GrumpyDaddy

For many years now Royal Mail Postman Pat Clifton was the man you could always rely on in Greendale. He was the glue that held the community together, the face of officialdom that could be relied on to being the post whatever the weather. Not only did he bring the mail he was often there to save the day in many a community crisis.

But watch Pat at work today and something has gone terribly wrong. Rather than being the glue that holds the Greendale community together he seems to be the cause of most of the local problems. If you've a special event and need a package for it delivered on time, these times you can guarantee there will be some dreadful and potentially dangerous cock-up.

I've just driven back from town with my three year old daughter where we went to get a birthday card for a friend of hers and some groceries. Out of nowhere Kitty started the following conversation, which I though was well worth relating to you verbatim...

Cbeebies is full of very strange programmes. Take Numberjacks for example. This appears to be a remake of spooky 70s show Sapphire & Steele albeit with the eponymous heroes replaced with CGI talking numbers that live inside a sofa. Then of course there's Waybaloo a show about dwarfish Buddhists with speech and learning difficulties, which tries very hard to be representative and fill each episode with a group of children of every hue that means the production company is very likely to exhaust Canada's supply of Chinese children pretty soon.

One of the oddest shows is Grandpa In My Pocket. Here James Bolam, slumming it from grown-ups' telly, plays the titular Grandpa. Now don't get worried - grandpa's excursions into "my" pocket are not of the Daily Mail-baiting "I'll give you a Werthers original sonny if I can have a rummage" kind¹. Oh no, instead it refers to Grandpa's ability to shrink to a pocket size when wearing his "magical shrinking cap".

Thanks to David Lewis for suggesting this. Using only song names from one artist, answer the following questions - without repeating a song title. It's harder than you think

• Pick yourself an artist - Iron Maiden
• Describe yourself - The Educated Fool
• If you could go anywhere, where would you go - Isle of Avalon
• Your favourite form of transportation - Flight of Icarus
• Your best friend is a - The Trooper
• You and your friends are - Blood Brothers
• If your life was a TV show what would it be called - The Prodigal Son
• What is life to you - Stranger in a Strange Land
• Your current relationship - The Angel and the Gambler
• Your fear - Fear of the Dark
• What is the best advice you have to give - Be Quick or Be Dead
• I would like to die - Only the Good Die Young
• Time of day - 2 Minutes to Midnight
• My motto - Heaven Can Wait

Have you heard the new song from Diana Vickers?

Rather familiar isn't it?

It features the biggest musical theft since Lloyd Webber ripped off Pink Floyd's Echoes for Phantom of the Opera. The chorus of Vickers' Wicket Heart sounds exactly like Red Hot Chilli Peppers' Under the Bridge being sung in a Reeves/Mortimer "Club Style".

Enunciate girl, enunciate.

Being the father of twins imbues one with a certain amount of cockiness. After all - those early days together saw me as their sole carer having been cruelly widowed. And so when I hear couples talk about how hard it is to look after their one child I tend to inwardly snort with derision. “You want to try it with twins,” I think, “On your own, while your heart has been ripped out.”

But the truth is that no matter how well prepared you are, how much you think you’ve seen and done it all, the second time around is still difficult even for a couple. The twins didn’t walk properly until they were 15 months old. This was laziness on their part - they cruised for months - but thanks to our narrow house there was no gap that required them to let go of a wall to get anywhere. By the time they decided to give “look no hands” a go they were already experts at it. There was no phase of falling over, no wobbliness, all nice as simple.