Why Cucumber Eaters can’t get Mortgages

In the nineteen seventies the first carrier pigeons took off from my home town and made their way across the Irish sea to England.

They were carrying a shipment of carrier pigeons to a would-be pigeon breeder, who wanted to stop being a would-be pigeon breeder and a be a real pigeon breeder instead, so he’d decided to go ahead and breed pigeons.

He didn’t do the actual breeding himself. He hired a male carrier pigeon to do that for him. In those days it was considered inappropriate for the a human to mate with a carrier pigeon. The seventies were a time of great conservatism and restriction of freedoms in my country. Although I’ve just realised that doesn’t make sense because this would-be pigeon breeder guy is supposed to be in England. Dammit.

Okay let’s pretend that my home town, wherefrom the pigeons took off, is in Northern Ireland not the Republic, and that’s (officially, technically, and don’t shoot the messenger (literally or figuratievely)) in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as is England, so that works I think

It was not until the mid nineteen eighties that it became legal to be adopted by h a carrier pigeon here in Irel-I mean Northern Ireland, and even then it was generally accepted that you were only allowed to be pen pals, and no more. As a child I was once paired, by my school, with with a pen-pal from Pensyllvania in America.  I think people in Pensyllvania feel obliged to write to somebody because the name of their state derives from the word “pencil,” and also because they go to a school that has some sort of arrangment with a school in Irland.

Anyway I’m not going to tell you any more about that, in case my rambling is making you angry and red faced, and you end up being mistaken for a nicely ripened tomatoe by an over enthusiastic sandwich maker who proceeds to chop you up and sprinkle you with a selection of green herbs and spices which tickle your nose and make you want to sneeze and sneeze and sneeze all day every day for the rest of your life or at least until Family Guy comes on and you’ve satisfied yourself that it’s not a rerun, or at least that you haven’t seen that episode before.

Don’t forget that now that you are a tomatoe, you will have a much lower life expectancy that you did as a human. Tomatoes rarely live past their sixth month. They become victim to crimes of passion or else they get made into a pizza. I can never remember which.

I was talking to a cucumber enthusiast the other day and he pointed out to me, in a very convincing and rather frightening tone, that cucumbers are significantly more resiliant than tomatoes, and even they don’t live very long. 

And I had to agree. I bought a cucumber recently that was wrapped in tough cellophane and already it’s gone soft and wrinkly and I’m not completely sure that I want to eat it anymore.

Admitedly it’s past it’s sell-by date and I have to admit that I have not yet sold it. The market is slow these days and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find someone who is currently living in a slightly smaller one and wants to move up the property ladder.

People who are cucumber enthusiasts generally find it hard to get mortgages, I’ve always found. This is because the banks realise that these people care so much about cucumbers that they will never eat them, and that therefore they are not eating enough vegetables and are likely to run into ill health before the end of their mortgage term.

The anti-cucumber lobby, on the other hand, receive more loan approvals than they can handle Mark my words, a couple of decades from now there’s going to be a lot of green juice on the faces of these bank managers when they discover that their customers can’t pay back the money they borrowed for their houses or cucumbers or whatever I’m supposed to be talking about.

I’m sorry but I haven’t had any porridge this morning and am finding it hard to follow my train of thought to it’s logical conclusion. The train has apparently buckled and somehow ended up on that other piece of unused track that you let your dog pee on when you go for a walk because you assume that it’s too old to be electrified.

Don’t worry, your dog will be fine.

Dogs like electricity. They lap it up the same way that a cat laps up milk. Strangely enough, electric power is surprising low in both energy and vitamins. Your dog is pretty much eating empty calories. Why don’t you just buy some canned stuff like everybody else?