We had some new people over for afternoon tea* yesterday. Not new as in, freshly cloned; new as in, new-ish acquaintances. Sarah made a big pot of tea, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts off and rhubard and custard cake - very English. During the tea-time chit-chat conversation which ended up on idiosyncracies, learning habits and general behaviour, one of the guests referred to themselves as "anal"…..[Me: "cough"]…..my hand, reaching for a mackerel sandwich, paused momentarily and my eyes dropped to the tablecloth. The conversation, thankfully, carried on without any noticeable recognition of my flinch.

A quick post then about "that word", and also a quick statement that in this post I will be avoiding all types of comical double-entendres and euphemisms involving "that word".

From what I can remember, "that word", entered the ring (fnarr - damn!) of popular parlance as an adjective about 7 or 8 years ago, possibly through one of the many US sit-coms whose characters use psychotherapy-type terms quite frequently. I'm thinking Seinfeld, or Friends, Larry Sanders\Garry Shandling etc etc. In that context of course "that word", as a contraction of "anally-retentive", generally means 'uptight' or 'obsessive', 'compulsive' etc. Prior to that, in England, it would have been used to describe something to do with bum-holes. Anyway, to me it's just a word that you don't bring up at the table. Like 'rape'.

Maybe my aversion to it is a bit "that word" too. Maybe if I start thinking about how uptight I get about "that word" I'll get stuck in some feedback loop and explode? Anally-expulsive? Horrible, but we're not away from that whole topic yet, so to speak.

The other term I don't like is "verbal diarrhea". Ugh. It conjures up images of mouths dribbling with runny poop (sorry, I had to be graphic to effectively convey my revulsion). So please, can I ask you all to start saying "logorrhea" instead?

Toby has logorrhea. Acute logorrhea. Coupled with his debating skills, already quite masterful at just 6 years of age, we're quite certain he's going to become a politician. Or a taxi driver. Actually, he wants to be a tramp (true) as, "they just sit on the pavement and people give them money". Added to that, they have dogs (bonus), don't have to wash (double bonus) and can go where they like (probably not very accurate) and eat what they like (hmm, more what they can find really). I can just picture him at the JobCentre now in his filthy oversized suit, rolled up sleeping bag under his arm and hob-nail boots with the soles flapping off. That's my boy.

Just to round up then. Whilst filling in an application form for car insurance last night (see Toby, look at all the fun you'll miss out on if you become a tramp!), I noticed that one of the occupations you could choose for yourself was (no, not tramp), jazz composer. Imagine that, jazz composers everywhere must be thinking, "at last, recognition!". What made me marvel was that the insurance companies must actually have some kind of risk analysis/probability ratio/matrix thingy set up that grades people's likelihood to make an insurance claim at a level so granular as to make a distinction between say, classical composer and jazz composer. Amazing. And now that I think about it, with jazz's sometimes free-styling tendencies and random improvisations, maybe a jazz composer is pre-disposed to make bad driving decisions, be more prone to accidents and therefore liable to pay higher premiums. If that's the case then maybe they're not the type of character you could trust to drive your kids to school or take you down the M40 in the pouring rain. Our anal friend is a jazz composer. I don't think we'll be seeing them again Sarah. Goodnight listeners.

*Tea is tea, as in 'pot of tea at four o'clock'. Some of you might use tea and dinner as synonyms. You would be wrong I'm afraid. You go 'out for dinner', you have supper as your evening meal. Tea, dinner, supper - got it? Good.