Vodafone Westland in Retirement

Overheard in the Caravan:

Hay is cutting up some vegetables for a meal.

Chairman: "Are you doing a boeuf bourguignon?"

Hay: "What, which this ham joint???"

Chairman: "Are you doing a ham bourguignon?"

Later:

Chairman: "Come and watch this news video about a dog adopting some tiger cubs."

Hay: "That's going to end in tears - the next headline will be 'Tiger cubs eat family'."

I hear soldiers are being asked to work from home over Christmas. Hope they don't start taking tanks home to patrol their drives...

My God, but the Vodafone website hacks me off. Firstly it's so damnably slow. Yesterday I couldn't even log off due to them:"Making some changes to the site," which seems to be something they're going every 5th nanosecond and an excuse for everything.

Once logged in, you get a picture of some paunchy, receding bloke in his late 50s kitted out in Vodafone regalia asking if he can help you - a bit like the assistants you find shuffling around B&Q. I ask you - when's the last time someone over 50 helped you with your mobile (in fact, when's the last time you saw a bloke over 15 behind the counter in a Vodafone shop)? It's like being offered help with your grammar by George W Bush.

Talking of the assistants behind the counter in Vodafone shops, I generally tend to shy away from the girls, as the natural assumption is that they're as ignorant of the controls of a modern phone as they are of the motorcar, but I was totally surprised last week when I had occasion to visit.

My new Samsung Galaxy Note 2 had taken it upon itself to start talking to me, which was rather embarrassing, to say the least when stood in a queue in the post office and it started blurting out my inbound Freecycle emails to all and sundry. On top of that, it was impossible to switch off the bloody TalkBack, as it is called (makes it sound like a wife), as the facility interfered with the scrolling. Surprisingly, the girl-child in the shop managed to crack the knack and in not time the phone was back to normal.

I suppose it's got more to do with the fact that it's usually girls who you see walking down the street engrossed in their phones to the exclusion of everything else in the universe - a bit like when they're driving.

Talking of the over 50s, one hears most of us have made little or no provision for pensions when we retire. What's retirement? Didn't think retirement was something my generation could even contemplate!

I was watching James Dyson fly overhead in his 15 seater Augusta Westland yesterday morning (he lives a couple of miles up the road and regularly makes a damed nuisance of himself by flying the bloody thing over us like a demented bee - occasionally at treetop height) and wondered whether his helicopter uses Cyclone technology.