Post 500. INCREASINGLY MONITORING

MY TELEVISION VIEWING.

TO SIDESTEP REALITY.
Sidestepping reality TV is a hard thing to do. The 'everybody will get fifteen minutes of fame' era is upon us, so it's cheap viewing for the easily pleased.
In my quest to avoid the intolerant views of  former gutter press journalists and Brexiteers under whatever current guise, I have all but abandoned the Jeremy Vine programme on Channel 5: might look in if there seems to be somebody of interest to me, but most of the token celebrities and failed old hacks who regularly appear are, to my mind, ignorable seat fillers.
By much the same token, I am too old and set in my ways to welcome programmes full of happy young souls setting Surrey, Kent, or Camberwell alight. Good luck to 'em, but I don't need watch. Nor do I bother with football now: the soccer world is a money pit packed with falling down foreigners and managers bravely wrestling with the English language. How the hell does Gareth Southgate pick an England team? There are scarcely any English players left in the Premiership.
All of which is an elderly mither that will probably be registered as racist, sexist, ageist (or a 'phobia')  by many of those who climb aboard every twenty first century bandwagon going by.
WELL, IT IS LEAP DAY, SO

AND A HAPPY BIRTHDAY 

to any 100 year old celebrating their twenty fifth birthday today. 

Enjoy it.

Post 499. IF YOU'RE NOT A GAMER

OR A MOBILE PHONE HUGGER

YOU'RE IN MY WORLD.
On the unworldly assumption that no change, for whatever reason, is ever for the better, I have survived thus far into 2024 without switching on my mobile phone each day or even looking for my (doubtless battery flat) ipad. I cannot bother to sit at my computer killing off fictional aliens, and I have been 'silent walking' for donkey's years. If that makes me 'Dennis no mates,' so be it.
If you are lost on a mountain and in danger of death (why do they do it?) then a phone call to a rescue team is a godsend. If you are a beleaguered mind seeking solace a phone conversation with some fixated crank can be a sadly fatal way out. A voice in your ear cannot match face to face contact. NHS patients in their droves are currently discovering that and will, I fear, continue to do so until whatever government of the day finally puts paid to the service altogether.

Never think NHS survival is a certainty. Insurance companies and Americans hover greedily.
Reality in all its forms encompasses us at an alarming rate. Politicians and the media regard us as gullible children. Professionalism, in anything but lying and deception (politics), is increasingly being replaced by puerile amateurism (just look at your tele). The world has gone bloody mad.

But cheer up. If you were born in a leap year you can have a birthday party soon.

That's enough until then.

Be lucky.

    

Post 498. THERE WERE EIGHT GIRLS

 LEFT TO RIGHT:
                                                     DORIS, MAUREEN, JEAN, LORNA.

                                                               PAT, RUTH, PAM, MARG.
A VERY ENGLISH FAMILY.
When, early in our relationship, Maureen told me she had seven sisters I was – as an only child with two (unofficial and part-time) foster brothers– intrigued and a trifle apprehensive. What would they make of their 17-year-old baby sister taking up with a thirty-year-old former soldier now a lowly NHS employee? They were a very English family. Mostly tolerant. Sisterly close. Quick of temper. Shrewd in judgement. I was a trifle apprehensive?
Mo introduced me to them gradually, mainly in their own homes, and answered the most often (thankfully kindly) asked question: “Where did you get him?” with: “I got him on the NHS.”

Over the years I came to know them individually, though all but one of them (oldest sister Lorna, an Isle of Wight  resident) lived in or fairly close to Portsmouth. they holidayed together at an island chalet complex every year, and were jokily known by its manager as 'The Sisters Grimm.'
I liked each of them as individuals. Being human, I had my favourites. Marg. was one of my favourites. She was the one who did not want to live beyond her seventies, who married Mike on the same day that our youngest child, Roz, was born (12 March 1970), who did the cryptic crossword in a broadsheet every day (a couple of times she attempted to teach me the knack, but I was hopeless), who swam thirty lengths at a local swimming baths three times a week, and whose television viewing in summer began and ended with  tennis at Wimbledon.
As the years passed on so, one by one, did the sisters until, with the death of Pam in 2020 (Post 348 refers), only the fourth born, Marg. and the last, Mo, were left. Now lovely Marg. has gone.
Throughout the last year or so her health, both physical and mental, went into decline and, despite every possible assistance that Mike (now in his late nineties) tried to give her, she was eventually admitted to the Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth, and thence to a NHS nursing home where, barely a week later, and two days short of her ninety fourth birthday, she died. 

There is little I can add except my commiserations to Mike who will be finding it all hard to take in, and my sympathy with dear Mo who now has none of her seven sisters. 
REMAINS ONLY TO SAY

MARG URRY nee HAMMOND.
A KIND, NICE PERSON AND
THE LAST OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.