‘AND,’ said my daughter, ‘Mum will be giving you some sausages for us to bring with you. OK? Good. Bye bye Daddy. See you tomorrow.’
She rang off. I had made no protest. I knew there would be no point.
What I didn’t know at the time was how many sausages there were and, more to the point, the sheer punishing weight of the things to go on my cargo manifest.
I’m a man who likes to travel light. For a long weekend visit to my daughter’s family home in the dreamy depths of rural Hampshire I would normally need no more than a Shoprite bag to pack my kit in.
But my daughter and her mother see my role in these visits as a delivery man, in this case pork sausages from Radcliffe’s the butchers in Malew Street, Castletown.
They are not readily available in the middle of Hampshire and they are apparently crucial to the sheer survival of my daughter and her husband and my two grandchildren, Annie and Henry, now at university but who would be home on holiday when I arrived. They all eat a lot of them.
In addition to my burden there was a pair of ladies’ shoes, items of female clothing and packages the contents of which were not explained.
But it was the sausages which did the damage. They weighed in at nearly 5lbs.
I had only hand luggage and on board the Flybe aircraft I tried to get it into the overhead locker and staggered backwards under the effort.
A fetching little stewardess did it for me. She knows me. ‘What have you got in it this time Mr C?’ she asked in wonder.
It would have been unforgiveably rude to snarl back: ‘Sausages!’
It was my first arrival at Gatwick for a matter of weeks and I found out that, without telling me, they had re-built most of it again in the meantime which resulted in me having a lot more walking to do to reach freedom.
Lugging my bag along, I also fetched up at new fortifications erected by the Border Agency.
There was a sign saying I should not try to bring foodstuffs into the United Kingdom from outside the European Union. Radcliffe’s are outside the EU just like Malew Street and Castletown and the rest of the Isle of Man. I decided to risk it and walked through unimpeded.
My arrival with the life-saving sausages was greeted with rejoicing.
My grandson Henry – tall, powerfully built, and bearded like the pard – is more a man of the world of today at the age of 20 than I am at 82.
He hefted the bag of sausages. ‘You’re a sausage mule Grandad,’ he told me. ‘Cool.’
I was there for five days. They didn’t give me a single one of those bloody sausages to eat.
l A HEADLINE in the Examiner about house rent rises of 35 per cent in Ramsey said: ‘New pubic rents points system rolled out.’
My readers seized joyously on this classic typo. There was a call from Tim and from a retired undertaker calling himself Dave the Grave and there was also John Rhodes saying in a horrified voice: ‘Pubic rent?’
Avril Firth emailed saucily: ‘I’m sure there are many of us who would love to see what that entails.’
Finally, Ed Abraham in Ramsey emailed: ‘A rent rise of 35 per cent in our pubic areas? Maybe if I had a Brazilian there would be the chance of a rent rebate.’
Hair today and gone tomorrow I suppose, Ed.