How not to get on my goodside

Long time readers will know I have more then a few bug bears. Cold early mornings, fuel duty, people doing the 'pleasantries' routine at church where they say hi, ask how your doing and hows your week, then saying that's great to hear before quickly moving on at such speed you know they can't have been listening in the slightist. I actually had once person who asked all this she had stated that was good to hear and moved on before I had even had a chance to speak.

One of my bigger bug bears right now is that of age. Yes I'm 28 and yes I'm still single however that doesn't mean I'm some sort of ancient has been who should be off to the old peoples home.

Yes that bug bear is one of the 'better' ways to not end up on my goodside.

Why have I mentioned this? Well glad you asked ( okay I know you haven't actually asked but lets pretend you have otherwise this next bit doesn't work :-)

As I arrived at institute last night one pair of our Elders happened to be at the chapel. One of them stuck his head round the door and asked what was going on which was a fair question as we’ve never had institute at Loughborough. However his first comment when I explained it was institute was
“ Ah Institute, that’s seminary for old people”

Saaayyyy Whhhaatttt!!!!!!
“ Excuse me?” was the only thing I could think to say without using any words you should never ever use inside a chapel.

“ No it’s okay” he said in the desperate voice of a man who has belatedly realised that he should have engaged his brain before engaging his mouth. “ I’m one of those old people. In fact I’m really old” Which seemed like a odd thing to say so I asked him how old he was. His response
“ No, I am old, I’m 22”

Which immediately made me wonder if there was anyway I could hit him one with out getting in trouble as , surprise, surprise you don’t automatically become ‘really old’ once your past 21 and not married.

It was at this point that the Elder looking at me and the other person in the classroom at this point realised that he hadn’t just put his foot in his mouth, he managed to cram both feet on in there and swallow the darn things as both of us were several years older then him. He made a sharp exit before he suffered his third strike.

I had aimed to arrive in plenty of time as it was the first night and the class president shouldn’t really be late as it’s hard to take the moral high ground if you’ve already gone and fallen off it. I felt a stab of unease as I wondered how many people we would get, my goal was 12 as that’s what we had as a average last year. As I watched out of the window I couldn’t help but think of little niggling worries, had I done enough? Had I done too much? Had the information got out to the right people?.

Fortunately the niggling worries soon disappeared as more and more people started arriving eventually peaking at a class size of 19! We reached this total without the student’s beings back, so we have a very good chance of breaking 20 people a week which I’m sure Bro H will be more then happy with.

I ran the activity afterwards which seemed to go well, even though there was a small flaw which I should have noticed sooner but c’est la vie I guess. But even with that people seemed to enjoy themselves as they seemed to be laughing with me rather then at me, unless my observational skills once again suck.

The Government is planning to introduce a new 'tax' ( see this is a tax not a levy) on everybodies phone lines to pay for the whole phone network to be upgraded to broadband standards. Now it is only 50 pence a month but it's still annoying. Although someone did point out that it can only apply to 'regular phone lines' and not 'cable' otherwise they would be essentially introducing a new tax on TV and people wouldn't be happy about that as we have to pay the TV license already.

In a new survey which was probably carried out by the scientists of we've got nothing better to do university they claim that when men ( eventually) do the cleaning they do a much better and more through job then women. I'm sure once the laughter and sniggering of Women up and down the land ceases they will realise that although this survey is probably totally, totally wrong at least it gives them an excuse to get their other halfs to do the cleaning. " You need to do the hoovering dear as it's scientifically proven that you'll do a better job then me".

anyway,

Later folks.