Never get into a cab from a company called ATAXIS

or the new science of Semiopathy. There has been a wave of egg kings around here recently and one who likes to sit in a chair on the beach down by the coastguard station. Canute ( or do we have to call him Cnut now?) has reverse bad press. Being discerning readers I am sure you know that he wasn't trying to hold back the waves; he was demonstrating, very successfully, that he could NOT and that he wasn't totally infallible. Great idea. Just bad after-event PR. All this is, of course, a good thing.

My history teacher at school was a thickly accented Welshman who invariably started each lesson with the words "Just go down to my car and ... ". The minutes between one of us scuttling down to the car park to fetch some papers which had been left behind and their return, were occupied with a small description of his own personal history usually relating to some age old event in the school (which he seemed to have been at since Canute himself). I can only drag shadows of these stories from the fog of memory, but one almost certainly referred to the headmaster's small baby starting early on the Cricket pitch by catching a ball while still in its pram. Or maybe not. Anyway, it all made the Great reform act of 1832 a bit more bearable. We were lucky to go to our school. It was located in a small village and the arrival of the pupils in the morning quadrupled the population. Actually the arrival of the staff probably quadrupled the population. The Sixth form had their own house set apart from the main school. It was made of wattle and daub; honestly; there was a large framed piece of glass showing the construction of the walls just to the left of one of the fire doors in the main corridor. I don't think that they meant to have the glass; it was just that the handle of the fire door had caused the wall to disintegrate and rather than locate a "Wattler" (or whatever they are called) the woodwork teacher tidied up the rough edges and fitted the frame at a fraction of the cost of repairs.

Further list of strange things at school.

- Our German Physics teacher (He was a physics teacher who was German) who made tea in a sock and got us to weigh the fire extinguishers.
- One pupil who while wearing a large external brace on her teeth one Christmas, fitted the contraption with tinsel and Tree decorations.
- A biology teacher who delighted in dissecting any dead animal brought to him. He once found an 40 cm tapeworm in a rabbit and I never saw anyone so happy.

There are plenty of other things but this is a weblog after all.