Marty

Now you're starting to sound a bit like our wee Drew...

My very last comment still stands...

Careful about mentioning sweaty men in here, bro... Not good for clo or Val's blood pressure.

Till the day she died my mam always claimed to be "Twenty-one plus V.A.T." (V.A.T. is Value Added Tax. I think America has a similar tax that they call Sales Tax)

Clo's earlier indecision when answering the question from Drew as to whether she considered him to still be a kid made me think of the following song from my teenage years....

You're in great danger of coming down with a severe case of dehydration with all the drooling you're doing these days, young Albert...

Hi, bro! (Still no plaid.... duggie is going to be disappointed once again )

If you say you're not a kid often enough, you might even make it come true. So....

Mea culpa! Your drip feeding of all the relevant information simply left this old man confussled. Anyway, wish your sister a very happy birthday from me.

Except your 7 year old nephew.

Not to mention your own delight, eh? Have a good day, Drew!

Greetings, young Albert!

I wouldn't say poor guy. He was on his phone the whole time looking at stuff on it.

Hmmm.... Nice suds there. The carbolic soap we had when I was a child would never produce a lather like that....

Mayhap there are. But do they offer the same privacy?

Huh?

We only have your word for that, ma Sherye...

I did, surely! But I assumed that was simply because there wasn't so much as a square millimetre of plaid to be seen....

When I was a child, my eldest brother (5 years my senior) almost always took a book with him when he went for a bath, especially in the winter months when it would be too cold in the unheated upstairs bedroom for reading. We were a big family, and I think he was just using the bathroom as somewhere he could read in peace and quiet. However, he couldn't stay too long, as the hot water tank depended upon the back boiler from the living room fire, and the bath water would cool down eventually. Some time in the mid-1950's mam found the money to have an electric immersion heater installed. Worried about running up a huge bill for the electricity, she warned us all that we weren't to use it unnecessarily, or leave it switched on too long. Suddenly my brother's time spent in the bath tub started to become much, much longer. Indeed, once or twice I even spotted him taking two books in with him. When the electricity bills suddenly started to get a good bit higher than expected, mam realised that he was simply leaving the immersion heater turned on whenever he went for a bath. And, if the bath water cooled down too much, he would simply pull the plug to let some of it drain away, and then top up with more hot water. Mam finished up paying an electrician to move the switch for the immersion heater from inside the bathroom to the living room!

Jiminy cricket, Gary! That's one huge toilet you have there! The monolith was around twelve foot tall... Just how big a dump do you need to take???