Bob

Both where I’m from and where I live in western Europe are the oldest buildings 14th-century churches.

you dogged a bullet

😳

I’m saying Fern Gully.

Can’t be helped, I suppose.

Sit closer?

I use a computer monitor for my playstation on the rare occasion I switch it on. Very much plug & play.

https://genius.com/videos/Eminem-rhyming-with-orange

That’s not rhyme, that’s assonance.

That’s one of the things that put me off learning Greek in the end. English has unwritten rules about which clusters of consonants can come at the start of a word; Greek not so much.

Wiktionary has a lot of audio transcriptions too: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oiseau

Outside North America, people say it with the O from “gone” if it’s stressed.

Where I’m from it sounds like “fuxle”, or indeed “fucks’ll”.

Cwtch is weirder I believe, because it not only comes from Welsh with its W as a vowel, but it comes from a Welsh word that has to use English spelling rules to be written both in Welsh (“cwtsh”) and in its English borrowing; not to mention that it itself came from Middle English “couche” which of course came from Norman. It’s a cute word though!

Sometimes I hear a remark during a conversation that just seems out of place, but is said with the air of a proverb, and that’s how I know it’s a reference to something popular on social media and that for me is too online.

Soap doesn’t clean itself!

I think Pac-Man could certainly eat the ghost at the feast, because when he’s had a pellet and there’s a ghost about, it’s always a feast.

It’s the largest country in the world,

It’s a federation. You could balkanise Russia into dependencies.

Oh, and Johnny Vegas is from the neighbouring borough in the county I’m from, so quite apt.

Once I was working at a train station on a nice, sunny afternoon, and there was a fella on the platform with a sharpened bit of PVC just waving it about, threatening people. I did as I was supposed to, stayed in the booking office, told security and the train guards, etc, but I was telling people not to go down to the platform because there was a fella waving a sharpened bit of PVC about, and they were saying “oh don’t be daft”, “oh I can’t miss this train”, and so on. I for one would let someone off if they were late because a fella was waving a sharpened bit of PVC about at the train station, but everyone who lived around the station was an hard knock or something.

Once I was working at a different station a bit further out in the sticks, and I was watching the CCTV as the train on the down platform was letting out. I saw someone walk into the car park, duck down between two cars, and walk away in different clothes. Bit odd, I thought, but fine, they’re not causing trouble. Then a man came to the window and he was apoplectic: “some fella’s just got off there and now he’s got a dress on!” So I said yeah mate, I’ve just seen that on the CCTV. This man stayed there for at least a few minutes repeatedly complaining to me that this other fella had got off the train and changed into a dress. I found it weirder that he was so upset about it, honestly.

Once I was on the way home from work on Orangeman’s Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelfth) and of course the train was rammed. I was sort of looking around, surveying the scene, and this bloke at the arse-end of the carriage suddenly piped up: “fuck the pope! Wahehey!” which I found a bit bemusing, but it’d of course been a dogshite day at work so I didn’t engage any further.

I’ve probably got hundreds of these anecdotes if I could jog my memory a bit. I had a bit of a talent for straddling the line of acceptability when writing the reports to security, which got sent to every booking office, so I ended up with a reputation and the nickname Mad Bob.