A lickle trouble

Viewers of programmes like Eastenders, and those who have seen films with Jason Statham in them will know of a certain vocal characteristic of those who live in the London area. Essentially, letters and wholes syllables are swallowed up in a glottal space, resulting in an almost total absence of the letter 't'. In fact, the very word 'letter' ends up being pronounced as "le'ah."

Dad had a similar, yet different, approach to pronouncing whole words. It was - and still is - a family in-joke that Dad could never really pronounce the 't' in the middle of a word. Instead, the hard sound of the consonant was transformed into a 'k' sound. Since my father was fond of Derbyshire, and a lot of his and Mum's spare time revolved around trips there, this invariable meant going through Matlock. Or, as Dad would call it, 'Macklock'.*

You can see how this is going, can't you?

Now, since Dad was rather fond of a tipple, especially single malt whiskies, the family joke has always been about 'lickle bockles'. My father always took it with good grace, and even enjoyed joining in with the banter. Brilliantly, this Gem has someone else falling foul of the whole scenario...

Hmm. If this was Twitter, this would probably be given "#guessyouhadtobethere".

Interestingly enough, when I was having an idle google, I found a site that would seem to have been named by my father...

I'm not making this up - ickle bockles is a site that provides you with all those horribly small toiletry containers that airports demand these days. Visit THEIR SITE to find out more.


*either way, Matlock is a lovely place to visit, but it is a right bugger to drive through as it's at the bottom of a long, narrow valley.

Friesians on the funny farm (AKA "Old MacDonald had a wotnot")

The other day, I told you how Julie's mouth jumps in before the brain has a chance to react, and I illustrated that with an example where two farm animals were confused (link).

What I didn't tell you, however, was that the theme was continued for the rest of the day, segueing from one bizarre conversation to another, where pigs were apparently fed up with their lot and spent their days masquerading as other animals, and ... no. I think I'll save that one for another day...
You get the point, though.

There are a lot of fields just outside of town, and since it's really low-lying land, pretty dreadful for crops. Enter the cows and sheep.
The sheep must have got wind of our impending arrival, for there was not a one to be seen. Instead, there were just a few cows dotted around the field.*

I'd seen the cows from a distance away, but it seemed Julie was drifting, as she didn't really notice them until we had almost passed them.

Well.. yeah...
Julie explained to me afterwards that she was merely continuing a running gag. Funny - I don't recall one conversation constituting a running gag...
It may not have been - it is now.

I'll tell you what, with all the running gags and in-jokes we have, any passengers in our car are going to be seriously baffled.


*Including one cow that was having some trouble and was instead dotting around the field... ew...