Bic, purveyors of pens to journalists and traffic cops world-wide, has come out with a pen labelled “Bic for her”. They are quite shapely and are described as “amber medium pens”. Amber? To me they look mauve or lilac. But then, being male, I cannot really tell – only women can, for example, tell beige from light brown.

But women have greeted the female pens with derision.

It seems that because spring is in the air (tra la) readers feel poems coming on. But Stoep Talk prefers pomes.

Pomes? Pomes are not terribly good poems. They are written by “potes” such as Barry Jammy of Parkwood. Barry is a great pote if ever there was one. He has sent me a topical limerick.

In 1999 Britain’s Royal Mail service offered a plan to parents: they could have their children post-coded so that, if lost, they could be delivered home via the post office. Parents could place stickers carrying identification data into their children’s shoes. Seriously.

I can’t help wondering whether such a scheme would work in SA. Especially as I have been told of a letter posted in Booysens being received 3km away in Doornfontein 17 months later. That’s about 0.0000000000000008km/h.

Spring, which started on Saturday, took a long time coming this year. To celebrate, here’s a story told to me by Karl Jensen, a retired SAA captain and a leading light in the Experimental Aircraft Association.

Karl’s flying hours add up to the equivalent of more than three years airborne.

Are dogs intelligent or are they intelligent? I wrote a couple of years ago about a Moscow ethologist (animal behaviourist), Dr Andrei Poiarkov of the Moscow Ecology and Evolution Institute, who found that some dogs in Moscow routinely ride on their own on subway trains and buses.

They are commuting from the suburbs to the city centre because they have learnt that city workers are apt to feed them, whereas in the suburbs there’s nobody around during the day.