Some English friends of ours came to stay on holiday with us. They loved the croissants from our patisserie and asked how to say the word delicious in French - I told them it was "merde". They collected the croissants the following morning and apparently had a difficult couple of minutes buying them ! The lady proprietor of the patisserie is a very good friend and soon caught on - but gave them a hard time just for fun. Have you ever had a croissant thrown at you by your guests ?
Is that Bombay Duck you are thinking of Shirley?
My Dad’s claim to fame on the practical joke score was as a medical student he and some mates managed to put another somewaht stuck-up students bubblecar on the roof on the hospital having pushed it through the corridor to the service lift and then manhandled it up stairs to the flat roof at knebworth hospital when bored on night duty
It's an age thing Norm;-)
Made me laugh Brian.....its def. a dirty trick...I dont see any bullying here and no one was hurt....its a practical joke...not always kind, but usually funny.
I can think of several practical jokes over the years...several played on me, and more than a couple that I played on others. We hired a friends brand new villa in a Spanish Village. It was one of those little white meringue style houses. The lounge had a wonderful fireplace that was purely for decoration...no chimney attached.....now the male half of the duo is a known practical joker..so we thought we would pay him back for the times he got us over the years.
They rang us on day 4 of our holiday and asked how we were getting on. We said great...but that the weather was chilly in the evening and we fancied a fire so we had lit one having collected some wood in the garden, but it was smoking up the room quite badly and what should we do, we heard Gerald call Cindy and heard him say 'They've only lit a blo*dy fire in the lounge'. Keeping up the joke for a couple of minutes was a killer, but he laughed (probably with relief) when he heard it wasnt true. He still tells the story to this day.
Another one that comes to mind regarding my dad, another joker; he liked alternative therapies, and used to treat his arthritic knees by covering them in cabbage leaves and bandaging them up for the night. When I visited one day they had run out of cabbages at home...but my mum laughingly gave me a bag of sprouts, with a straight face I handed my dad a handful of said sprouts and asked him to hold them against his knee whilst I bandaged...I wont tell you his reply, but we had a great laugh when he realised it was a joke.
On a similar electric theme:- a mate of mine was an apprentice at a local garage which had a stream running beneath it. He amused himself by dropping a lump of metal connected to the garage electric supply into the stream & caught many a trout this way. He was eventually caught by the local law, sent to court & received a suspended sentence which was reported in the local rag. Years later whilst a committee member of the local angling club he was surprised to find that someone had sent a press cutting to the Angling Times where it received front page prominence .
Thanks for sharing this Brian......made me smile! My best friend Mandy and I went on a coach holiday when we were 18 to Italy..... We were the youngest people by far and got on with nearly everybody..... nearly everybody apart from one chap who we had to share a table with at mealtimes. A lovely lady called Thelma who was travelling on her own also shared our table. Now every mealtime he proceeded to make sneery remarks at anything Thelma said - by day 3 we were plotting our revenge! The trip back to the UK took 3 days with overnight stops in various places...the last night being in Brussels. When we booked into our hotel we noticed that we had been allocated a room opposite this chap! So having armed ourselves with superglue...we managed (don't ask me how....do not understand how we weren't seen or caught!) to put glue on the inside of the fame and the lock when he had the door open just after he went into the room.... the problem was that 10 mins later he couldn't get out and the chap that turned up with the master key got the key stuck in the lock! That evening Thelma, Mandy and I had a lovely peaceful meal..... with the other 40 odd passengers smirking and smiling about x being 'locked in his room'. Some young kids got the blame.....it was soooooo hard to keep a straight and sympathetic face! On the ferry home the day after one of the couples came up to us and said 'it was you two wasn't it.....we heard you laughing in your room!' We never confessed.... But it still makes us laugh.....we actually didn't think it would work that well but it did take a while to get him out! Please do not accuse me of bullying....I was 18.....it was 30 years ago......;)
I have a wife younger than me, hence young children, and whilst like everybody else think a bit of extra dosh might be useful but believe that wealth is an awful burden. Anyway, the husband is actually a nice man. I have been out on the hunt of a Sunday with him. Not a hint of jealousy.
As for your final quote from, correct me if I am wrong, Luke. If you see what I say further on, then my fake recipe was mild compared to what is done and said to other people in the community. I am thinking especially of the two gay men she says probably have AIDS and so on. I said it was a dirty trick to begin with, but mild compared to some of her smears of people living near her. No, I do not believe in tit-for-tat but amusement at her expense - instead of her amusing herself at the cost of other people...
I agree cate...seems like sour grapes to me...old rich man daring to marry young woman...who... shock horror is spending his/their money. If he's happy with her that's his business..at least he's got some company now that his wife' passed on.How much kinder if you had shared a genuine recipe with her...a prank's a prank...but to my way of reading your story Brian...this was motivated by jealousy.
And before you ask...have I done anything underhand...not since I grew up Brian.
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." is the code I live by...and it's served me well.
Having shared a "villa" with John H-F in the then small village of Marbella in 1968 I can vouch for that. BTW John remember when we got arrested together for cramming a Fiat 500 and the trophy and flea ridden wild dog I introduced into the adjoining "Kr**t" occupied property very late one night? Political correctness? Please....................
Excuse me for living! It was done for one reason because the person the trick was played on being married to just about the wealthiest farmer in the commune treats everybody as inferior, is rude and insulting, lost her first hard working cleaner cum cook by telling her she was lazy and useless when she lifted never a finger herself, has terrorised a gay couple in the village who she says should move somewhere else where 'respectable' people do not have to see them and plenty more. I invented my recipe on the spot with all of that in mind, also bearing in mind the manner she had approached the group of us was by barging in and demanding menus and recipes from us without as much as a hello, please or thank you.
I did not include, nor did I want to, that in my account of the event. The fact that she regularly insults my wife for having an Italian accent also gets my goat. One thing in this world I do not believe in is revenge, but just this once I allowed myself a smidgeon of it. As I have said more than once, I did not expect her to actually try it anyway.
So, that off my chest, I will also say that I have been accused of being politically correct so often in my life that I am now immune to it. I am I suppose. However, this is bullying by your definition and your definition alone and by no definition I know and believe me there are half a dozen books on the topic I use for work less than a metre from me.
Have a nice day!
Please wake me up when this one is over...................
Gulty on all counts M'Lod!
Genius story, Brian.
The only dirty trick thing I do/have done is to try to cook.
'Both barrels' would be a mild and justified response to said resulting offerings.
No it was Stoke on Trent one of the lads was an electrical engineer apprentice he used to connect a magneto driven by an electric motor to the metal door handle and call the foreman in, he fell for it every time , i remember the same lad coming down telling him there was an elephant in the car park the foreman told him to bugger off until the police rolled up ,there really was ,it was from the circus up the road the poor man didnt know what to believe after that
The only dirty trick I played was when I was a student nurse, didn’t have much money, lived in the nurses home and had to use a shared fridge. Food kept being stolen, even when packed into several sealed boxes and with a note on top to say that this was all I had left to eat until the end of the week. So the next time I was paid, I bought exlax chocolate and made up some individual choccie mousses, sealed them up in my box in the frisge with a please do not steal label on them. They went…two so called colleagues were then off sick with a very starange bout of gastro, and for a while no one touched my stuff…I then managed to buy a second hand fridge and kept it in my room, getting used to it’s humming, because the thefts had started again
Manny years ago I used to work night shift in a spinning yarn mill in Yorkshire ( proper northern I am tha noz) any way we were always pulling pranks on one another so one VERY frosty winters night I walked around the night managers car every 10 mins with a garden pump up sprayer and coated his car in a fine mist of water, come morning there was a good 2 inch of solid ice coating his car, oh how we laughed when he came to get in, he was the same guy who used to set a fishing line tied to a railing over the mill stream , when he was out on his rounds one of us would sneak up and hook all sorts of weird nonsense to his line, a massive dead rat we had found was one of the things . Hee hee, frightened the life of of him when he hauled that up out of the dark!
This has brought a memory back from many years ago though not in France, group of friends all about 15, one lad lived near a very grumpy neighbour who owned a little Isseta bubble car, remember those little 3 wheeler things, after a particularly bad grumbling session about the youth of today hanging around street corners and a stint in the army would do us all good we crept back later in the evening and lifted his bubble car over his hedge and onto his front lawn, it didn’t stop his grumbling and none of us were present in the morning when he saw it but part of the hedge had to be removed to get it out which was never replaced
Not a trick but yesterday I was down earlier than my wife and I just fancied bacon and eggs- used a small pan left on he range- found out later that dried Philippino fish had been cooked in it! My fault but it wasn't too bad!
Brian, your story has cheered me up no end, thank you for a good laugh!