Posted by Lemon Bella writes:
Indian Skimmer and I went to see all three days of the South African tour match against Somerset. We hate the ground at Taunton, it’s rubbish. It’s only picturesque if you look at it from a certain angle, and not once did we see anyone with a cream tea. Also, every time we’ve been to Taunton someone has had to be ejected for being a moron. In our heads, Taunton equals morons.
Day one started well because at Plymouth station we saw a man barred from travelling because he had a live lobster in a box. The woman behind the counter had to ring head office to check and apparently he’d have been fine if he’d had a rabbit or a cat, but not a lobster.
At the ground we ate several homemade pecan brownies for lunch, each one containing our recommended daily intake of saturated fat. Obligingly, Jacques Kallis then came out to bat so we could have a bit of a nap to work off the brownies. Later on, we saw Mark Boucher giving Neil McKenzie a head massage on the balcony. Either that or he was checking him for nits.
On day two we managed to finish three Kakuro puzzles before the train pulled into Taunton. This is a record. Then a man walked past our seats and stole the coffee stirrer we’d left on the table. This was a shame as we still had things to stir.
We spent the day attempting to take photos of Morne Morkel with our fancy new camera but he was too fast. We have a lot of high resolution pictures of his back foot and the bowling crease, though, so we know it’s a good camera.
On day three we got distracted from ordering food (pasty, cheese and onion, not too bad) at the kiosk because Dale Steyn walked past carrying a plate of sandwiches. The kiosk attendant had to shout to get our attention. She gave us a look that suggested this had happened a lot.
The drunken louts sitting behind us were as drunken and loutish on the third day as they had been on the others, but with the added attraction that they’d removed their shirts. They attempted to heckle the South Africans but Neil McKenzie heckled back. In our opinion, Neil McKenzie won that battle because not only was he fully clothed at the time, but also his heckle made grammatical sense.
That amused me muchly.
Never done a kakuro puzzle so I’m not really sure if 3 before Taunton is a par score.
Brownies are good. More people should eat them more often.
Top report.
3 is good. Especially given that it was 7.30am when we started. Adding up at that time is difficult.
The photo is exceptional.
It really captures the action. Indian Skimmer managed to get *hundreds* like that. She’s thinking of going professional.
Sadly I had to google “live lobster railway” and I now know how to kill a lobster humanely (stick it in the freezer till it’s stunned then shove a knife behind its eyes and chop its head in half.) I thought I should share that.
Dale Steyn and the sandwiches (do hope they weren’t lobster) – made me wonder what would happen if Kallis and Boucher go to one of those “All you can eat” buffets…..
What the hell is kakuro?
But killing the lobster humanely is meant to result in an inferiour taste, as the adrenaline isn’t coursing through its veins. Do lobsters have veins? Or adrenaline? Well, you know what I mean.
Seriously though, I thought a vaguely humane method was to put it into cool water and ramp up the temperature slowly, having covered the pan with a damp cloth. Apparently, the lobster falls into a deep sleep and dies without even knowing it.
Do you ever know when you die?
I didn’t.
So you don’t know when you die, but you clearly do know when you’re dead.
At what point do you realise and how do you know that that moment isn’t the moment when you die?
That was a comment and a half.
I just woke up dead.
It was clear I’d been dead for a few hours.
The words “Mark Boucher”, “Neil McKenzie”, “giving” and “head” are never to appear together in a sentence again, ok? Apart from that, fabulous report ladies.
Talking of transporting animals, I recently had cause to stand for hours near a man with a cat in a basket (he was shipping the cat to Australia). The basket had a sticker on the side with pictures of a tortoise, fish and something else, all with a big red cross marked on them in pen, and then a picture of a dog, circled in pen with the word “CAT” written across it. I assume this was in case the Australian people shipping it looked at the ginger fluffy creature and thought “is that perhaps a fish or a tortoise?”.
You’re all assuming the guy wanted to kill his lobster. If that were the case, I suspect he would have done it before travelling as it would have saved him a lot of time and effort (“No, I’m not joking. It really is a lobster”).
I like to think it was a pet.
It would be great to have a lobster as a pet, but how many evenings would it survive when you get home to find nothing in the fridge? I don’t think I’d last a week before it became bisque.
Talking of pets and death reminds me of a woman who drove off from her cat fanatic friend’s house but, unfortunately, straight over the beloved cat. She jumped out the car but the cat was dead. She panicked and put it in her shopping bag and jumped back in the car and drove off. A few minutes later she saw a tea room and stopped to try and get calm and decide what to do.
While she was drinking her tea another woman came in carrying an identical shopping bag and sat down. The second woman ordered tea and then very casually looked into the bag and fainted.
The cafe owner called an ambulance which came very quickly. The ambulance men put the woman who was still apparently unconscious on a stretcher and whisked her away but the cafe owner picked up the bag and ran after them. She put it on the stretcher with the thief.
We don’t know the end of the story except that the cat killer did not own up. She squared her conscience by deciding that hearing it would be a worse trauma for the owner.
I know you read late additions to posts and as you posted the lobster story I thought you would like this one too. I wouldn’t post it ‘live’ partly because death hasn’t come up lately but mostly because some of your readers evidently like cats.
That is a slightly unsettling story.