May Contain Nuts

"Statement of Frank Penn, driver of black BMW reg. X418NGN regarding incident in Oaken Avenue, London SW4: At around ten a.m. on 27th March, I was driving down Oaken Avenue in a southerly direction at approximately thirty miles an hour. Suddenly right in front of me on the end of a long pole appeared a four-foot-high model of Tony Blair dressed as a public schoolboy. I instinctively swerved, striking a parked car, though still hitting the figure with my nearside wing, which decapitated the dwarf Prime Minister model, sending his head up over the windscreen. I struck a second car before coming to a halt, which was when I saw Mrs. Alice Chaplin holding the now headless torso on the end of a wooden pole. She was crying and crouching at the kerbside and began shouting at me, 'See? See what happens!' I realized that I has caused significant damage to two parked motor vehicles and I immediately called the police."

Now if that excerpt isn't enough to make you promptly buy the book, I can't help you. Or maybe I'm just weird like that, picking up random books and reading chapter one to see if it's amusing. That's how I ended up with Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks. It's a bit out of chapter one from May Contain Nuts by John O'Farrell. It's a gem of a book I found while on a layover at Heathrow except my copy has a couple of pelicans on the front cover (the significance of which didn't hit me until I read the first thirty pages).

In a nutshell (ha, ha), it's a satirical account of today's parental neurosis i.e. if my child can't speak five languages by the time he's three, he'll never amount to anything and will end up living in a rusted out van, DOWN BY THE RIVER.

For the record, our 21 month old can express himself in two languages, but who's counting. :) Shoot me if I ever start acting like Mrs. Alice Chaplin....