Lollipop lady

Pleased with yesterday's post, Antler responded, "Thanks Chris, what an honour...or in your lingo, an honor!" That leads right into today's topic.

This bit of British weird news threw me at first and then had me laughing! At 9am on Monday, 53-year-old Janice Woodland spotted a herd of horses bolting down the road in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, U.K. "I looked up the road and thought that's a lot of horses....It’s just not something you expect to see, it’s more like something from a movie. It was quite scary but the most important thing was to keep myself from panicking," she later remarked. They were heading right toward Alderman Jacobs Primary School and would have put the students in danger if they had shown up 10 minutes earlier. Instead, Mrs. Woodland saved the day, as The Telegraph reported: "[She] immediately held out her lollipop to stop the charging animals and corralled them into a nearby garden." What?!? A lollipop would only have extended her arm's length by a few inches and couldn't have steered away the charging horses, so why was such a detail even worth mentioning? Nevertheless, the woman and parents of the schoolchildren managed to corral and calm the horses (1st and 2nd images) until police and RSPCA officers responded, and their owners came to collect them. It was only when I read the report more carefully that I realized that "lollipop lady" is British slang for a crossing guard -the lollipop in question (3rd image) is taller than she is!