Matchless wit

There's a chap, call him Fred, who's a regular in a pub, but he's a little on the simple side. Other drinkers tend to take the mickey out of him by occasionally offering him two coins - a 50p piece and a £1 coin - and asking him to choose one. Fred invariably picks the 50p piece and the suggestion is that he does so because it's bigger and, to Fred's simple mind, more valuable.

One day, a sympathetic customer tells Fred he would be better off, next time anyone tried the trick, to pick up the £1 coin. Fred says no, he wouldn't. And why is he right?

I'm pleased to say that, despite my advanced years, the brain cells swung into action pretty rapidly and I reckon that he's right because if he started taking the £1 coins, nobody would play the game any more. Better to win a steady supply of 50p pieces than have nothing at all.

But there is another brain teaser which has defied my best efforts and it's really beginning to bother me.

Near where I live are the premises of a company that specialises in industrial doors.

Its vehicles carry advertising for the firm - name, phone number, etc - along with the tantalising message that the company operates a "23-and-a-half-hour emergency service".

Why?

When is the half-hour that they won't turn out? Why not? Is it the same half-hour every day? What happens if you ring during that 30-minute period?

Do you get charged extra? Is it all a gimmick to draw the public's attention, like printing an advert upside-down in the paper - annoying but effective?

Every day, when I walk up to the newsagent's with our dog to get the morning paper, I have another crack at solving the riddle. The only thing stopping me from asking one of the blokes I sometimes see outside the premises is that I don't want to me made to look a fool.

Answers on a postcard, please....

Meanwhile, talking of advertising, may I in passing offer my personal congratulations for the wit of someone at a roofing company, one of whose vans I spotted recently?

The firm is called The Roof Doctor, the slogan underneath is "Never Felt Better." Nice one.

Back to my box of matches, which had a lot more reading matter than you'd expect for such a small space. It also carried the warning: "Keep Away from Children."

I like that sort of ambiguity. It's very good advice, for instance, to a young actor who doesn't wish to be upstaged by some precocious nine-year-old from the local stage school, or for anyone with a headache who just can't face all that screaming that kids do when they get over-excited.

My father, bless him, used to find the advice printed on the top of jars of jam hysterically funny.

"Pierce With a Pin and Push Off" it said. That was "Push Off" in the sense of "Get Out of Here" in dad's mind.

Well, you had to be there, and dad did have an odd sense of humour. I've never seen anyone laugh as much as he did the day I put the video on fast-rewind, and everyone dashed jerkily backwards on and off the TV screen.

As for me, I'm rather fond of the story - and it just has to be apocryphal - that a council erected a sign that read: "Do Not Throw Stones at This Notice."

But when you consider that Southampton City Council, whose affairs I used to report for the paper, once erected a lovely new park bench on a piece of riverside land, only to discover that it was below the high-water level when the tide came in, it could just be true after all.