Junk Emails

Whoever sends junk emails has got me completely wrong. They seem to think I’m a seedy, hypochondriac bloke with a lot of problems down below. Not only am I cursed with a miniscule member, it’s about as reliable as the old A40 Mum used to drive.

Apparently, my girlfriends are sniggering among themselves about my shrunken, faulty manhood. And my long suffering wife (I have one of those as well as the girlfriends) is concerned I may not be able to get her pregnant.

Nevertheless, my alter ego’s appetite is insatiable. I’m in the market for a sexy Russian girl who can’t spell but has breasts the size of bowling balls.

When not performing disappointingly in the bedroom, I’m swallowing dodgy prescription drugs with names that sound only partially familiar like Aspromix and Pethadinerole. My other obsession is cheap, immitation watches.

While the real me usually deletes these messages without opening them, I’ve taken a look at one just now - in the interests of journalism.

Apparently, if I buy one particular outlet’s Viagra, I’ll be able to open a beer bottle with my penis. That could be handy. Finding the bottle opener’s always tricky. It gets lost among the tangle of spatulas and serving spoons in the middle drawer.

The advertisement says I may even be invited to become a porn star. Well, I guess it’d be more lively than cleaning up the cat litter box.

Most of the time I delete junk mail messages on automatic pilot. Their lurid subject headings are easy enough to detect among precious emails from readers. Often the highlight of my week, readers’ emails mean a lot. I try to reply to them all (except unspeakably abusive ones).

The other day as I was deleting Viagra advertisements, I had a horrible sinking feeling. Without meaning to I wiped an email titled Velcro. No doubt it was a reader’s response to a comment I made about Velcro being one of the best inventions of the 20th Century.

They were probably telling me off, saying advances in medicine and science were far more important. They’re right, of course. Velcro isn’t that great. It didn’t even supplant zips the way people said it would.

When I asked my husband why men still prefer zips on their trousers, he said Velcro would be too noisy in public toilets - and somewhat mood shattering in other circumstances.

Nevertheless, some inventions have been undervalued for their simple elegance and versatility. Take dental floss, for instance. According to that Bible of the Internet, Google, it was invented by a New Orleans dentist who recommended passing a piece of silk between teeth in the early 1800’s.

He shouldn’t take too much credit, though. It wasn’t long before Taranaki people were using their mothers’ sewing cotton to remove chunks of mutton wedged between their molars.

Nylon dental floss was created during World War Two. Americans use enough of it every year to stretch from Earth to the Moon and back four times. I buy almost that much for our household.

Dental floss is great for all sorts of things around here – hanging Christmas decorations and paintings, training grape vines, oh and occasionally for teeth. I’ve used it to string broken necklaces and earrings together.

Floss is excellent for cutting through dough and cheesecake. It can successfully repair tents and backpacks or reattach umbrella sections back to their spines.

I’m not the only one to explore its potential. In 1994 a prison inmate in Virginia used braided floss to scale a wall and escape.

Another seriously undervalued item is the plastic clothes peg. I’ve yet to discover a better way to seal a half eaten bag of chips. Rubber bands are clumsy by comparison, and those plasticised bits of wire laughingly called “ties” never hold.

Half the stuff in our kitchen cupboards and freezer is held together with clothes pegs – from cereal and frozen peas to rice and some strange brown powder that seems to be a maternity ward for moths.

Pegs are essential for holding music on its stand when our daughter goes busking with her violin at Christmas. Some people use them to hold curtains together, squeeze the last out of the toothpaste tube or to hold the end of matches so their fingers don’t get burnt.

I look forward to hearing from readers about their favourite undervalued inventions – and hope the person whose message was deleted forgives me. It’s so easy these days to mistake Velcro for Viagra.

Helen’s email : notnuts@bigpond.com