How Granada TV cut my puns down to flies

IT’S Sunday evening, I'm packing my bags to return to Spain tomorrow, and I have a deadline to meet.
OK, D-day is four days away but picking the moans out of life every week is no mean challenge.
In fact, I sometimes wonder how I manage to find something new to write about each week.
Well, the answer is that I don't, which is my excuse for bombarding you this week with some of the contents of Donna's Diary of Diabolical Puns.
Over the past three years. I‘ve filled more than 150 pages of the Courier with my weekly Grumpings. It's been more for love than money, too.
Let’s face it, there’s scarcely enough cash floating around in Spain to pay the rant (pun intended, not a typo), never mind finance a full shop at Merca-Donna.  So I just do a Lidl a couple of times a week.
Either way, I’ll need to  Consum a lot less after my visit to the UK.
How the plane will get airborne on the way back to Spain I really don’t know.  My two daughters stuffed me with so many goodies this past week that I expect to became the first Easyjet passenger ever to travel  from England to Spain by steam-bloat.
I’ve never been quite sure what people make of my verbal twists – or how many fellow pundamentalists (or is that mental pundalists?) are out there in Courier land.  And at what age ‘normal’ children’s brains start to quirk.
Which is why I've never ventured into the world of literature with my bee-utiful  brace of bug-standard books.
Before I tell you more about Claude of the Rings and its sequel Lloyd of the Stings, I must tell you how I got hooked professionally by the pun bug.
I was fortunate to be part of the team of journalists that launched the Daily Star in Manchester inn 1978.
Our first-ever issue was featured on Granada TV’s What the Papers Say. Presenter Bill Grundy was renowned for his sarcasm - and I got the full treatment for the masthead I had written for the Star’s embryo Fishing Column.
‘STAR ANGLING...you’ll fall for it hook, line and sinker’, whined Grundy as I choked on a mouthful of corn on the cod.
Anyway, Claude of the Rings and its sequel Lloyd of the Stings,  tell the story of a fly and a wasp who live cosily in a swarm corner of an airport terminal.
They become friends and are fascinated by the gigantic metal insects that both swallow up hordes of human beings and also poo them out alive.
To quote the words I’m planning for the fly-leaf, they stow away inside one of these huge creatures and end up in a strange country where they don’t speak the wingo.
Their adventures include being rushed to waspital after drinking too much Budflyzer,  having a battle with Spiderman on the web,  and ending up in America where they become the stars of a hit TV series called Swat’s Landing.
Oh, I forgot to tell you. Claude's dad Maurice is a gardener who specialises in cutting lawns. His pals call him Flymo.
Not funny? In that case, I'll buzz off.
Published in The Courier (www.thecourier.es) March 28 2014
 

  

Air today, gone tomorrow - or will Woody Allen and I live to be 20,000?

EVER stood inside a giant warehouse service lift as the rickety contraption creaked and squeaked its way between floors?
Throw in a couple of dithering button pushers, a circuit or two of Liverpool Airport runway and a laid-back wheelchair pusher rumbling you through passport control, and bingo, you’ve arrived.
Unfortunately you’ve missed out just a little. Because the other passengers are all long gone, and the pilot and crew who flew you from Alicante tucked up in their hotel beds.
I was in the process of discovering that for disabled and frail travellers, wheelchair travel can be both a godsend and a penance.
It was heaven to be the first passenger aboard at Alicante - and promptly smothered with Air Smiles by an eager-to-please cabin crew.
But when I eventually met up with my family in a near-deserted arrivals area at Liverpool, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.
By the time the tiny wheelchair entourage reached to passport control, our fellow passengers had long since headed off into the night.
Nobody in their right mind would WANT to be pushed around in a wheelchair rather than exercise their pins.
But as I approach the Biblical three score years and ten, the reality of existence is beginning to hit home.
I am going to need help more often than not on future flights after my latest ordeal.
I don’t want to die. But imagine where we would all end up if our bodies kept going but continued to degenerate.
Like Woody Allen, I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by living for ever.
Or at least until I look in the mirror on my 20,000th birthday.