Belly laughs and a donation...

I will be honest. I object to the charity collectors who frequent my local supermarket. I find it disturbing to be faced with someone who intends to pack my shopping for me in the hope of receiving a donation for it. Personally, I would prefer to pack my own shopping, without an observer. In addition, paying for my shopping by plastic, I'm rarely in a position to hand over any cash. The whole situation can be quite a source of embarrassment...

Today, although the bag-packers were in store, I had the rare pleasure of finding a till which was bag-packer-free. As if for my amusement, the bag-packer, who had been at the till previously, had left their collection bucket. This bucket read:

Forgive me for being churlish, but this amused me very greatly. I mean, how can they be so stupid as to get the name of their cause wrong? This is a classic example of The Computer Printed Sign something which usually finds its way into apostrophell. Every single bucket carried this wonderful tribute to the typographical error and I laughed quite a lot.

I tried, tried, and tried again, but I could not find a good pun to relate cancer with curries - or even Edwina Currie. The nearest I got was the fact that Marie Currie might want to learn to improve keema-therapy... it's not much, and most people would probably not recognise the keema (a relative of the korma) as being particularly related to anything, let alone spicy Indian cuisine.

So amused was I that I donated an amount to the bucket held by one of the senior officers of the cadet force. I pointed out the mistake on the bucket's sign (I thought it a fair swap for the cash). The conversation did nothing to restore my faith in the cadet force's attitude towards exactitude:

What is the arrmy comming tto?

18 March 2001
Ashley Frieze