Jonge

I don't know about you, but in recent years the festive season can be condensed down to just two things for me:

1. Presents
2. Gingerbread lattes

2011 was a particularly successful festive and jonge-fuelled season (as I shall refer to ginger from here on in) because I got lots of lovely Christmas presents, and in addition to the numerous jonge lattes I awarded myself, I managed to secure one of these:

Yes, that's one entire litre of Starbucks gingerbread - I mean jonger-bread - syrup to add to my coffee or rub on my face, or basically to do whatever the hell I feel like doing with it. I genuinely thought this bottle would see me through to around April, but as I type it's down to about the halfway level, suggesting I'm going to be terrifyingly jonge-starved come the end of January.

But it's not just the jonge lattes that have made the last month so wonderfully jongey: there was also some limited edition jonger-bread porridge that I trawled around several different Waitroses in the hopes of finding. Sadly, when I did manage to get some I discovered that it tasted less jongey and more 'a-bit-like-someone-stirred-some-mercury-in-it.' Maybe I should add some jonge syrup to spice it up? If not I'm saddled with about 10 packets of the odious stuff.

Finally, there's jonge people. I'll probably get a slap for saying this, but my bro has jonge hair. He's tried fobbing it off as 'auburn' and 'strawberry blonde' over the years, but it's jonge. And after 30-odd years on the planet he finally seems reconciled to that fact.

So there we were over Christmas watching Captain America: The First Avenger on DVD, and I don't know if you've seen the film or not but there's a bit in it where some horrible Hydra agent grabs a jonge kid and uses him as a human shield before mercilessly chucking him off the side of a dock to what you assume to be a watery grave. Fortunately the kid can swim and urges Cap to go get the bad guy, but that's by the by: y'see Big Bro wasn't paying much attention at this point, so I said words to the effect of "look - he just tossed the jonge kid in the water! Don't you care about your brethren?"

"Not really," replied Big Bro absentmindedly. "We jonges are a naturally buoyant people."