Bloody beards...

There seems to be a beard revolution going on. You can’t turn on the televisioning box these days without seeing men with hugely hirsute jaw lines when only a few months ago their faces would have been as smooth as the proverbial baby’s bottom. Worse still, it seems that a lot of these ‘men’ are mere babies themselves and there is something not quite the full shilling about an apparently twelve year old boy with a huge hunk of hairiness around his mouth.

The TV ads, boy bands, movies, reality shows are full of these whiskered boymen. Maybe I should grow a big fuck off beard so that I can advertise perfume and cars and breast milk and everything else that only seems to be bought by men with hairy chops or their women who are obviously saving money on the weekly shop by not buying razors and shaving foam.

Of course there are men that look great with the full treatment: Orson Welles, W.G. Grace, Ernest Hemmingway, Captain Birdseye, Haddock, and all pirate captains, explorer types, and Victorian firemen with solid brass hoses. But it’s really for the older person, not the ‘only started shaving a few years ago’ boy brigade. They should stick to goatees and chin bars.

Boys with beards! Oh well, it could be worse – they could have full beards and tats.

What do you mean they do?

* Thanks to Mr Kevin Parrott for the fantastically rendered image of me with a magnificent full beaver. I think it makes me look a little like Orson Welles... Oloroso.

The grumps...

 I’m a bit grumpy today, not at all like yesterday. Yesterday was ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’, shiver me timbers. I spent some of the day talking like a pirate – dubloons, groats, Davey Jone’s locker, and splice the mainbrace ye scurvy knaves – and the rest of it thinking about pirates. To be exact I spent most of the day thinking about a pirate cat who I dreamed up a few years ago and who I thought I might write a few stories about but never did.

In my imagination Kit the Pirate Cat sails on the good ship name to be definitely be decided, but I think that it is either ‘The Dolphin’ or ‘The Tuna Flake’. Kit spends his days chasing the pirate rats that live below deck. The chief rat (who is definitely called Black Jack) is huge and is always laying traps for Kit. The ship is manned by a mismatched pirate crew including a one-eyed, toothless, boson, named ‘Salty Socks’,  who get into all sorts of scrapes with rival pirates, mermaids, native islanders, terrible storms, etc. They are always getting into deep water and are a hapless bunch, doomed to failure, but Kit usually, in his catty way, saves the day and ends up being fed cream and fish by the motley crew who mainly love him.

The ship’s captain, who may be called ‘Captain Scampi’ or ‘Captain Crabstick’, doesn’t like Kit one bit and is always trying to get Kit to walk the plank, although he never seems to manage it…

And that is about as far as I’ve ever got. I quite like the idea of ‘Kit the Pirate Cat’ though.

Anyway, now that ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’ is over perhaps I’ll have a go at a Kit tale or two.

Dubby the Buccaneer...

Here's Dubby the duck out doing a bit of pirating.

Not quite the Caribbean, but a break in the rain at least allowed him to have a good hunt around for the treasure he's buried somewhere and can't find. That's the trouble with ducks - bad memories, very forgetful - Dubby would forget his own name if it wasn't written on his underneath in black indelible felt tip pen.

I don't know why he's carrying that map either. Despite being able to navigate south for the winter, ducks (at least rubber ducks) seem to have absolutely no sense of direction. Dubby was about to wander into the sea, blindly following his map, before I pointed out that he was looking at it upside down. It could have been very nasty - rubber ducks float very well but have a tendency to drift with the tide, and the tide was going out. Dubby could have ended up anywhere.

Thank God he doesn't have sat-nav.

Anyway, here he is sitting on a rock as the waves crash around him wondering where on earth he buried that treasure, in fact he's wondering if he actually buried that treasure, and was there ever any treasure to bury anyway? He gets a bit confused poor thing. It comes with the rubber duck territory.

Come on Dubby, let's go home, I don't think we are going to find your treasure today - and Polly Parrot looks as though she could do with a stiff drink after getting splashed with all that sea water. I know that I could - being friends with a rubber duck is much harder work than you might think.



The motley crew of the Scarlet Drake - Dubby's old ship.