PandaBoy

Frambot, or perhaps I should be calling him BambooBot, or even PandaBoy, these days given his apparent obsession with that grass, its products and the uses thereof, was partially disabled today. Before you begin to worry and start bombarding us with comments (to comment on this new blog just click on the 0 Comments text that follows the tail of the blog entry and you'll get a dinky little window to enter your observations or counter arguments in. Click on the little envelope beside it and you get to send us a private email comment!) I should explain that what happened was this: he was deprived of his overalls for a day! Disabling for a boy who lives, sleeps and, may eventually die in them but hardly life threatening.

The signature red Sanfor overalls were beyond grubby but it had proven difficult in the extreme to separate a boy and his best friend so we resorted to subterfuge yesterday! The Guv'nor pretended to need to borrow said overalls in order to test out his new telescopic loppers on the olive in the road outside the house - loppers by the way that PandaBoy, I'm convinced, has his eyes on for trimming up the bamboo hedge at the river's edge - and, having separated man and material he then proceeded to put the stinking, filthy things in soak (ironically the spirtle used to agitate this hideous mess is itself made of the selfsame bamboo that obsesses the boy himself so). Hoorah, for a bit of constructive deception - and for Vanish.

And so they soaked all night, and most of this morning too, until the sun had burnt off the cloud and a light zephyr rummaged through the tops of the heavily laden olives. At this point they were rinsed and hung out on the garden wash line. A stout man with a stick stouter still was required to stand guard until they were dry since the BambooBoy was showing classic withdrawal symptoms by this time and was parading around in a particularly unbecoming set of khaki shorts and looking much like a desperate hombre (he was sporting three day's growth).

Well, the upshot is that boy and breeches are now re-united and we are all able to breathe deeply in their vicinity once more. Sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice the comfort of the individual, albeit temporarily, to effect improvements to the lot and living standards of the majority.

They even came out red again!