After the Funeral, Tea.
Strong tea in served in cups with saucers (matching) alongside understated, embarrassed looking food served in small pieces. This is to ensure that even the hungriest eat absent-mindedly, the morsels finding their way into their mouths accidentally.

Builder’s or Workmen’s Tea.
Type a. Made by the householder, willingly at first and offered with biscuits. As the work progresses into weeks and the breaks seem to match the length of the work achieved daily it is offered more and more grudgingly until it is stopped altogether. What they don’t know is that the workmen place bets on who can get the householder to make another cuppa.
Type b. The flask of strong dark syrupy tea fortified with 25 sugars which workmen bring with them, in case they meet a householder that does not offer any and for the days when their goodwill tea making will expires.

Friends’ Tea
Informal tea served in mugs, over such a good chat you don’t notice that you have polished off a plate of biscuits between you.

Meet the Boyfriend/Girlfriend’s parent’s tea.
Weak tea, served in the best china to ensure that the nervousness is accentuated by fear of smashing something. Large biscuits or cake are offered but you have a tiny side plate so you cannot avoid apologising about crumbs. Questions are always asked when you have just taken a bite.

Committee Meeting Tea.
Whether it is served in mugs or cups and whether there are biscuits (even the type of) is the result of an ealier meeting. Somebody always chokes on biscuit crumbs at a crucial moment, usually to make everyone feel bad if the vote has gone against them. Whoever makes tea always makes a racket with the china so that someone else feels obliged to make an offer of help which is refused with great martyrdom.

Community Tea
Served in churches, community halls, or school buildings at jumble sales, fetes and fairs. This is always served through a hatch on pale yellow or bule china. It is never hot but the price includes a biscuit.

Working Tea
The worst cases are those with drinks dispensing machines slopping out tepid grey liquid. The snack crisps or chocolate is usually spat out of another machine. Tea ladies with trolleys are the best; bringing round a great urn with hot, strong tea and a choice of sandwiches and cakes subsidized by the firm so everyone at work is podgy. Others have a kitchen area with a kettle, teabags that everyone chips in for and everybody’s individual mug, bought from home. One is always being used inadvertently by a visitor or new arrival who doesn’t understand the dark looks they are getting from the owner.

Morning Tea
Whereby one partner always makes the other a cuppa in bed and the one crappy thing about being single is having to make your own.

Solitary Tea
Bleary eyed, on your own at the breakfast table, talking yourself into the day with a large mug of tea and lashings of hot buttered toast.

Comfort Tea
At any time of misery or hunger, with an enormous mug, and further lashings of hot buttered toast or biscuits straight from the packet.

The Government.
Unlimited moan fodder on a daily basis.

Our Partner
Habits, lack of romance, dull sex.

Weather.
We moan about the cold but on warm days worry about global warming. When it rains it’s miserable but when it doesn’t we worry and hose pipe bans are put in place. We are never prepared for radical weather like snow or gales.

Money.
Mortgage rates, pensions, credit cards, debts. Not having enough, or other people having too much.

Health
The reason that the question ‘how are you?’ was invented. ‘Fine’ is the wrong answer. Then there is the state of the National Health Service, hospital superbugs, low paid nurses, highly paid doctors.

Bad Service.
Restaurants, shops, garages, post offices, mail order companies. Is bad service really more common than good service or do we just notice it more?

Reality TV Shows.
We have to watch the shows to get to know the best characters to moan about.

Neighbours
Nosiness, noise, pets or children, they’re bound to be guilty of something.

Kids
They have everything we had nothing. Ungratefulness. Noise.

Mobile Phones
Noise. Noise. Noise.

It used to be Eastbourne, closely followed by Worthing, that had the reputation for being heavily populated with elderly people, though many of them seem to be suffering from some kind of delusional dementia as they sit in deck chairs along the prom in the rain, wind or snow congratulating each other that they are living on the sunshine coast.

As life expectancy increases in the Western world, Britain itself seems to be heaving with elderly people who are no longer confined to their usual habitats ; community centres, bingo halls, churches, bus stops and the Co-op, but can be found in internet fogeying at libraries, or in gyms, pubs and even nightclubs.

In supermarkets they lurk around using their newly acquired mobile phones like the geriatric mafia.
‘Im in front of the baked beans.’
‘Good work Mavis.’
‘What shall I do now?’
‘Select the cheapest brand, place it in your basket and proceed to aisle F, pet food.’
‘Roger.’
‘….Who’s Roger?’

Despite all their life and business experience, the only jobs that they get are in budget or DIY stores where they are not even excused from wearing the grimly coloured uniforms or round fat cheesy name badges.

What next? Maybe they could swim around a pool at theme parks and have a hook on the back of their costumes so kids can ‘grab a gran.’ The chubby ones could be used as door stops and the skinny ones could lie along the gap at the bottom of doors, as draught excluders.

Saturday Night
Drink so much that you can see two of everyone. Pick anybody, (you’ll fancy them all) (a) of the opposite sex if you are heterosexual; (b) of the same sex if you are homosexual; (c) of either sex if you are bi sexual or so plastered you can no longer tell and really don’t mind either way. Get kicked out of the pub at closing time. Stumble to the place of whoever lives nearest. Go to bed and fall instantly asleep. Wake up and wonder where the heck you are, who the heck you’re with and whether the earth moved. If it did you wish you could at least remember. Check them out now that you can see just one of them and either do what neither of you were capable of last night and arrange another date, or slip away as fast as possible and repeat with someone else the following Saturday night.

Library
Lurk in the I.T. area of your local library and ask attractive nerds to explain how to do things on your computer. Sooner or later they will need to see yours or show you theirs. Or sit near those who are studying, preferably in pairs or threes. Try to see what it is they are studying and get a similar book. Find a hard-to-understand paragraph and sigh a lot. The bravest will ask if you need any help and then they will all vie with each other to be the most helpful. Take your pick.

Easy as Chips
Arm yourself with a bag of freshly cooked salted, vinegary chips from a fish and chips shop. Stand near your quarry, wait until they are almost drooling and then offer them one. They will stay chatting at least until they have helped you to finish the chips, giving you plenty of time to ask for a date.

Shelter from the Storm
Carry an umbrella with you whenever rain threatens and find someone you like the look of. Follow them until the rain starts falling when you can fall into step beside them and put your umbrella over their head. Works every time.

Internet Detective
Join a ‘free’ online dating agency and check out local talent. Find out as much as you can and check out any photographs. Don’t bother paying to join so you can send them an email, but send them a wink. If they send one back, lurk around the area they live in the places you now know they frequent. When you spot them start up a conversation about something that interests them and lead them gently and firmly towards your first date. They will be convinced you are their soul mate because you seem to know and understand so much about them. If they bore you to death, repeat the process with someone else.

Love Hooligans
Start an FHA group (Football Hooligans Anonymous.) ‘My names Dave and I am a football hooligan.’ (Clap clap clap.) Mutual support often leads to love, though this plan will probably work best for girls or gays as the group might be bloke heavy  and you need to make sure they want to change their behaviour  unless you fancy  it really really rough!

Tea for Two
Be the one person in your workplace that knows exactly how to make their perfect cup of tea. Marriage or cohabitation, almost guaranteed!

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Tenacious Fighters. Once they have their teeth into something they don’t let go.
Jamie Oliver. Bob Geldof. Margaret Thatcher.

Funny and can be Ridiculous.
Sarah Ferguson. Ken Dodd, Cherie Blair.

Great with the Elderly and Children.
Princes Harry and William, The Krankies, Simon Cowell –NOT!

Slow.
Gordon Brown, David Beckham.

Fat and Ugly yet Strangely Attractive.
Dawn French, Matt Lucas, Father Christmas.

Slow to Mature.
Chris Evans, Tony Blair, Mick Jagger.

Tendency to Dribble
Hugh Grant, Jade Goody, Ozzy Osbourne

Prone to Health Problems
Elizabeth Taylor, Kate Moss (hers is called Pete Doherty.)

Any town or village has at least one antique, bric-a-brac or junk shop. Most antique shops contain a certain amount of junk while many junk shops contain antiques. It’s probably the percentage within the shop that decides on the name.
Collectors are the most prolific browsers as they are forever hoping to add another item to their stock

There is no rhyme or reason for any specific collection whether a famous painting or thimbles unless it is thrown open for public viewing. This is because once a certain number of the said item is contained in the collection, there is just not the time to look at and enjoy each one.

This means that despite the momentary pleasure gained from acquiring it, thousands of collectors are giving storage to things that they have no further real use for. Even stranger, many of the collections are completely worthless because nobody in their right mind would be particularly bothered about owning one toilet roll cover let alone 2,647.

The worrying thing is that collectors existed way before computers did so they must have had to log each item by hand, to keep track of the number, or remember to write the last number of items so that each new one could just be added on. But what if the log book or number was mislaid or you weren’t quite sure whether you had logged every item?

They must have spent a good part of their lives counting. unless of course they collected different numbers in sequential and ascending order.

source : http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/share…

Autumn time in British woods where the earthy smell of rotting leaves mingling with a waft of wood smoke on the air makes it seem as though Robin Hood and his Merry Men are just a sniff away.

Lawless Robin robbed the rich and gave to the poor, becoming one of our most popular folk heroes. He didn’t use it to buy a flash horse or a swanky castle. He just repaid the exorbitant taxes that the royals and wealthy nobles were fleecing from the people, who until then had just accepted the unfairness of the situation and tried to manage.

Just like us today, when even the measliest wage packets suffers deductions, pensioners pay thumping great council tax bills, grieving people have to find inheritance tax and VAT is slapped on everything.

Only nowadays we are Robin Hoodless.

Do we need a modern day Robin Hood with his Merry Men to squat in a corner of the local Town Hall or the House of Commons, helping themselves to wine and food from the huge feasts and functions and distributing it to the homeless? Or maybe to set up a squat in the second or third homes of wealthy Members of Parliament, distributing their goods and clothes to those on the streets? Maybe, but it would only be through the viewpoint of history that we would see them as anything but criminals.