Me: I'm not interested, thankyou.
A cold caller yesterday: What aren't you interested in, dahlin?
Me: Please don't call me dahlin, you don't know me.
Cold caller: I was only being polite.
Me: No, calling me dahlin is not being polite.
Phone down
'In what universe' would have been snappier. 'At best over familiar, at worst patronising' more accurate. I could have told her that I thought she was the hospice phoning about Mum or I wouldn't have picked the phone up in the day but I didn't know her that well.
Now, love, flower, petal, meduck would have got past me, made me smile even; but whatever English region 'dahlin' is a normal end to a sentence, I've never come across it before.
And now for something completely different:
And this is the bridle path in Eckington in July:
And now for Tony Blair, who with typical self obsessed lack of regard for the party he professes to love, has just published his memoirs - Radio 4 is full of it and it does no-one any credit to acknowledge his rant but I'm going to, briefly.
1: ( Are my rants typically subdivided like this or is it just today?) His increased drinking - an aperitif and half a bottle of wine for dinner - just the weekends or did he then go to the house, sign away our lives etc. Since when have public servants been allowed to work when over the legal alcohol limit? And if it is just the weekends then why is he telling us? Am I supposed to be impressed that he can afford it / get up the next morning without a hangover, or feel sorry that he had to share the bottle / has a social life so pathetic that he was counting his drinks?
2: How is it to his credit that he supported Gordon Brown when he thought he wasn't up to the job of leader?
3: Hasn't turning catholic taught him that confessions are meant to be between him and God via the privacy of the confessional, not via the media?
I tried "Grumpy old women" but it seemed to be complaining about being an old woman rather than complaining about the world like "Grumpy old men" does. Not that I can stand more than a topic and a half in Grumpy old men, the one that is sticking at the moment every time I cross the road with Angel, practising perfecting the sit, is that they seem to think that pedestrians should be grateful, or at least thank them personally for not running them down when they are on a crossing!
The one with the grating accent (that seems put on) and the circular glasses, "I waive my hand to show they can cross, would it hurt them to raise a hand in thanks?"
1: the law obliges a driver to stop at a crossing, you are not doing the road crossing pedestrian a favour.
2: when drivers stop at traffic lights at cross roads, if it is polite to express gratitude why isn't it a flutter of hands all round and the subsequent pile up?
Nah, what they mean is that pedestrians - ie mainly female, young, elderly, poor, should be eternally grateful that they are not invisible. After all the hand wave is a truncated doffing of the cap and tug of the forelock.
So maybe they would prefer a curtsy instead
Bah. That's that out of my system.
