Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

  Apart from the discovery that red toadstools aren't just something from fairy tale illustrations, one of the best things about having found the disused railway line to Leiston is Coopers Hardware. I went there for fly papers.  You can buy the spray next door at Solar, but I want to watch the buzzers die.   'The fly papers are upstairs, sir.  End of the aisle just before the chemicals,' said just the right person to be running a hardware shop - lined, weary, cheery and giving off that air that would make you trust him to know about everything from building a retro-but-Eco-privy; through the correct whisking consistency for carpet shampoo; to not, for the love of God, trying to cut costs by using varnished flour and water mixed to regrout along the side of the bath. (My nan knows who she is...well, she would except she's long gone to the Eternally Wednesday Bingo Club in the sky)   I found the fly papers and then - as you do - decided I needed a sieve, a set o...

 At the till in Solar today a woman refused to buy a daffodil broach for breast cancer awareness. 'Thank you, but my mother died from cancer of the bowel.'

Remember this:  Poshness in Aldeburgh... ?    Well, there was a follow up today in the library foyer. Two kapok stuffed ladies of Aldeburgh were going through the boxes of charity Christmas cards, and one said how pleased she was that the various labels on the boxes made clear which specific charity one would be supporting. 'Then one can avoid those that are just that little bit too overseas oriented. It was their own look out: those undeveloped countries choosing to throw our help back in our faces by leaving the Empire.'

  My aunt remembers toddler me shouting about them being a bloody rubbish episode of The Clangers.

  Finally I found my way, after eight fails, along the disused railway from Thorpeness to  Leiston. I've failed mainly because people have to show off. Not the nice man yesterday who pulled his cowering, floppy eared dog close to heel while he carefully explained where I'd been going wrong - mainly that never in all my eight previous tries had I actually been on the disused railway line at all.  'No, you see, there you'd have been on the common.  No, that's the shell pits. Where?  Oh.  Did you not notice the bunkers and flagpoles and blue signs warning about balls from your right? Yes, the people in the funny trousers. Not walkers exactly, you see. Ah, now, there you were nearly on the old line: all depends on from which direction you approach the pigsties.  What you wanted to do was, where the road forks, trust yourself to take the track that don't look like nothing at all, just after you'll have seen what's left of the old platform at Thorpeness Halt...

  The president of the Musical Association asked me to sing two serious, non-denominational Christmas songs, one Ivor Novello, two comic numbers, all linked by comically festive patter.   I agreed.   She then said, 'There's no money for you, apparently. Do you perform for free?  I'm sure you must at times.'   I said, 'As I'm sure at times your husband must manage hedge funds for free...'

  My dad has been saving anecdotes for me to use in my act. In Norwich Market he met Geoff, who used to make sound effects for radio. Geoff wants to include in a Radio 4 quiz a round where contestants must tell the difference between a home made sound effect and a computer generated one.  He suggests as a test piece one he created in the sixties.  A goat running amok into a cottage, up the stairs and into the parlour where it knocks seven bells out of the fireside brass. The goat Geoff had planned to use turned out to be about to kid, so he made the bleating sounds himself and created the goatish running up the stairs sounds by wearing pairs of gloves and socks made out of halved and slightly charred cricket balls.    Dad empathised with Geoff's goat stopping play because his second ever Country and Western gig, at RAF St Asaph, was cancelled after the squadron mascot, a billy goat, refused to get out of the bath.