(Submitted by Paul Tomlinson)
Missing Royal Naval Life? Here’s how to recapture the atmosphere of the old days and simulate living onboard ship once more.
- Build a shelf in the top of your wardrobe and sleep on it inside a smelly sleeping bag. Remove the wardrobe door and replace it with a curtain that’s too small.
- Wash your underwear every night in a bucket then hang it over the water pipes to dry.
- Four hours after you go to bed, have your wife slip open the curtain, shine a torch in your eyes and say “sorry mate, wrong pit”.
- Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the centre of the bath and move the shower head down to chest level. Store beer barrels in the shower enclosure.
- When you shower, remember to turn the water off while you soap.
- Every time there is a thunderstorm, sit in a wobbly rocking chair and rock as hard as you can until you’re sick.
- Put oil instead of water into a humidifier then set it to “HIGH!”
- Don’t watch TV, except for movies in the middle of the night. For added realism, have your family vote for which movie they want to see and then select a different one.
- (Mandatory for engineering types) leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24 hours a day to re-create the proper noise levels.
- Have the paper boy give you a haircut.
- Once a week blow compressed air up through your chimney. Ensure that the wind carries the soot over onto your neighbours house. When he complains: laugh at him.
- Buy a rubbish compactor but only use it once a week. Store up the rubbish on the other side of your bath.
- Wake up every night at midnight and make a sandwich out of anything you can find, preferably stale bread. Optional: cold soup or canned ravioli - eaten out of the can.
- Devise family menus a week in advance without looking in the fridge or larder.
- Set your alarm clock to go off at random times through the night. When it goes off - leap out of bed, get dressed as fast as you can then run out into the garden and break out the garden hose.
- Once a month, take every major household appliance completely apart, then re-assemble it.
- Use 4 spoons of coffee per cup and allow to sit for 3 hours before drinking.
- Invite about 85 people you don’t really like to come and stay for a couple of months.
- Install a small fluorescent light tube under your coffee table, then lie under the table to read books.
- Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of all the doors in the house. Now you always either hit your head or skin your shins when passing through them.
- Put wire locks on the wheel nuts of the car.
- When baking cakes, prop up one side of the cake tin while it is baking. When it has cooled - spread icing really thickly on one side to level it out again.
- Every so often throw the cat into the swimming pool or bath and shout “man overboard”, then run into the kitchen and sweep all the dishes and pans onto the floor while yelling at your wife for not having secured for sea properly.
- Put on the head phones from your stereo, do not plug them in. Go and stand in front of your dishwasher - say to nobody in particular “dishwasher manned and ready sir”. Stand there for 3 or 4 hours. Say, again to nobody in particular “Dishwasher secured” - remove headphones, role up the headphone cord and put them away.
- Nickname your favourite shoes ‘steamies’ then get your wife to hide them around the house on a random basis.