We All Scream

I like to think I have many talents. Today I learnt that eating an ice cream cone with anything approaching dignity is not amongst them. It started well. Me and the better half were enjoying a preamble along Seaburn beach and decided to round off a pleasant morning with the ingestion of frozen treats. The problem started when I became aware of the tell tale drip--drip-drip of melting on my hand. I tried to ignore it, but the trickle soon became a sticky torrent, coating my hand and making the cone soggy. There then followed a very real  moment of terror when I realised that the structural integrity of the cone was fatally compromised and urgent action was required - not shortly, not in a moment - but right this fucking second. Dutifuly I rammed the thing into my mouth, managing to get ice cream and monkey blood over my chin, cheeks and nose in the process. I was no longer deriving any actual pleasure from the thing and attacked the rapidly disintegrating mess with a frantic mechanical motion, a look of grim determination that I suspect was completely inappropriate for the task in hand. Luckily me and the missus (who incidentally encountered  no such problems) were in a place where no one else could see me make a spectacle of myself, otherwise I suspect I would be single right now.


Still, the beach is an unambiguously nice part of a town that has precious few of them. The Sunderland airshow was here last week.  For those who've never been it's... well, it an airshow. In Sunderland. I have absolutely no idea why I felt the need to clarify that. I hadn't been since I was a teenager (where, if memory serves, me mate's dad got his tyre's slashed, because little tossers are, sadly, a constant in any town) so I thought I'd have a wander down. It was absolutely rammed and the weather behaved itself. It was enjoyable, with the qualification that there's only so many times I can watch a plane do a loop de loop or a barrel role before it gets a bit old. But if, unlike me, you are the kind of person who squees over B52 bombers, military paraphernalia and the like, then I imagine you'd get a lot more like it. It also serves as an expo for the British armed forces, who try to encourage young minds to join up using a three pronged approach of the subliminal, liminal and super liminal (Hey! You! Join the army)*.

So there you go. That's the update for this week. Grown man attempts to eat ice cream. Fails. You may have guessed that I was at something of a loss what to write about. In honour of failure at the beach, here's a depiction of the rum ham scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

It should have been you, Mac. It should have been you.

I'm most of the way through another strip. The muse has currently nipped out for  a packet of fags. If she returns in time I will add it here.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*Yes that was a Simpsons reference and, yes, I'm sorry