Chase Post

She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed is over the moon because our son has befriended the son of the rich couple in the Big House.

This is an appalling brand of snobbery, of which I am not guilty: affluent or poverty stricken - anyone can buy me a drink.

The thoroughly modern family over the road have tutored their two children with Churchillian precision.

The youngsters have an un-nerving ability to describe the aches and pains collected during a day playing on the village green in medical terms.

Their 'book at bedtime' must by The Lancet.

I just can't sleep. I'd take sleeping tablets, but don't want to end-up like Judy Garland. A gay icon.

Every day this week I've been jolted from slumber, bathed in cold sweat, by fears over the spreading mould on our bedroom ceiling. The cause - despite forking out a fortune to a battery of tradesmen - is still unknown.

The council skip cometh.

Fifty two items of tat we loaded onto that rusting communal bucket. We decided to take 13 back, in the hope there may yet be someone on ebay who wants a one-legged Action Man with a stutter, a bird cage ladder with four rungs missing (a must for budgies who take really big strides) and a blender without the blades: we think the latter would make an excellent executive toy for high-powered businessmen who find it relaxing to watch vegetables spin very quickly.

I was asked to judge a pole dancing competition on Wednesday. Honest.

Complete con. The girls had Midlands accents. Not an Eastern European in sight. I thought they'd be wearing clogs and crushing cabbages.

Instead, semi-clad women, covered in baby oil, gyrated inches away from me. Gosh, it's changed so much since our maypole dancing at junior school. Not one of them hit me with a pig's bladder.

Bloke up the road is selling labrador puppies for £300! For £600, he'll train them, too.

"What do you train them to do?" I asked, stunned by the price tag.

"Fetch sticks," he told me proudly.

For an extra £300 I'd want the mutt to fetch the sticks, then knock-up a coffee table. Possibly drive me to the pub and back, to boot.

I've just come across a container full of all my schoolboy achievements.

That is one cramped matchbox, I can tell you.

I was so success-starved as a youth, I got a bogus certificate knocked-up for reaching puberty - with a 'well done' message from Hugh Heffner. Cycle proficiency and 50 length swimming certificate are still numbers one and two, under 'academic achievements', on my CV.