PONDERING PEPYS
"Have you thought about my diary idea for your blog?" asked the cat Shadow.
"Not really," I said."Now that I've read Alan Bennett's Diaries 1996 - 2004 in Untold Stories I don't think I'd have much to say."
"What, because you don't go pottering around churches or hobnobbing with acting luminaries?"
"Something like that, yes."
"OK, so you're not a church spotter and, as for actors, your man's a playwright so he's going to know plenty of them. It's like when you were in the NHS you knew a lot of doctors and other professionals. Bloody'ell, the only difference between church spotting and train spotting is that churches are marginally colder than railway stations."
"Oh, come on, how would you know that?"
"By popping up the road to St. Johns of course. There are people there who think I'm the church cat. Sometimes on a Sunday they bring me treats. Even the most mean little Christian can be quite generous if you look pious enough."
"I never know when to believe you," I said.
"Does anybody?" he said. "Just get on with the writing..."
25th OCTOBER.
Suddenly another year gone and time again for the AGM of the Flu Jab Club.
The club has a limited membership consisting of my Leader, and I and our friends Wendy and Mo.
This year, in keeping with the times, the surgery did not send out reminder letters but relied on us to read the County Press or make a phone call to find out when they would be administering whatever causative agent may currently be in vogue.
It was to be this Saturday or last and as Matt, son of Wendy and grandson of Mo, was home from University for the first time last weekend, the AGM was set for this weekend.
We are old hands by now and waft through the needle puncturing procedure like partying jet-setters half our age.
Afterwards we ignore the "sit fast for ten minutes" advice and repair to God's Providence House (so named because the plague of 1584 failed to claim its inhabitants) for tea or coffee and marvellous cheese scones.
We exchange family news. We have been friends for nearly thirty years and when we part company we may see them no more than a couple of times before next year's meeting.
It matters not.
Time is a sprinter.
Last year was yesterday. Next year is tomorrow.
26th OCTOBER.
This morning on The Politics Show (BBC1) there was a documentary about a new library/cafe/conference centre at Winchester, allied to discussion on whether a comment by Culture Secretary Andy Burnham (who?) that libraries should be about coffee and chatter carried any weight.
Viewers were invited to email or text their views on whether enticing people, by whatever means, into a place where they could encounter books, was necessarily a good thing and to text with what they thought would be a good title for a book on the "Future of Libraries."
I instantly thought of a title - "This Happy Read" - but didn't text it.
My wife and my daughter and my granddaughter and all their friends, they text.
I don't text. Don't know how.
Seldom remember to take my mobile phone when I leave the house, either.
I'm danger enough on the roads without fiddlin' with an effin' phone.
My Leader liked the "This Happy Read" title, though.
Who cares that it missed the tortuous texting?
27th OCTOBER.
The big sports news is that Harry Redknapp has left Portsmouth FC to become manager of Tottenham Hotspur.
It was very sudden and has left Pompey in a state of shock.
In lieu of any comment from the cat Shadow, who highly rates ol' Harry, I shall have to rely on the personal view that he took a struggling side, made something of it, and was probably never going to better the FA Cup win of last year.
Now he has returned to his London origins, will certainly be paid more than the million-or-so a year he was getting with The Blues and stands, if he stays lucky, to go out on an enormous high. Good luck to him.
28th OCTOBER.
Today was Spycatchers' Lunch day.
I was lucky enough to be invited to join this Island group just after I retired in 1989. We meet for lunch once a month, usually on the last Tuesday and at a different pub each time.
We have a pretty darned good idea which pubs are currently serving the best food and which to avoid.
It makes for a pleasant two or three hours and it hurts nobody.
29th OCTOBER.
Somebody has finally found the excuse they have been looking for to curb the lewdly ebullient Jonathan Ross and oust the constantly outrageous Russell Brand.
Their sheer bad taste was presumably proving too much of an embarrassment to somebody up there and a foolishly teenage kind of non-joke involving phoning the actor Andrew Sachs about his granddaughter's sexual activities has provided the opportunity to kill off two highly expensive birds with one sanctimonious stone.
I think it's the same sort of daft reasoning that saw off Greg Dyke.
Neither of these lads is my sort of broadcaster (you have to be a bit elderly to remember Alvar Liddell, Stuart Hibberd and Bruce Belfrage) but at worst I can only regard them as a couple of tiresome tossers.
And now the Prime Minister has had to butt in.
Why?
Because he hopes to take our minds off the economy?
30th OCTOBER.
"What do you think?" I asked the cat Shadow, recumbent on my Epson printer."Reckon this diary thing works?"
"It's all right," he said unconvincingly. "Bit like your usual, but with dates instead of headings. Y'know, I think we may have had this conversation before."
"It's not easy writing currently about current affairs" I said. "And Ross and Brand were well covered by Peter Tatchell - for want of a better way of putting it - in The Guardian this morning."
"Yeah, but your views are free Nobody has to pay national newspaper prices for them."
I sighed: "Nobody would pay ten quid to read them in paperback, either."
"Never mind, mate," he said. "You've mentioned a few celebs, all you need now is a church or two. Why not pop up the road to St. Johns?"
AND A BIT OF LIGHT RELIEF.
Friends Sheila and Anonymous John have sent us the following Fw from a friend of theirs.
It has a decided charm in an Always look on the Bright Side of Life sort of way.
It is certainly worth the couple of minutes or so of viewing/listening time.
Give it a try:
http://dingo.care2.com/cards/flash/5409/galaxy.swf
No comments:
Post a Comment