Two hours and all he had to show for it was a bad back.

Friday and Saturday are easily the busiest days in the weekly supermarket calender and this week is no exception. Luckily Cliff was there working away serving customers with his usual cheery demeanour. Today a side of Cliff was revealed which until today had previously been unknown. Firstly we saw him entertaining a child. His teasing nature is fine for the majority of his customers; most just give Cliff an awkward smile and leave as soon as possible when exposed to Cliff's 'banter'; some, like us, look forward to it. But for one minority group, his devilish grin and witty quips can seem threatening and frightening. I am, of course, talking about children. Our tiny friends do not seem to 'get' Cliff as we do. Today, he tormented a youngster by pretending to eat his Kinder Egg. A harmless gag, perhaps, and one with no malice intended. But to the innocent child in front of us, it was a direct attack on his property.

This case of mental anguish, over it was our turn in the queue. Boy were we in for a change! Today Cliff was trying out some new material and it's a bit blue people! This mysetrious women who he keep talking about was mentioned once more and this time things appear to have taken a turn for the comical. It began with him mouthing the words "did she come round last night?" to which we did our usual bemused reply of "no" at this point Ciff looked scandalised. He then continued in his usual vein of rambling about things that we only catch the barest part of. Today he made mention of the woman coming round to his house at 8:30 and doing something for two hours that left him with a bad back and feeling very tired. This already intiated a giggle loop situation which is one of the worst situations to be stuck in at a normal time, but was particularly bad right now. He then went on to say something equally incoherent about his pyjama cord which I suppose we should be greatful we didn't quite catch.

Anyway as a dose of comparative sanity here is a link to a more normal, much saner blog than this. It documents the events of a someone trapped in Liverpool.

http://cutetwirler.blogspot.com/

Naughty boy!

Firstly, we promised you a picture of this magic little comedic gem and we didn't lie!

Today we headed to our local supermarket in need of tea. As usual, we looked through the windows as we headed towards the entrance, trying to grab a glimpse of our bestest, friendliest friend. It wasn't looking good... until we were nearly by the door, and we saw him! Relief swept through us. The relief was especially sharp, as today was the day we had brought along a camera in the hope of some paparazzi-style photos of the man. As we queued up, we got some initial shots- but they were blurry and unusable. It was going to require open confrontation with the camera; how would he react? To our delight, it was with a smile and a catchphrase, "naughty boy!". More on that later. Cliff felt the need to explain his repartee with us to the middle-aged lady he was serving at the time. For some unfathomable reason, he told her a story. He informed her that one of us was in the habit of waiting until a lady came to clean his room, and then removing his glasses and pretending to be blind (complete with an impression of a blind man fumbling around). This story was not quite as random as it seemed; former mention of a cleaning lady had been made by Cliff, and with special reference to glasses. It all started, we believe, on or around Valentine's Day, when Cliff picked up on the 'young lady' of one of our party. Soon he was making innuendos in the direction of having glasses steamed up by said young lady, during acts unknown. Over the next few days Cliff regularly quizzed us on the cleanliness of our rooms, in respect to having a young lady over. This myth that we possibly have messy rooms comes from the diappearance of our store card, which he continues to ask us for to this day, with hilarious consequences. It seems in his mind this has evolved into some kind of illicit affair with a cleaning lady, although we cannot be sure. The 'relationship' side of this seems to have been dropped from the routine in recent visits, explaining (as far as is possible) his cleaning lady story which he told his customer today. A further point on the removal of glasses undoubtedly comes from the fact that one of us removes his glasses on joining his queue, for the purposes of confusion. The other of us is in the habit of going shopping barefoot; a fact that Cliff was quick to pick up on. Despite frequent visits with shoes on since, he is still surprised to see shoes present, leading us to the belief that he might only recognise us only from our barefootedness and glasses; hence the occassional removal of glasses. Cliff has since picked up on this removal of glasses, and somehow aligned it with his stories of us, cleaning ladies, and 'steaming up'.

As for the "naughty boy" catchphrase, this comes from his hinting at acts of naughtiness going on around Valentines Day. He then made the "logical" assumption that because one of us said we may have had something planned around Valentines Day that we must be getting steamed glasses. This of course resulted in much uncontrolable laughter from the pair of us as we realised that this man we had previously seen as being a very family friendly comedy figure, but now he appeared to be introducing a bit of blue. The phrase naughty boy is more than just a phrase associated with acts of a glass steaming nature, it is also linked to seemingly normal happenings that would otherwise not have any kind of naughtiness. Among these are trying to take photos of him, not having the store card and many more that are just so everyday that they would be no more naughty than watching Blue Peter. It's not so much the phrase that he says but the delivery of these two words. Words pn a scren really cannot describe the intonation and the way his accent makes two words so undescibably funny.

He also offers this tip for romance: an onion makes the opposite sex wild!