Time goes by so slowly for those who wait

[venta]

For the best part of a fortnight I've been intermittently coughing and hacking and spluttering and generally sounding like dying sealion. But without the ability to balance a ball on my nose (I tried).

In among the many apologies to my colleagues for the godawful noises, I mentioned the likelihood of gold watches.

Everyone looked at me funny. Again.

[Poll #1566412]

It never was a gold watch, by the way.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

I do wonder how often these early radio comedies are to blame for things which sound like they ought to be regional oddities but appear bizarrely spread out. My parents were avid listeners, and still are in fact (thank you BBC 7).

They're also relatively old to be my parents, meaning that most of my contemporaries have younger parents who didn't grow up with ITMA, so it would be a good explanation of a lot of the odd things I say.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I've always been fond of some of my grandma's sayings, which mostly seemed to be concerned with the tidiness of one's appearance and particularly hair:

"You look like the wreck of the Hesperus"
"Your hair looks like a hen's arse on a windy day"
"You look like you've been dragged through a hedge backwards"

and the bizarre compliment to a well-scrubbed cheek or item of silverware: "shining like shit on a barnhouse door".

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ohh yes, dragged through a hedge backwards sounds familiar. My brother got told he looked like a walking jumble sale once. I don't think anybody would try and sell clothes with that much snot on.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I first came across "wreck of the Hesperus" in the George Harrison song title, but my mum told me it was quite a common expression in her day. It refers to the Longfellow poem of the same name, but that's much earlier. I wonder if this was also a meme started by someone on the radio.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ooh yes, wreck of the Hesperus is something I'm familiar with hearing. I think I'd expect it to be applied to someone who looked, say, hungover or something. I think of the hedge-backwards one as being very common, but then I've been wrong about that kind of thing before :)

I've never heard the hen's arse one, but I like it.