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Cold Calls And Large Women's Breasts

7/19/2015

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Well ain't that a hoot?

There I was, working away at the keyboard when the phone rang. It was a cold-call from a company called Stop These Calls. They said that for an annual subscription they can stop me receiving cold calls from other organisations. 

What!!  How hypocritical. Their call centre worker simply could not see the irony in the fact that he was cold-calling me asking me to pay £59.99 to stop other companies from doing exactly what he was doing – namely making a cold, unsolicited, nuisance call.

Bournemouth-based Stop These Calls trumpet on their website that they are an “independent group who want to STOP you from receiving nuisance calls.” Then friggin’ practice what you preach, and stop making unsolicited calls yourselves.

They also trumpet: “Find out more about how we help reduce and eliminate nuisance calls.” Yeah, that’s easy, too: same course of action…stop making the damn things.   

My phone number is actually registered with the free Telephone Preference Service. It is a legal requirement that all organisations do not make unsolicited or marketing calls to numbers registered on the TPS. Actually, now I think about it, maybe the TPS isn’t all that good, as it failed to prevent Stop These Calls from doing exactly that.

And talking of hoots, says he, going off on a tangent, here’s another you may like. My new publisher is American, and their editor was going through my manuscript of the revised edition of In Shadows Waiting, due out in the next few weeks, when she came across a sentence referring to a  hooter. She changed it to horn.

This was her comment in the margin: “I changed this because at first I didn’t know what it was. Thanks to the Cambridge dictionary I know now that’s a car horn, but to your American audience this means one thing and one thing only – large women’s breasts.”

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So The Dog Says He Doesn't Like Cake

7/18/2015

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Imagine my surprise the other day when the dog snatched a ham sandwich off the hostess trolley, wolfed it down and then said “thank you.”

“Naughty boy,” I said. “You shouldn’t steal sandwiches.”

“But I don’t like the cake,” said Pepe the poodle.

So I duly flew through the open window and looked down on my Mum’s house.

Yes…that really happened, but only in my dream, of course.

Dreams are powerful and fascinating, are they not? What prompted me to dream of my childhood home that I moved out of in 1981, and our pet dog who had died in around 1968? And Mum’s all-the-fashion-then hostess trolley…why on Earth should I dream about that when I’ve not given it a thought for 35 years?

I do have a recurring dream, which is far more understandable, though. During my broadcasting career I was never late for a news bulletin or start of a programme (there were some pretty close calls, but I always made it, even if there were only seconds to spare). 


But to this day…almost 30 years since I traded in my microphone for the writer’s pen…I still often dream that I feel like I’m wading through molasses,  desperately trying to get to the studio, even though I’m two minutes late. 

And the presenter, bless him, carries on playing a record until I finally make it to the hot seat. Then he cues me in; I look down at my script, and what pages aren’t blank are complete gobbledeygook! 

However, even that can’t really compare to the real-life nightmare I once had during my time in radio. I was due to read the 11 a.m. news bulletin and had stopped off in the little boys’ room en-route to the studio. So there I stood, the bulletin just two minutes away, with my script firmly gripped between my teeth. 


That is, until a colleague walked up next to me and said: “Hi Stewart.” Unthinking, I said: “Hi Denis.”

At which juncture, gravity took charge, depositing my script with unerring accuracy straight into the soaking urinal.

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    Author

    Stewart Bint is a novelist, magazine columnist and PR writer. 

    He lives with his wife, Sue, in Leicestershire in the UK, and has two children, Christopher and Charlotte, and a budgie called Sparky.

    Usually goes barefoot.

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