There are a few things that wind me up, and being late is one of them, or other people being late.
We were chatting about this in the Barmaid’s Bosom the other night, mainly because Electric Ted was late, as ever.
Ted is one of those people who it seems can never get anywhere on time, and he always has an excuse and it’s never his fault.
He comes out with some classics – traffic, the weather, his wife, the dog, next door’s fish pond, the phases of the moon – he must have a book full of them.
I used to work with a bloke – we shall call Eric – who was always late, and he too came out with a lot of excuses. He used to come to work on a motorbike, and it was forever breaking down, it seems, or had a flat tyre. He had more flats than the city council.
One of the other lads happened to be a bit late one day and was following him along the road, when Eric pulled his bike to the side of the road about 100 yards from work, got off, rubbed his hands all over the tyres to make them look dirty, got back on the bike, thundered into the yard and started cursing about yet another flat tyre he had to get repaired.
Sadly, we had no photographic evidence to back up our accusations, but he wasn’t late for a few weeks after.
We also got round to discussing the US elections in the back bar of the Barmaid’s.
Now Peter Snow, Jeremy Paxman and any one of those Dimblebys would have been intrigued as to what the ‘brains trust’ made of the American electoral system. What is the New Hampshire Primary, we wondered, although Wobbling Bob’s suggestion that it was a Dulux undercoat did not go down well.
One very good point was made though. There are millions and millions of Americans, but why is it that a father and son, (the Bushes) and possibly a husband and wife (the Clintons) get to be President of the USA?
That’s if Hilary gets in, of course. Strange that nobody else wants to do the job.
I was in Bristol at the start of the week for a BBC course, old dogs and new tricks type of thing, all to do with websites and the like.
Went out for a bite on Monday night and noticed a large sculpture of a beetle, the sort of small bug, rather than a musical group from Liverpool, in the middle of the square.
This beetle was very big and black, about the size of a horse. I asked the waiter what it was, and he said he’d only been in Bristol for three months and didn’t know.
There was plaque on it but it said: “Don’t climb on this statue.”
Ah well, I still didn’t find out what it was.
If anyone knows why it’s there can you let me know.
* Dave Bradley is the BBC Hereford & Worcester sports correspondent