I just recently found out that most of the flying things I have been seeing (and trying to hit with a rolled-up newspaper. Shut up Sinan!) are not in fact wasps but in fact hover flies drawn from the sunny shores of France to England by the nice(ish) weather. They look nearly exactly the same as a wasp except they don’t have stingers and their yellow and black colouring is part of the short fur covering their abdomen so it is softer than a real wasp colours.

After some careful thought and experimentation I have found a foolproof technique for telling the various flying summer insects apart in order to safeguard you and your family. When an unknown insect appears, wave a rolled up newspaper around it but don’t try to hit it. If it goes apeshit all of a sudden and starts repeatedly stinging you and everyone around you then my research has shown that it is probably a wasp. If it goes crazy and stings you once before dying then its probably a bee. And if it bumbles around the place trying to work out what is going on before flying headfirst into your newspaper then its probably a hover fly.

Oh yeah and if it is a massive black ball that makes a noise like an old Nam era Huey chopper before divebombing into your face and clawing your skin off then its either one of those things out of the movie Pitch Black or one of those bastard bugs that kept trying to kill us when we were on Ios in Greece last year

I finally clawed open my wallet the other day and bought a new packet of razor blades for my Gillette Ultra Mach-Daddy Turbo Pro Plus shaver. They cost £7.60 at ASDA. Seven Pounds Sixty!? What the hell?

When I got home I opened the packet and eagerly looked inside for the gold plated, irridium edged, diamond encrusted blades that I had assumed would have to be inside to justify the fraction-of-a-small-country’s-GDP I just paid for them but all I found was a couple of plastic shaving heads! they didn’t even have rare earth, nuclear powered anti-gravity ball bearings in them!

I mean, in this day and age, for £7.60 I would at least expect them to include some sort of coupon for say, 20% off my own robotic geisha or all you can eat at Big Jim’s Diner of Questionable Origin but no, it was only razor blades. Yes they work and work well but OMGROFLMAOBBQ they are a rip off!

I finally came to the conclusion that it musn’t be the actual materials they are made out of that drive the cost up but the fact that they are constructed in in a Venusian space factory leased by Gillette from a breakaway Chinese sect of space-faring monks. The bureaucratic red tape involved with this arrangement must be the reason for the cost of the blades. I mean, they couldn’t be charging that much for something that could be made for 20p a pop in Taiwan could they??