Wednesday 10 January 2007

Tight Elastic, getting going


I thought tight elastic was important till I heard about Tony Blair's flying habits and their impact on global warming.

As I type this, in January 2007, just after midnight, a daddy-long-legs comes nosing around my desk; and I don't have the central heating on, and these insects belong to September. This means the planet is getting warmer.

My anger at tight elastic is that, from about the year 1980 onwards, they have sewn the elastic into waistbands instead of threading it in. This means that you can't adjust your elastic, either by taking it in or letting it out. It is not a bad thing to do, this taking in or letting out of elastic, not bad at all if the initial sewing had created a nice oblong of double elastic and you have the right size of safety pin handy and all the rest of it that you might have learnt at your mother's knee, if you had the right kind of mother.

But nowadays, with this extra security, you have to cut your waistband in several places. This leads to a jagged look. Indeed, in the knickers that I was wearing this morning, this led to jags that grew larger by the hour until the garment began to slide down my female hip that has been enlarged by brandy butter, turkey soup and Stilton sandwiches.

But one has to weigh this against the elastic of the earlier part of the last century which could leave you with your knickers coming down suddenly -- generally in the playground. Which would YOU chose? I would chose the old type of elastic but ensure that it was well sewn at all times.

As for flying. I have only just decided that I might as well go to Australia after all -- and then all this footprint stuff comes up. I can't be leaving 5 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. I think I will go to Australia by bike. And I think that Tony Blair and his family could easily go to Tuscany by train. That would be a decent compromise.

Wasn't it foul when he went to Cumbria for a wee holiday to show solidarity with the farmers struck by foot-and- mouth, and then hoofed it off to Tuscany just as soon as it appeared (to him, not to us) decent? He's never been back, even though Cherie must have friends in the North.

My two questions to Tony Blair:

(1) Why don't you and Cherie take the family back to Cumbria?

(2) What do you think of the public hangings conducted (with shouting) by our nation's indispensible ally, Saudi Arabia?

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