A fox and a din­kle din­seed joke

Tru­ly! I for­got to say. My friend Emi­ly, on Sun­day, had just been bemoan­ing the can­cel­la­tion of the hunt in Eng­land, say­ing it was the work of a bunch of dopey Lib­er­als who weren’t even aware that the peo­ple they hurt were the Lit­tle Peo­ple in the coun­try who set up the hunts, not the land­ed gen­try who hunt­ed. “Hon­est­ly, we need the hunt. Emma and I saw a fox in Ham­mer­smith the oth­er day, in broad day­light.” “Oh, Emi­ly, come on, I’m the Queen of Writer’s Embell­ish­ment, but you can’t get even me to believe you saw a FOX in cen­tral Lon­don. It must have been a large dog of some kind,” I protest­ed. “Seri­ous­ly,” she said.

So we’re dri­ving home and John’s just nav­i­gat­ing the last few
annoy­ing one-way streets to our flat, when in front of the car flash­es… a FOX. Sor­ry, Emi­ly, you were right. A FOX!

Then this after­noon in a crowd­ed pizze­ria I’m read­ing Avery’s school notes for par­ents, catch­ing up on what’s hap­pen­ing. Remem­ber the Turks and Chi­nese com­plain­ing about the back­yard noise? Well, Mrs D was announc­ing the offi­cial mea­sure­ment of noise pro­duced, AKA the acoustic sur­vey, and I men­tioned this to Avery as she man­han­dled her ten­drils of moz­zarel­la. “So there’s to be an acoustic sur­vey,” I said, and she looked puz­zled and said, “What would they ask, just things like, do you have a glue stick? Or what do you use it for, your glue stick?” “Not a GLUE STICK sur­vey, an ACOUSTIC sur­vey,” I said, and then we both laughed so hard we could hard­ly breathe. My fam­i­ly will under­stand the sub­ject line of this post! Nev­er end­ing fun, con­ver­sa­tions with children.

John is off to Vien­na tomor­row for his first busi­ness trip since we arrived. I asked for some tiny sausages in a can and Sig­gy’s sig­gy. We’ll see.