This week I'll be mostly pressing pause

I'm ... pressing ... play.

"Come in, sit down and shut up" was what my Grandad used to say. We'd go round on a Saturday evening and Kojak would be on the telly, or Hawaii Five-O, or whatever. This was before the days of video recorders; VHS and Betamax were just a twinkle in the eye of some electronics engineers. So when it was on, it was on. If you were watching the telly, you would come in, sit down and shut up.

A decade later we had video. Of course you still had all that mucking about with setting the timer and making sure you wound the tape back to the right place, and remembering to switch the thing off - because it would only record if it was off - doh! And then when it was recording you couldn't watch anything else. So videos were really for taping things that you were going to miss while you were out; You could go down to Hammersmith Palais on a Saturday night, nip over to Leicester Square for the midnight showing of RoboCop, come back on the N279 from Trafalgar Square, get home at 3am, watch a bit of Night Network, and still be able to rewind the tape and catch up with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield on Saturday Live before going to bed.

This week I'll be mostly mentioning the war

Don't mention the war.

We've had quite a few Germans round our place recently, along with some Spanish and Swiss. We prefer the Germans, which is not to say that we don't like the Spanish and Swiss, we just ... prefer the Germans.

However, there has been a sense of nervousness at times. Like when we were watching a Miss Marple with references to a character killed at Dunkirk. Or explaining Jersey Liberation Day. Or Abbie asking what Hitler's first name was. Or finding a World War 2 Tanks homework laying on the table. Ridiculous things to be nervous about, I know.

Yesterday Abbie mentioned the war, "and I think she got away with it". In fact, we had quite an interesting and enlightening conversation around the dinner table, which I will not be making any observations about, witty, or otherwise.

Today our German house guest told us that this morning she had seen a very English 1970s sit-com where a hotel manager is incredibly rude to the German guests. Ah yes, we know it well, we told her. After a number of weeks of nervousness, it was most liberating to launch into my best Basil Fawlty impression: "Don't mention the war, I mentioned it once and I think I got away with it."

I did stop short of doing the other classic line though. Altogether now: "You started it... You invaded Poland!"