No entry. It's your own fault.

What is it with my family and keys?

Years ago, when me and my sister were just kids, we all went on a day out and had ourselves a wonderful time - right up to the point our parents locked BOTH sets of car and house keys in the boot. Or trunk, for non-Brits. Cue an expensive journey home, including three trains, a bus and a taxi. Not necessarily in that order. And then we had to break into our own house. Oddly enough, it was soon after that that us kids got our own house keys. I wonder why...

Some years later, I was working night shift at the Cadbury factory in Birmingham, when my shift leader came to me with a message that my parents were at the security gatehouse and needed to see me. I started panicking - after all, when you get an unexpected visit from your folks, it's not often good news. Besides which, you will have got the gist already. Yes, they had gone out for the evening and locked themselves out. I had a little rant about communication.

Fast forward some more. Not long after I had moved south to live with Julie, the two of us went to the beach. I'm not great with the idea of leaving my belongings unattended on the beach while we go for a swim, and there was a small pocket on the inside of my shorts. Unfortunately, when I went for a dip, the keys fell out. Fortunately, I found them rolling in the surf on the water line. Fortunate indeed. Never before or since has Julie been so angry with me.

And now yesterday.
I was talking to my Mum by means of the old telephonic device, and she was telling me of her 'little bit of fun' the day before. Apparently, my mother had had a hospital appointment. Parking there is abysmal, so she booked a taxi, removed a lot of crap from her bag in order to make moving about on crutches a bit easier, and then shut the doo...oh shit.

No sooner had the door clicked shut than she realised she hadn't put the house keys back in her handbag. Crap. The taxi and appointment still need to happen, so off she went. When she got back, my mum found that while house keys were absent, she did have the car key. Deciding to use a cafe as an impromptu office, Mum tried to think of how to get a locksmith - not having one on speed dial, you see.

Having failed to come up with a solution, Mum then went to a garage to fill the car with fuel, and noticed a police car there. Collaring a copper, she asked him if he knew of any locksmiths in the area. Confused, he asked why, and got the whole story.

Well, there's handy.

Interestingly, I have come across a couple of good ideas for trying to make sure you have a house key with you at all times.

Found on Tuvie, this one looks funky, but I can see you would have to have a key specially made. Far better is this idea from Pocketbands.com - it's a silicon rubber bracelet with a pouch for you to put a key or an emergency tenner inside.

Naturally, the bands you would wear would not be transparent - it sort of defeats the idea of hiding something. I'm seriously liking this product, actually. Ideal for kids, clubbers, people on the beach (ahem), I am actually thinking about finding out if there is anywhere over here that flogs them.

Oh! The jiggery pokery!

Knees bent, arms stretched, rah-rah-rah.... ...sorry.

By now, you should have a fair idea that I am a great fan of wordplay, both intelligent and base. In case you aren't too sure what I mean by those terms, the difference comes when you have the reaction of either 'heh - clever' or 'hurr-hurr-hurr'. And just in case you still aren't sure, here's a handy visual guide.

"I see what you did there."                         "He said bottom... pfffff!"

However, I am erratic. Sometimes, it takes me far longer to 'get' a gag - but then there will be times when I am stuck in a manic free-associating mode, and almost everything is twistable. And yes, Julie usually tends toward the latter mode.

That's not to say that everything that comes off the cuff* is 'naughty'. Many people, mostly professional comedians, thrive on firing out barrages of clever little gags (Milton Jones comes to mind), or comebacks to snide comments/hecklers. A lot of what I say, when I want to twist the meaning of another person's sentence, will tend towards the less cerebral, shall we say. The thing is, by doing that, I am training everyone to believe that will be all I would come out with. The my fun really begins; firing off on bizarre tangents, people will start laughing at the joke they expected to hear and then go blank and say, "wait, what?"

If this is sounding familiar to you, I'm not surprised. You've been reading about Julie doing this to me and others for a few years now...

Now and then, though, I screw up. I will say something without really thinking about it and fall foul of my own methods (this recent slip comes to mind)...

Changing the scene a little, now.

Until recently, I was out of work. Now, I have a part-time job in a factory, dealing with soaps, bath lotions and tanning products. As such, we have large cubic tanks of the appropriate chemicals at the start of the line feeding into the bottles. On Monday night, we were dealing with a foaming handwash. While it's cleaner than, say, tanning mousse, it's still a bit of a bugger if it is spilled, because it is incredibly liquid, and moving the tanks around is a process carried out with great care.

When it came to hanging one tank for another, a colleague set to removing the empty tank, while I got the full one. Moving very slowly to avoid sloshing the handwash, it seems I was concentrating more on my work than my words...

Oops.
It was fortunate that my colleague had the empty tank, as he was laughing far too hard to be careful with it. Meanwhile, this was the look our team leader gave me...

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* Hurr hurr hurr...

Not to be sniffed at.

One thing that all dog owners know is that unless their dog has been very highly trained, then a dog is a curious creature, and wants to investigate interesting smells.

'nuff said, right? Roxy is certainly no exception to the rule, and having almost total freedom after three years in a last chance rescue centre means that she will make the most of it. Especially since she is still settling in, and half-believes she might have to go back to the centre.

One of her regular - and favourite - strolls is along the promenade and past the pier. Just before the pier, the prom splits in two; one path leading up and past the pier's entrance, and the other continuing by the beach and going underneath the pier.

Taking the lower prom route, you start to get a long series of low walls, one of which surrounds a sort of picnic area. Obviously, many people sit on these walls, and on this particular day there was a family of parents and young children perched on the wall, munching on chips (British chips, made with thick cuts of potato and deep fried).

Roxy, ever interested in all the different smells, always makes a bee-line for the wall, and that it also bore people with food was simply a pleasant bonus. As she was sniffing at the wall, the family were making a fuss of Roxy, something that is usually welcome. However, with all the various odours, her canine attention was pretty much set to 'distraction mode'. So, while Roxy was amenable to being stroked, the most important thing was to check out all the interesting smells on the wall.

Moving along, Roxy started snuffling at a section of wall one of the women was sat on. I kept an eye out, because some people take exception to having a dog smelling their nether regions. It didn't help that the woman offered a dubious origin for a particularly interesting smell.

...sometimes, I need to engage my brain before sending messages down to the mouth...
Fortunately, the woman laughed it off.

I suppose it could have been worse...

Badgered

Ready for a quick blast of Cute?

Baby badgers; so young their eyes have yet to open.

Julie found this delightful image somewhere, and I insisted she shared it with me - by private message on Facebook, so it wouldn't get lost in every other post I see.
I had an ulterior motive, though. Lovely as these badgers were,* it was Julie's comment that cracked me up.

Nope.
Just to clarify; these are baby platypuses:

And these are baby badgers:

They're all cute, and they are all (roughly) mammalian. Other than that, nope. Not the same.

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* By the way; baby badgers might look cute, but adult badgers are vicious buggers and are roughly the size of a Staffordshire Bull Terrier - and with roughly the same temperament when pissed off. Don't mess with them.

A lengthy problem

This one is old. And I mean 'before I met Julie' old.

I used to work in a warehouse that stocked and supplied electronic components. It was a pretty big warehouse, and at the time this took place, I was a shift team leader in the goods in department.

As anyone who has ordered multiple items at a single time knows, what you ordered isn't necessarily what you receive. One supplier even threatened to take us to court because we were refusing to pay for items we hadn't received - but they were adamant they had shipped. And then they found said items in a dark corner of their own warehouse. And two suppliers seemed to think it would be a jolly good wheeze to throw a load of components into a box with polystyrene chips (a fantastic idea, courtesy of static electricity), and then leave us to guess what each item may be.

It didn't help that the term MICROelectronics was often a very salient term to describe the parts. While some items had the device code printed on them somewhere, others were too small to fit the entire code, no matter how small the print.

As team leader, it fell to me to contact the sales department in question and ask them to iron out any problems. Cue this conversation (and yes, Mary was Irish)...

All around me, people were either laughing or demanding to know what the laughter was about. All I could think of was that I had just well and truly scuppered my chances of asking Mary out...

Sanity soundbite

Every now and then, we fall back to discussing Julie's Gems - the acts, not the site. Usually, Julie will try to explain her way out of the situation. Unfortunately, the explanations tend hold about as much water as a colander. Made of rice paper.

Occasionally, Julie will examine herself, trying to work out what is going on in her head. As I have asserted on many occasions, my darling wife is not stupid nor in any way suffering from any mental disorder. She is highly intelligent, but just a little... erratic, shall we say. In fact, the only real difference between Julie and the rest of us is that the little filter between her personal world view and the real world is curiously absent. That, and the world's definition of 'normal' probably needs tweaking.

Actually, love, I would argue that you are a lot saner than many of the rest of us put together.

Born old birdie

This is a young seagull. It has this dappled colouring until it gets older - it's a defensive camouflage thing. Living in Eastbourne, we see a lot of these. And hear them. Ye gods, the keening of a young gull as it tries to blag food from a parent seriously gets on your ti... er, nerves.

The thing about knowledge, if I may digress slightly, is that until you learn or are told of a nugget of information, it will completely elude you. Furthermore, if you are not interested in certain things, then there is a strong chance that facts pertaining to those things will remain forever beyond your ken.

Julie, until I entered her life, didn't have much interest in natural wildlife. Now, she is just as keen as I am in seeing plenty of it both in the flesh and on TV. However, in the early days of our relationship, Julie was unaware (ie didn't care one way or another) that the speckled birds and the white ones were in fact of the same species. They were both bloody nuisances, that's all that mattered.

When we were out for a walk along the seafront one day, I pointed out one bird very similar to the one pictured above, and commented that it was merely a young seagull. Julie interpreted 'young' as 'baby'.

I'll take your word for that, love.

Oral, not aural.

Let's be honest, we've all done it. We have all said something and then immediately wondered why you did. Sometimes, it slipped out and you aren't even aware you spoke until you realise people are staring at you. Sometimes, you are caught up in the moment and an incautious phrase escapes before the mental filters can stop it.

And then there is Julie. Shameless to the end, all manner of things are said at the drop of a hat, with not a regret. Brilliantly, many Gems arise as a direct result of my wife attempting to justify herself or defend something she has just said.

For example...

Indeed.

B&Q boo-boo

Well, we've had a pleasant weekend - how about you?

On Saturday, me and Julie went to a place called Michelham Priory. It's a wonderful place, full of history, and is reputed to be the most haunted place in Sussex - should you believe in the supernatural. There is plenty to see & do at any time, but they also host a lot of special events - such as the Medieval weekend which we enjoyed. Wonderfully, the entry price is reasonable and isn't jacked up when a special event takes place. Visit the Sussex Past page to see more.

In keeping with the desire to show living history, the priory grounds also has a working forge, worked and maintained by a skilled blacksmith.

I have to admit, I loved the bellows.

When we arrived, the smith was fashioning a number of hooks for one of the event participants. The lady in question was hanging around, completely at ease in her heavy gown. As we watched, I felt myself almost lulled by the rhythmic tempo of the smith's hammer strikes. In addition, the sound changed, according to which part of the steel he was hitting, and where upon the anvil he had placed it.

After about five minutes, this competent worker had nonchalantly turned out a strong and serviceable hook.

The hook is made to rest over a wooden beam.

Unfortunately, just as the crowd were admiring the smith's handiwork, Julie decided to pipe up...

Time to move on, methinks...

Distinctly different

I'm sat here, typing this out and a neighbour - a few houses away, actually - is noodling on his guitar. I would say 'playing', but it's jazz. In other words, a random mess.

I don't like jazz. Can you tell?

This is not to say, however, that my neighbour is a poor guitarist. Far from it. We have heard some lovely music, usually blues-based, coming from his house. Normally,  it's just noodling though. Practice.

One day, some time ago, we were sat in our front room, reading quietly. After a while, I realised I could hear our neighbour playing his guitar. Only just, though. He must have had his windows closed - or the breeze was blowing the wrong way, carrying the majority of the sound with it. As I said, it was a very soft noise, far from intrusive. In fact, when I commented to Julie that our neighbour had begun his guitar practice, she was surprised. In fact, even when I drew her attention to it, it still wasn't registering.

Zing!
Well, I lost that one. Not only was I confusing, Julie also managed to fit in a truly apposite pun. In the meantime, perhaps Julie could use these to boost her hearing...

Bloomin' unholy

We don't have much of a garden. Similarly, I don't have much of a green thumb, and nor does Julie. Since we have limited resources and abilities, we try and make sure everything we plant is as easy as possible to grow and maintain.

Unfortunately, there is something of a running battle with the local cat population and since Julie is actually rather fond of cats, my subconscious desire for an automatic machine-gun nest has to remain that way for now.

..uhhh... whoops...
Oh well.

Because of the cats, much of what goes into the garden needs to be pretty hardy. Stuff like shrubs and trees. Well, I say that, but they've done a bang-up job of killing my lovely yellow fir tree by spraying against it. Little bastards. By contrast, the fuschia appears to be immortal and the bay tree unstoppable. Both, however, pale in comparison to the buddleia in the front garden (read as 'strip of earth between house and pavement'), which has to be butchered to the ground annually and trimmed and bound at least twice throughout the growing season. I love it, and so does the insect community.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of pots in the back garden with some lilies, chosen by Julie, which also contain some of her mother's ashes. This year, however, there are a couple of intruders...

I checked (good ol' Google image search) afterwards and found the flowers were indeed snapdragons, which much have self-seeded from somewhere else.

Pretty, aren't they? We tend to call them 'rhubarb-and-custards'.

Say you, say me, say what? [Part II]

Part II? Oh yes. The first time around was when I got a little lost in my own sentence. Those with memories as poor as mine can see it HERE. This time around, though, it's Julie who is doing the sentence-stumbling.

My wife often denies having said something - usually right after we've finished laughing about it, oddly enough. However, when she finally remembers it, Julie will try and hurry us on to the next subject, saying something like, "I can't be expected to remember everything I've said, can I?" It's something I can't normally argue with - unless, I have pointed out,the original conversation is not yet five minutes old...

Of course, when Julie tries to deny or correct something she has said, she'll find she hasn't yet left the Gemzone and falls right into another verbal trap...

My own personal trap is that I will all too often find myself trying to point out the lack of logic in something Julie has said. We then get into... not an argument, but a back-and-forth discussion about what was said, who said what, and how it was said.... and I get completely lost myself. These days, I know better. When we have a situation like this, I stay quiet, apply The Look, and remain quiet when Julie asks me, "...what? Wha'd I say?"

The Look. As supplied by Sceptical Dog.

A very specific loss

You may have noticed that Julie has a certain way with words.
Specifically, a way that tends not to correspond with many other people.

As you may have noticed over the last couple of years, this is really rather entertaining. However, that entertainment comes at a cost. That cost is clarity. Usually, this isn't much of a problem; I can look round and see what Julie is referring to.
Unfortunately, if Julie is talking about something that's not to hand - or if I'm not in the same room as her - then it makes it much more of a guessing game.

Most of us, when faced with a word that is on the tip of our tongues, will stop talking and stare into space until we remember what we wanted. In fact, if you are anything like me, then you could end up staring into space for quite some time.

Not Julie. Oh no. Julie jumps in not only with both feet, but fully dressed and ready to go. In this instance, we were getting ready to go out for a walk. I was by the front door, putting on my shoes. Julie, for some reason, had gone into the kitchen and was there doing up her coat. Then there was a small noise, a clink.

Eventually, after some discussion, it was established that a metal part of her coat had come loose. It didn't help that Julie kept insisting "the thing - you know... the thing."
No... no, I don't...

The Wedding banned

It's been about six and a half years since we were married. It was a lovely day, which was pleasant, considering the weekends either side of the one we booked were absolutely vile. Mind you there was one vile thing about our wedding day - my head. As the morning went on, my head grew progressively worse until I found myself trying to cope with a near-migraine level headache.

Toffed up, me and my best man got a taxi to the hotel where we got married, and began the process of meeting and greeting various friends and relatives. It was the first time I had met many of the younger ones, and I was pleased to note that they were a fairly well-behaved bunch. I'm not much for children at the best of times and I definitely didn't want any excitable kiddies that day.

Our home-made table centrepiece. Hedgehog, of course!

Apart from our tying the knot, we both agreed that the highlight of the ceremony was when my foster brother, who is severely disabled, acted up at precisely the point I had predicted.

Before the wedding, we had to drop by the registrar's office to discuss things. I was adamant that I wanted Jim to be there, so I was making sure that there would be no objections on the part of the officials. However, I did warn them that Jim has a broad sense of humour and, while unable to speak, he uses his laughs to communicate some things very well. And, being mischievous, he responded well to the question, "is there anyone who objects to these two being married.?"

Cue the snigger.

The registrar hadn't quite believed me when I warned her, so this snigger came as something of a surprise; I knew from our first meeting that, while efficient, she was also officious and patronising.

There was another incident concerning the registrar.
When we moved to discussing some of the finer details of our ceremony, the matter of restrictions was raised. Now, I had heard something about this. If you were to be married in a non-ecclesiastic manner, then the music played should have no religious references. This ban included Robbie Williams' hit 'Angels'.

I objected to this. Not so much for the banning of a Robbie tune (which I rather like, actually), but that there were restrictions being placed on our special day - one we were paying for. Nevertheless, argued the registrar, angels are a religious construct and therefore cannot be played at a civil ceremony.

Ridiculous.

The registrar went further; we were not allowed to choose any music that was inappropriate for such an occasion, and we would have to submit which songs/tunes we had in mind. Julie was also unimpressed.

I burst out laughing, but the registrar was none too happy, and gathered up her papers, saying, "well, I think that's all we need to discuss for today," before bidding us 'Good day' and leaving.

In the end, this was the music we chose for the ceremony. Approved, of course.

• Bride's entrance: 'Horizons' by Genesis
• Signing the documents: 'The Rose' by Bette Midler
• The couple leaves: 'Handbags & Gladrags' by Stereophonics (it's Our Song)

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PS - apparently, the ban on ecclesiastical references in songs has since been lifted.

Diggin' down on the farm

If Julie has a fault - unlikely, I know - it's that her mouth has a tendency to say something before the brain gets a chance to edit it.
Unfortunately, Julie's mouth doesn't have access to all the knowledge that her brain does, so it tends to tag things and respond accordingly, even when the situation doesn't completely conform to her brain's definitions.

Here's a prime example. We were out for a drive the other day, shunning the main roads as normal and pootling around the small lanes - dodging into gateways every now and then to allow oncoming traffic to pass. Not a lot of conversation was going on; what with the narrow lanes and tall hedges, I needed to be careful with my own driving, just in case someone coming the other way wasn't careful with theirs.

When it comes to this, Julie tends to drift and take only passing note of the scenery, near and far. When we passed (yet another) gate leading onto a field, we caught a fleeting glimpse of an animal with black and white colouring.

Actually, no. Not 'moo'. More like 'whinney' or 'neigh'.
Yep. It was a horse. However, Julie's mouth had done its party trick and made what it had thought to be the obvious connection. Unfortunately for Julie, I had also seen the beastie in question and had recognised its equine nature.
I laughed, and Julie knew immediately what had happened and switched the running of the mouth over to her brain, admitting that it was, indeed, a horse.

Sadly, Julie lost the chance to leave it there and almost literally dug herself deeper.

No. I don't think so.
They're yellow.

World Book Night 2013: A final fail and a call to arms

Yes folks. As I type this, you have just under six hours to enter the free draw. If you want to be in with a chance of winning a great book posted to you anywhere in the world, then email us immediately (if not sooner) at juliesgems@gmx.com - you never know, you may even bag yourself loads of other goodies too, including some official Julie's Gems bookmarks, featuring quotes from the great lady herself!

As a sweetener, here is one final outtake from our pitiful attempts at making a promotional clip for this draw (made in association with World Book Night 2013)...






There you go. All done and dusted.
We will post the results of the draw on Thursday.

World Book Night Fail II - the Techno-derp.

OK, so there we are trying to film a clip for our World Book Night free draw. Yes, we managed to get it together in the end, but there were a couple of problems. One was my poor delivery, and the other was my less than stellar ability with editing tools.

Mind you, Julie's grasp of technology seems to be even worse than mine (somehow...).

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Don't forget - you still have time to enter the free draw to win a load of books, CDs and other goodies!
Email us at juliesgems@gmx.com - and don't forget, this is open only to residents of Earth.

A cheesy mouthful

Sometimes, things happen and you find yourself thinking, I don't want to know.

Imagine this little scenario, if you will.
You will walk into a room and find your housemate, naked, straddling his golden retriever. For a moment, you face betraying no emotion, you stand there. You housemate and his dog return your look. For them, surprise and embarrassment hasn't had time to register, and before it does, you calmly - but definitely - leave the room.
There's a decent explanation. Even as you leave the room, you know this. However, the situation has managed to affect your mind enough that, for some reason, you just can't think of one right now.
Some time later, while you and your housemate are watching TV, you broach the subject carefully, picking at the subject like you would try and scratch an itch around a scab or cut.

As it happens, all that occurred was that your housemate was just about to get dressed when his dog suddenly decided to see what the contents of an ashtray tasted like. His owner was understandably concerned for the dog's well-being and yelled for the dog to drop the dead ciggies. The dog, thinking that this was some kind of game, happily dashed out of the room and downstairs. And your housemate dashed after him, forgetting that he wasn't wearing even a single sock. In the front room, he finally managed to catch hold of the dog; gripping the retriever's torso between his knees, he bent forward to try and prise open the dog's jaws.

Which is when you walked in...
...and out again.

Have an embarrassed retriever in a baby swing.

For my part, I was already in the kitchen when Julie had her moment. The previous evening, Julie decided to drop by McDonalds on the way home from working at the hospital. I sat in the car while Julie went in a bought her food and a coke for me. The next morning, I went to the fridge for milk to put in my tea. In there, I saw that Julie had not been able to eat her burger - not even a bite.

Later that day, after that evening's hospital shift, Julie took the cheeseburger out of the box, put it on a plate and into the microwave.
After a couple of minutes - *ping!* - one superheated and unappetising bit of meat in a bun. Julie put the plate onto the worktop and turned the bun over. With some difficulty, I might add; all the cheese had melted and slid out of the bun and welded the whole thing to the plate. I grimaced slightly and turned away to the sink to rinse out a mug. When I turned back, Julie was picking at her food. She looked up, saw my expression and tried for an explanation.

Hmm, yes. Sometimes, it's best not to attempt an explanation. Especially if you have a tendency to pick the wrong words...

No, no, yes-yes, no

Every now and then, Julie seems to go into Gem overdrive. Or, as she puts it, "I'm having a mad five minutes."
Most of the time, these 'MFMs' happen at home, towards the end of the day. Tiredness does play a large part, it has to be said, but there is also a strong case for arguing the side of 'winding down after work'. I can understand that. I mean, if you've been on the go all day, then you want to put your feet up, both literally and metaphorically.

However, Julie will sometimes have an MFM while we're out and about. These are the occasions when I have to be very quick about writing stuff down, because the Gems come out so fast, they almost pile into the back of each other.
Naturally, Julie gets a bit miffed about having to stop every few feet just so I can jot down the latest Gem, so when I called our walk to a halt last week, my darling wife decided to make a comment. Unfortunately, she got a tad confused and it sort of backfired...

To tell the truth, I'm not all that sure myself...

From a far-flung phylum

You may have noticed a trend here; I have been referencing previous Gems in new posts. The reason for this is simple - when Julie and me talk about the Gems, she tends to go ahead and Gem it up once more, but in a totally new way.

For example, here is the tale of a certain caterpillar... He's not a very hungry caterpillar, but he was an explorer, and had found his way onto my sleeve.
A few weeks ago, I was looking through my notes and we were talking about this occasion. Julie, however, referred to the poor creature as something completely different.

Well, yes... There's nothing like narrowing it down, is there?