Yes, don't ever be embarrassed about asking to check your GP's "crudentials" [sic] before letting him or her examine your body fluids will you!!! The so-called "gig economy" has already "sucked in" a lot of professionals, like food delivery drivers, and who knows where it will end?
Just saying!!! Yours Truly has got his annual blood test tomorrow, and just look at this story, which just happened to "pop up" in this morning's Onion News! It would be just my luck if I got one of these amateurs on MY case now, just wouldn't it !!!!
It's a bit of a warning to you on my part to you, the reader, essentially just to be careful out there, that's all!
Yes, it's true. I have got an appointment tomorrow morning here at my GP's, here in leafy, semi-rural Liphook, Hampshire, to undergo my annual blood test. By nature I'm a bit of an "early bird", and very much "a morning person", so this morning I start on my own 24-hour program to get my blood looking good, also my body fluids generally, and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois suggests one of my nice healthy walks through nearby Radford Park, by the banks of the River Wey, would be "just the ticket".
The walk has been specially designed by me, mainly to give my body a good "shake-out", and then to "tighten it up", and then finally to "give it a good shake-out again" [all technical terms, for which my apologies (!)], the general idea, to put it in layman's terms, being that my "samples" are all in tip-top condition tomorrow. Annual blood-tests are always a bit of a worry, aren't they, especially at mine and Lois's advanced age (!), and I don't want them finding anything nasty, that's for sure!
[How much do you really understand about how the body works, Colin, if you don't mind me asking! - Ed]
Apart from that, it's a pretty ordinary day for Lois and me, not much different from a thousand other couples in today's Britain, is my guess !!!!
Yes, there are about eight dozen stories in today's naked, leafy, semi-rural and small-to-medium village of Liphook, Hampshire. This has been one of them. Will this do?
"Oh, but wait, how did your famous fortnightly Old Codger Danish online meeting go this afternoon, Colin?", I hear you cry!.
[Not me, I'm already "propping up the bar" at my local "gargle factory" (!) - Ed]
Well, seeing as how you're obviously "gagging" to know - or should I say "
gargling to know" (!)
[No! - Ed], our famous Danish online meeting went very well this afternoon, thanks! The Danish novel that our group is all reading is getting exciting, and the group's big talking point today is that Norwegian woman stockbroker who gets lucky - in more ways than one (!) - on a business trip to Copenhagen.
(left) Lois and me on our computer, trying to control another rowdy online
meeting of the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, and (right) Danish writer
Anna Grue and the book our group is reading - "The Judas Kiss"
Yes, the Norwegian woman stockbroker, after a busy day broking stock in Copenhagen, gets lucky at her hotel casino's blackjack table, and then, with her handbag full of her winnings, she picks up a Danish gigolo in the bar and invites him up to her hotel room, as you do (!).
The couple then spend half an hour in her hotel-room on a bit of quality "shepherd time", as the novel puts it [Danish; hyrdetimer]. Shepherds have a sexy image all over the continent, and they're famous across the Channel for "getting busy" under a shady tree with attractive women in the afternoons, while letting their sheep "baa" amongst themselves for between 30 and 60 minutes.
a typical continental shepherd, Daphnis, "getting busy" with
his current "squeeze" Chloe, while letting his flock baa and bleat
amongst themselves for up to an hour - oh dear!
"Shepherd time" doesn't really work as a phrase in English, however, and after a spirited debate the group accepts my suggestion of "Hanky Panky Time", as a "nod" to the tradition of "happy hours" at pubs and gargle-factories generally (!), so that's nice.
Just to get this group of old codgers to agree on anything is a bit of an uphill struggle [Danish: op ad bakke kamp], to put it mildly!
No, it certainly isn't easy leading a local U3A "Old Codger" Intermediate Danish group, let me tell YOU !!!!
flashback to February 2013:Lois and me on our first visit to Copenhagen,
where our daughter Alison and family were living: a good chance for us to master
a broken-to-semi-fluent smattering of Advanced Level Basic-to-Intermediate-level Danish.
Happy days !!!!!
20:00 And the name "Chloe" - not the one that's the current "squeeze" of continental shepherd Daphnis - but another Chloe, English this time - crops up again in an interesting Channel 5 documentary this evening in the channel's popular series about Cancelled Celebrities You Have Loved.
The other evening we saw the one about Benny Hill, who, of course, was famously "cancelled" by Thames TV back in the 1980's, maybe the first person in the UK to suffer that fate? Tonight, its the turn of comic and whacky Liverpudlian DJ, Kenny Everett, to fall under the spotlight.
As Lois and I see it, Kenny Everett and Benny Hill had a lot in common. Yes, they were silly about, and trivialised maybe, women, homosexuals, and non-white people, and foreigners in general, but they did the exact same things with men, heterosexuals and white people, and British people (Kenny himself was a closeted, secret homosexual who finally came out several years later).
The intention was just to be a bit silly, and to raise a laugh, and all done, by both Benny and Kenny without the faintest little trace of malice, even though not always "in the best possible taste", to borrow Kenny's famous catchphrase.
Some of the complaints made about Kenny were quite trivial. Kenny used to make fun of foreign accents, for example, and he had his cast of characters like his "Marcel Wave," his alter ego of a French sophisticate, for example. And Kenny's life-long friend and "fellow silly-person" Chloe vouches here for the character's authenticity, which went beyond caricature, she says she's learnt from past experience.
And here's Kenny himself, putting his Marcel character into action:
What could be more harmless, and more silly, than that? And yet.....
"Harmless silly fun" is mine and Lois's gut reaction to the excerpts we see tonight from Kenny's weekly show. But is that just a very easy thing for an ageing, white English couple, born and brought up in England, to conclude?
Remember, Kenny also "mimicked" Asians and their funny accents. And that same Asian contributor to tonight's documentary, pictured above referring to the French as "our cousins across the English Channel", recalls how, as a schoolboy at an otherwise all-white English school in the 1970's, he would repeatedly come in for some admittedly gentle ribbing in the schoolyard, the day after a Kenny Everett show.
Lois and I remember that we found it hilarious in the 1950's to see Peter Sellers do his famous comic Indian accent as a comic Indian doctor in the song "Goodness Gracious Me" with Sophia Loren. This was a song that was written with the intention of being sung in the film "The Millionnairess", in which Sellers played a comic Indian doctor, but the song got cut out of the film.
Peter Sellers as a comic Indian doctor, and his patient, Italian actress
Sophia Loren, in the film "The Millionnairess" (1955)
So the jury's still out on that one maybe?
[Another thoughtful, but at the same time hard-hitting, blog post, if I may say so, Colin! - Ed]
Will this do?
[Oh give it a rest! Just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
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