Invading my personal space

MANY people feel that the mobile phone has been one of the most useful inventions of the past century while others claim it has destroyed their privacy.

There is actually a third school of opinion which believes some public areas should be set aside where all mobile phone music is banned.

The ridiculous lengths to which this irritating phenomena has gone can be perfectly illustrated by one flabbily challenged family group I had the misfortune to meet while chatting quietly in the street with a friend.

They loomed large and seemed about to pass by when they suddenly stopped next to us when one of their mobile phones went off with a stupid trilling jingle.

They all clustered round to listen when, blow me, one of their other phones went off with zombie music and some rapper talking about making everyone well.

When a third family phone went off to the sound of the Birdie Song I nearly strangled the lot of them on the spot but in the end I didn’t have to. They destroyed themselves.

There was so much noise, so much shouting and so much different conversation that they were drowning each other out and were forced to move on and move apart to stand a chance of hearing their respective callers.

My friend and I shook our heads in disbelief, walked away and slowly the family group faded behind us, but that is not the point.

I don’t ask to hear and I don’t want to hear simultaneous lurid details of last night’s party, “how’s your Mum’s legs?” and which pub the caller can meet them at. All that and three moronic pieces of music as well was just too much.

In an era of cutbacks surely this problem can be one of them.

Offer too good to be true from an African prince

IT was such a good cause that I couldn’t help but consider supporting it.

Prince Umtali Wanaballa had recently assumed control of the treasury in his country but was having a spot of bother completing the takeover.

He wanted to move its £8 billion pounds to a secure place in England and needed my help — and more specifically my bank account details – to do so.

Naturally I would receive £1 billion of his treasury’s cash as a consideration for my help, all the money being transferred as soon as I emailed back my account details to him.

He’s still waiting for my reply because it was an obvious email con, but I idly checked to see what else might be on my computer’s spam list.

Incredibly I found 57 dodgy emails, all of which were African cons except for two music and two travel adverts.

Everyone from Princess Alice and Mr Akim Zongo to various law firms and even the United Nations seemed to need my bank account details.

One of the best lines I found was allegedly from a senior bank official trying to interest me in using my account to filter $13.7 million belonging to a client of his bank who had recently died in a plane crash. Conveniently, the crash also seemed to have killed the rest of his immediate family and all his relatives. That somehow left the bank needing my help.

Once again I can do no better than to quote Dorset Trading Standards advice that “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is”.

Our footballing hero George

THE year was 1966 and the glory was England’s as our football team won the World Cup.

You’d think that the man who scored a hat-trick for us that day would be a household name for ever, but not a bit of it.

Two teenage girls caught up in the current World Cup fever both knew all the details of England’s famous win despite it happening nearly 30 years before they were even born, so you might hope that history could safely be passed down in their hands.

Unfortunately pride in their team’s historic achievement was crowned by awed references to our hat-trick hero… that immortal footballer George Hurst!

Wait until they run that one by their boyfriends!

Making your own luck

PERHAPS there is such a thing as luck… if you are lucky.

A Weymouth woman on holiday in the Far East had always wanted a jade bracelet and found the perfect one for her.

Bargaining duly started and the price fell from £200 to well under £100, but the woman refused to pay over the odds and told the seller it was still too much.

The seller thought about it for a bit and then offered a lower price, urging the woman to buy so she would bring the seller good luck.

The woman replied: “I don’t want to bring you luck, I want to bring me luck.”

A deal was agreed and the woman went away well pleased.

Maybe she did create her own luck because 20 years of lucklessness in her staff-union draw ended when she got home and won £12,000!

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