Broad Street is a street in the middle of Oxford, and is indeed broad. The phrase refers the traditional May Day festival held there, which would commence at dawn with a competition to see who could throw a bunch of fragrant woodbine herbs up Broad Street the farthest. This would be followed by a race to sweep the resulting pile of woodbine all the way along the street. In the days of horse-drawn transport, this also served a useful function in cleaning and deodorising the road of unwelcome material. So metaphorically, throwing a woodbine up Broad Street means any way of transforming a necessary chore into a joyful activity. Try dropping this phrase into your next management meeting: "Let's throw a woodbine up Broad Street on this one and see where it drops."

What are hot boots and cold boots?

The remedy for cold feet and warm feet, respectively. D'OH.

In other words, "hot boots" are anything, be it an actual object, argument or other psychological device, used to convince someone to do something that s/he is scared to do (has "cold feet" about). Whereas "cold boots" is pretty much the reverse - anything, be it an actual object, argument or other psychological device, used to try and either extricate or at the very least calm down someone who *has* jumped into a situation feet-first only to find it "too hot to handle". Very often the person who was too scared to get into whatever situation it was, turns out to have been right in the first place, and giving them the cold-boots treatment is the only remedy for your own mistake of having given them the hot-boots treatment in the first place. The two concepts most often crop up in arguments between friends over a romantic relationship that one of them is either (a) not yet involved in, and too scared to start, or (b) has gotten involved in, found out that they were *right* to have been too scared to start but it's too late now as it's already started, and wants to try to find a way of reasoning themselves out of it again becuase they can't handle it: and it is the best mate that provides the warm- and cold-boots treatment successively and ill-advisedly ;-)

In the days when my father was a computer programmer, he would sometimes say that a hard day's work had in fact been turd-varnishing.

Sir/Madam, should your father have really said that, then he was dredging the pond of poor taste! The term turd varnishing is one step lower than 'brown nosing'; it refers to those moments in an office when everything is up-to-date and staff are at a loose end. (Ed: Yeah, right!) Most go to the pub. Others, the 'turd varnishers', head off to the head and take with them 'procedure manuals', a copy of the remarks section of the most recently purchased software core, the company 'directions' manifesto or copy of the latest speech made by their Project Manager, supposedly to 'polish their skills'. I'm sure you get the drift.

Now, oddly enough, also gleaned from and I.T. type - what the heck is a Farenheit Burster?

In the depths of the IT department wallows the BOFH and the ever present PFY. And it to this latter ungodly creature that we must turn our attention. Not too bright the the PFY lurks in front of humming screen and servers, surfacing only briefly to ghost into a work area first thing on a Monday morning, 'Tut' three times before removing a computers base unit as the Farenheit Burster looks on in spluttering astonishment.

Next time I go to the beach should I take a scanning basket.