First there was Fart Verruca, now there’s Fat Cucumber!
Once again, my son misheard a BBC commentator during the football and thought he’d said ‘fat cucumber’ when in fact he’d said ‘Vancouver’. Easy mistake to make, I’m sure you’ll agree. He didn’t share in our laughter or find it outrageous because if New York can be known as the Big Apple then why can’t Vancouver be known as the Fat Cucumber?
I’ve never been to Vancouver. I have been to Seattle, though, where our cruise ship docked when we went to Alaska. The city, I gather (from those who know this area of the world better than me) falls a little short of Vancouver’s general appeal and aesthetics. So maybe Seattle has more of a shout for being known as the Fat Cucumber. A modern nickname for the Space Needle perhaps.
(I’ve just remembered that London has the Gherkin, but there’s a bit of work to do before the whole city can be known as the Big Gherkin. It’s confusing because that also sounds like the nickname for Boris Johnson.)
Anyway, Brighton’s Dutch international goalkeeper Bart Verbruggen never got to play in Vancouver, and that’s the great tragedy of this World Cup — that, and Argentina’s progression.
It’s been a busy week for my son. Last Friday he took part in his school’s first ever colour run, which was wonderfully messy. The local volunteer group and the school itself made such a huge effort to make it happen, and they got lucky with the weather because it occurred slap bang between two heatwaves.
The plain white PE t-shirt he ran in was meant to go straight in the wash because apparently the paint* does come out if you deal with it straight away. But we agreed it looked cool as it was, so we’ve left it out to dry.
I can’t believe he’s coming to the end of Year 3. As parents, we’re just not ready for the summer break. Remarkably, he hasn’t missed a day of school all year — for the second year running! Maybe he’s like David Dunn (the character in the film Unbreakable, not the former Blackburn Rovers footballer).
We watched Unbreakable with a group of friends at uni that included someone who is probably a Reform voter these days. He worked out before anyone else that Samuel L. Jackson was a baddie, but it was for the wrong reasons if you know what I mean.
*environmentally friendly cornstarch mixed with natural colourants like berries, spices, plants and flowers, meeting the kind of EU safety regulations that Nigel Farage despises