More haste, less speed

I REFERRED last week to firms of solicitors with unusual names (Wright Hassall, etc). A number of you have reminded me of that long-established Kidderminster firm, Doolittle & Dalley. They are estate agents rather than solicitors but still worth a mention.

STILL on strange signs, a reader recalls a trip to Skegness when he came across a roadsign: "To Old Bolingbroke and Mavis Enderby." Beneath it, with great care, someone had created a sign in identical text reading: "The gift of a son."

THAT tale reminds me of the famous sign in Liverpool: "Mersey Docks & Harbour Board." Underneath someone had written "and little lambs eat ivy." You may have to get your gran to explain that one.

A RUSSIAN court has jailed a businessman who paid an "assassin" £3,000 to murder his wife. The hitman promptly swiped the money and informed the police. It emerged in court that this was the businessman's fifth attempt to bump off his wife. Each time he had been swindled by fake hit men. Oscar Wilde would have loved it. To employ one bogus hitman may be regarded as a misfortune. To employ five bogus hitmen looks like carelessness.

REJOICE, for the 21st century has arrived at my local paper shop. One of its two tills has been replaced by a "fast till" where you scan your own items. I have two newspapers costing precisely £2. What can possibly go wrong? For starters, the machine has a suspicious mind. It notices the Daily Telegraph is unusually heavy. It summons a human being. The human being gets a bit flustered. She says: "It's because it's the big Saturday edition and they're always a bit heavier." She waves a magic card which overrides the machine's suspicion. "Hang on," I say, as the penny drops. "This machine thinks I'm shoplifting, doesn't it? It thinks I've slipped a box of chocolates inside the Telegraph, right?" She nods, embarrassed. "Something like that," she smiles. The other newspaper causes no problems, the "fast till" flashes up the price, I insert a £10 note and it delivers the change and the receipt. But you can't help noticing that in the time it took the "fast till" to process two customers, the woman on the old, slow manual till dealt with five. But then it's not really about speed, is it? It's about getting rid of staff.

CHANGING times. A pub customer is glassed in the face by another customer who has a string of convictions for assault. A nurse saves the victim's eye by delicately picking out splinters of glass. The victim is a man. The serial attacker is a woman. The nurse is a man.

AND in case you're thinking the above tale at least proves that society is becoming more equal, consider the sentence handed down at Bournemouth Crown Court on the slim, attractive woman attacker involved. Despite having 17 previous convictions for assault, a record the judge described as "breathtaking," she was allowed to walk free with a suspended sentence. Her bruised and bloodied victim believes the only reason she was not locked up is that she's female. He says: "If it was the other way around and I did that to her, I would be going straight to jail." Hard to argue with that. After 50 years of feminism it is still no great disadvantage in life to be young, pretty and female.

MAVIS Enderby? It's a hamlet in the Lincolnshire Wolds and, no, I'd never heard of it either.