make everyone forget by fetching another round of beers from the fridge.
It's often been a source of disapointement that nobody has ever actually brought me a monkey back from their holidays. It transpires this is because my friends don't wear hats.
According to a BBC report today a man was caught "smuggling a monkey onto a flight from Florida by hiding it under his hat". Perhaps most importantly "the monkey appeared to be healthy" - (
Passenger 'hid monkey under hat' - BBC, August 8th).
It sounds like he was caught doing something that hasn't ever been done before. Which immediately makes me wonder how many times other people have succeeded in doing exactly the same thing. I'm sure that someone - if not several people - in the world read that news article and smugly thought "heh, glad I got away with it!" before their monkey fetched them another cold beer.
I'm still going to ask friends to bring me back a monkey whenvever they go on exotic holidays. But now I'm going to buy them a hat first.
