Chateau Pumphrey 2009 - a good year

I set off for work this morning and the sun was shining, the birds were singing, flowers were budding all around me, and .... the schools were back. Yep, the Oxford transport infrastructure morphed from empty roads to total gridlock overnight. As a result, the journey to work took twice as long, as I skilfully dodged little Tarquins and Johnnys being ejected from 4x4's sitting on double yellow lines with hazard lights on. I may be over-simplifying things, but how much of a problem would this be to overcome? Two fairly obvious solutions spring to mind; (1) stagger school start, and finish times; and (2) buy quite a lot of yellow school buses to transport Children safely.

Then once at work, I found out from our shipping line that the container that we were expecting today had been delayed at the docks and was coming tomorrow instead. Blimey, today hadn't started well.

Luckily, things started looking up when Hazel arrived at work. "Morning!" we yelled at each other.

"I've got a present for you, because you were whingeing that I get them for everyone else and not you," Hazel said.

"Excellent!" I said, "what the devil is it?" I asked her.

Dah dahhhhh! Here is the very 'Hazel' (ie. funny!) present that she had brought in. It was a bottle of her own homemade wine, complete with a label saying 'Chateau Pumphrey' and a picture of her drunken cousin dressed as Cruella DeVille below it.

It was one of the most amusing presents that I have received in ages, and I have been reliably informed by Hazel that if I attempt to drink it all in 'one go' I probably won't be in work tomorrow and the inside of my mouth will feel like the bottom of a bird's cage.

After the container was cancelled, the chaps in the office were left with a gap in their diary during which they decided to take the mick out of my handbag, purely on the premise that it didn't contain enough 'girly' things.

"Why are you routing around my handbag anyway?" I asked the perpetrator.

"I needed an pre-2002 nokia-to-USB cable and they are really rare," he replied.

"And did you find one?" I asked. "Actually yes, I did" he replied. Even though my handbag had brought riches forth, he still decided to parade it round the office pointing out the absence of make-up, hair products or perfume.



Cheeky git. Especially so because I have recently rationalised the contents of my handbag to try and align myself with normal girl standards. I decided that I don't have time to service cars any more, so I have taken out the 'oil filter removal chain' and my full set of metric and imperial allen keys. But....... the 20GB hard disk drive, ipod Touch, and Swiss army knife are used too often to be removed, so they are allowed to remain.

Please ladies, send me pictures of the inside of YOUR handbag so that I can perform a non-scientific audit of handbag contents! (that would be really interesting!)