You know that old joke about buses: you wait ages for one, and then three come along all at once? Well, it applies to rebuses, too. Here are some we made by combining our brand new alphanumeric fridge magnets with a few of our older, silver ones. See if you can work out what they all mean, but don’t make yourself late for work. Answers below the image.

Oh, hai! Still here? Let’s see how many you got right:

From top to bottom (and either in decreasing order of quality or increasing order of excruciatingness) they translate as:

• Manic
• Handbag
• Hartlepool (Heart + lepool? Get it?)
• Bearskin, and
• Blizzard

As if that weren’t enough, here’s some of my recent fridge magnet artistry. Click the picture to see it hugely.

I couldn’t finish this post without mentioning this cute crocodile, a present from Shana to me?—?and it wasn’t even my birthday! Croc has little magnets in all four limbs but is otherwise totally floppy. Frankly, he’s not gonna scare anybody, is he?

In the beginning was the Word:

No, hang on a minute; wrong book. Better start again, hadn’t I? OK, here goes.

Wednesday was a red letter day. It was also a green letter day, a pink letter day, a blue letter day and a yellow letter day; oh, and an orange letter day. (Did I say pink? Ah, I did. Sorry, couldn’t read my own typing there for a moment.) Shana had sent off for some alphanumeric fridge magnets as a little surprise treat for me. Now, every time we’re in the kitchen we try to outdo each other with humorous little messages.

The box contained 77 magnets, which is fine for most things. If we run out of letters we use the numbers instead, like a fridge magnet version of leetspeak. Alternatively, since we’re restricted to short sentences, you could say it’s a bit like Twitter, only with more immediate access to milk, eggs, chips and sausages.

Sometimes I can’t resist the temptation to be arty. Examine more closely the little picture above (hint: you may need to click the thumbnail pic to see a biggerer version, which will save you the bother of trying to discern all the tiny details), and you should notice the faint reflection of the camera in it. Hey, if Alfred Hitchcock could make cameo appearances in his own films, then I can appear in my own pictures, so there! Anyway, it just shows how clean and shiny our fridge is.

Consonant please, Shana!