WELL, it’s the TT again. You know, ‘Terrifying Time’ for timid old lady motorists and timid old gentlemen motorists like me.
The visiting bikers certainly scare me motionless.
But I do keep listening to Vauxhall Manx Radio TT which is sponsored by motor cars for some reason. There we get regular police reports on what the bikers are doing on the roads of the Isle of Man by the affable Inspector Derek Flint.
He often has to talk about ‘incidents’ which is the standard TT euphemism for crashes. I like his style.
One morning he spoke of some of these incidents being no more than ‘ego-dents.’
The station also regales the TT fans with the news by Jaunty Johnny Moss.
As for the visiting bikers, one passed me on Bray Hall going as fast as the TT riders. He was going up the hill.
I also saw a biker with the registration IOMGP. I didn’t have time to work out how he managed it.
But there is one other thing I have to say for our visiting bikers. Most of them seem to have quickly conformed to the Manx rules of the road as I know them.
Every time they are in a long line of traffic and see another motorist ahead trying desperately to be let into it, they know exactly what to do.
It is: ‘Don’t let him in.’
RICHARD Hetherington tells me there was a story in the Sunday Times saying that Britain’s first plastic banknotes are to be issued starting with £5 notes in September.
He says he seems to recall that plastic £1 notes were produced by the Isle of Man in 1980 and they were the first plastic notes in Britain.
Miss Isle of Man Syndrome?
Lots of people remember our plastic oncers and some might very well still have some of them.
They were, as claimed, almost indestructible. You certainly couldn’t tear them in half.
It was also rumoured that if you left them in a hot oven they would shrink to the size of postage stamps. I didn’t try that.
I already had little money.
NEW tricknology strikes again . . .
Last week people were complaining they couldn’t get a reply when they rang my mobile. I thought it would have to be back to Manx Telecom to get it put in order.
Fortunately my grand-daughter, Annie, was on hand.
She looked at it, and said patiently: ‘It’s on silent Grandad.’
Somehow or other I had managed to achieve this without any knowledge of how to put it back on audible.
A silent mobile phone? Who would want one?
Never heard such a thing.
LAST week I was at my workplace in Broadcasting House and I was introduced to a comely blonde visitor to Manx Radio called, I think, Lucy Campbell who was thinking about a career in radio.
She was told: ‘Of course, Terry has been in radio for years.’
In my occasional role as an old man able to joke about approaching senility, I told her waggishly: ‘I’ve been in radio since it was invented.’
Her eyes widened in shocked disbelief.
This was a blonde smart enough to know that Marconi invented radio and sent his first transmission in 1895.
UKIP has issued an election leaflet, saying: ‘UKIP wants top management fat cats on huge salaries to be cut in half.’
Giving them the chop?
FUNNIES File: A now long-gone newspaper called the Isle of Man Gazette reported: ‘Douglas Corporation has put its foot down on the problem of dogs fouling the footpath.’
A sticky problem.
SIGNS: In a podiatrist’s office: ‘Time wounds all heels.’