Punctuation's Revenge: Attack of the Quote Marks

First of all, I think I should mention that Oscars was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Rather than the dimly lit, loud ned-fest that I had anticipated, it was just a very normal bar that looked as if it was being slightly too posh for its own good. It was actually quite enjoyable - music not too loud, not an incredible amount of smoke... not bad at all.

And I got to meet people again such as Roy, Podge, Sinky, Niall, Niall's Hair, Freddo, Freddo's Beard... I didn't recognise half the people I went to school with. (By the way, yes, some of those people have real names, but most people have forgotten what they were.) Niall in particular was completely different, I thought Dougal from The Magic Roundabout was sitting beside me until I saw his face through the hideous mullet-monster that had attached itself to his head.

Anyway, on to the bit in this post that the title comes from - recently I've talked about ignorance of pronunciation and the hideousness of Internet abbreviations. Today, when looking at a Tesco lemonade bottle at the kitchen table, I was faced with something even worse.

Made "With" Real Lemons, declared the label. Everyone who reads this journal will have spotted the mistake straight away - why are the quote marks there? Does it imply that they are in fact made "without" real lemons, or is it just that whoever put together the label had less intelligence than the lemons inside the bottle? It may be a small thing to some people, but I find ignorance of how punctuation should be used very "annoying". Don't even get me started on the apostrophe.

Now, back in the real world... The family went to Jimmy Chung's to celebrate the exam results this year, after we discovered our favourite restaurant had closed down when we went there last time. Like the one in Dundee, it's an all you can eat, but I was weak and only managed two platefuls before having to yield. Actually, for a Chinese restaurant it was very Scottish, serving things like chips and battered chicken. I tried to say "Thank you" in Chinese on the way out - I hope I haven't terribly insulted anyone inadvertently.

Work has been very slow. The last couple of times I've been in I've been down for four or five hours, but they've both turned in to two hours each because there is literally no one to be served. Rain at a golf course café means no customers, and we're getting a lot of one and none of the other.

In fact, so slow was business that I was sent out to put on the barwoman's lottery numbers down at the supermarket. I found the whole business utterly baffling, I can't imagine how Sun readers manage to play it. Anyway, I hope that I filled the ticket out correctly, because if I haven't and she wins, I'm a dead sandwich maker.

I received a pair of odd socks from Whitney in the post this afternoon, which I appreciated far more than you'd expect. On a more irrelevant level - what a great word "galoot" is.