Driver Fred could only scratch his head as his passengers cooled their heels outside his 133 to Liverpool Street Station. It had all been going swimmingly, he ruefully reflected, until that bloody detour at Elephant & bloody Castle. Worse again, this was the third time this week he'd have to bloody ask Abdullah could he follow his bloody caravan back to the bloody Clapham turnoff!

Hallmark's "Gave You My Heart" musical greeting Christmas/Valentine cards proved to be a complete marketing disaster. "Can't think why these delightfully quirky little items didn't sell," said a spokesperson for the company. "Anything from St. Thomas Aquinas is usually enormously popular, and we thought he and George Michael would be a winning combination. But people just don't seem to like Wham! anymore. We won't be using any more of their songs for our cards."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uk_Fu8_UaQ

Oops, sorry, that was too big. Try again.

The concequences of Mrs Flatley's baked bean and boiled cabbage supper was proving difficult for those lodging at her abode.

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Lottie Shickleheimer demonstrates the "Young Ladies' Anti-Lecher Detesticulation Hat", voted "most practical female accessory" by the International Guild of Suffragettes in 1906. One click on the button and the cunningly concealed battery under the hat sends an electric signal to the right leg causing it to elevate sharply to head-height, if not of course obstructed by a male groin on the way.

The hat lost popularity overnight after the Great New York Hailstorm of 1907 which coincided with a mass open-air suffragette rally in Flushing Meadows.

Tacitus was too embarrassed to record that Seneca's last words had actually been: "All I want when I die is a simple tribute concert at Wembley Stadium. That's all I ask. And maybe a covers album..."

"I say, Calpurnia, these new yo-yo things are quite the ticket aren't they? They take yer mind off the bloody, tiresome games anyway! God how I hate bank holidays!"

McDuff and Fletcher contented themselves with some practice swings as they waited for the ballboy to retrieve the ball.

And waited.

And waited ...

(the many serious drawbacks to aerial tennis were a while being fully realised by its aficionados)

"What!?! I must've miss-heard you .... I thought you said tonight's party, 'all really like their meat'. Now you tell me that it's the 'annual Rhineland Vegans' meet!' ... But I've just bought all this lot. And I've got half an ox, two porpoises and a brace of conies round the back too! Them two cabbages just ain't gonna be enough."

"Have a look at these - I just printed them off the Res Historica captions thread!"

**********

Trevor's new anti-allergy suit was a tremendous success; you couldn't hear a word he was saying! No longer did his friends have to listen to his incessant witterings about pollen, mould, HDM mattress protectors and the dangers of nuts sometimes containing nuts.

Blessed relief for all.

At the height of Torchy The Battery Boy's popularity families in search of their weekly fix were known to pawn perfectly good living room furniture in order to meet their TV higher purchase payments.

Serge had a secret fantasy in which he played rugby for France against Wales - in the nude. One day he woke up to discover that he wasn't dreaming his favourite dream at all but was actually there wide awake in Cardiff on the pitch. What a nightmare!

Count Ziborsky, with remarkable presence of mind, calms the kulaks down with his famous "Four of Diamonds" card trick. But for how much longer would communism be held at bay, he wondered, even with such a strategy?

In the crowd a young Ioseb Besarionis je Juḡašvili considers what he would do if he ever joined the boyar class - sawing people in half in particular appeals to him ...

Factory workers take a stab in the back to a new level when they decided to demonstrate their opinion of the proposed extra working hours to the general manager.

By the time the RSPCA caught up with her, Lady Alice's tally of kidnapping, killing and stuffing seventy-three cats, thirty-two poodles, seventeen hamsters, four gerbils, fifteen parakeets, six chickens, three pigs and one unfortunate platypus was to ensure for posterity her reputation as the infamous "Butcher of Badminton".

(Lady Alice, pictured above, early in her career of animal abuse)

Gardener Paddy O'Rourke soon began to regret his decision to allow his employer to demonstrate his new invention, the electric eyebrow plucker. Mr O'Rourke, missing one eyebrow and half a head of hair, was later seen requesting new employ at a neighbouring estate.

Nordmann appeared to go along with Catigern's demands for special recognition, even arranging for professional photographers to provide a suitably splendid avatar picture.

Unbeknown to Res Historica's Big Catty, however, behind the scenes a lucrative deal had been struck...

LOL!!!!!

Temperance wrote:

Nordmann appeared to go along with Catigern's demands for special recognition, even arranging for professional photographers to provide a suitably splendid avatar picture.

Unbeknown to Res Historica's Big Catty, however, behind the scenes a lucrative deal had been struck...

LOL!!!!!!

Temperance wrote:

Destitute artist was given gainful employ, putting on the finishing touches at Madam Tussaud's.

The fateful birthday in 1970 when a short-sighted aunt, meaning to buy the LP "Pink And Perky's Greatest Hits" as a present for her little nephew, and confused by the pig picture on the cover, inadvertently purchased for him "Absolute Bullshitting For Beginners Trainer".

For a young David Cameron, life from that moment was destined to follow only one path ...

This year Emily and her nanny resolved to keep very quiet and pretend that they were both fast asleep when uncle Augustus crept around the house with his Yuletide gifts.

Daddy was a solicitor and always did the right thing, and so he had welcomed his brother back home to Britain, after Augustus' wife, auntie Sheila, had shacked up with a strapping Swedish sheep shearer from Sherlock Station in New South Wales. But uncle Augustus had not found the change in life easy. Wagga-Wagga was a world away from Wimbledon, and he obviously still felt more a-tuned to the change of the seasons than to the change in the Law Terms.

Thus it was that every solstice-eve he would prowl the house bearing gifts. But Emily really wished he wouldn’t ... It was midsummer after all, June 21st , the tennis was about to start and it was a full six full months 'til Christmas!

"I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but the room has already been taken for the Res Historica annual general meeting"

................................................

Copernicus was forced to revise his calculations on that fateful day he was out taking a gentle stroll to relieve his hydrocelic testicle and got clobbered by two extremely low-flying bits of the universe.

"Darling, you look more like a flowerpot man than Richard III, but I still love you."

EDIT: For those too young to remember:

Bum, crossed posts.

You go ahead, ID; I'm going out in a sec - haven't really got time to find a new pic.

Noooo, I've deleted it and it will take ages to type it all again! It wasn't very good anyway, yours is better.

OK.

The picture I posted above is perhaps more suitable for a "Who's mummy's little treasure, then?" picture quiz, so here is an alternative offering for a caption.

Mortimer, the third duke's marmoset, never shirked his responsibilities when it came to being his master's most respected literary critic. His habit of wiping his arse with doggerel which did not meet his exacting criteria might have appeared crude, but the aspirant poet was (as seen above) grateful for the creature's hard, yet honest, assessment of his output.