Thursday May 8th 2025 "Do YOU make YOUR neighbours laugh with your hilarious antics? If you do, you're making the world a happier place, which is nice!"

Friends, do you make your neighbours laugh - are you one of those gifted people who can lighten the hearts of everybody around you? If not, then why not take a tip from lovable local couple the Holts, who were featured in this morning's Onion News, and follow their example. 

You'll be glad you did!

It's a heart-warming story, and it cheers me and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois no end today to see that we're not the only couple in Hampshire where one partner forgets to check on the dryer and the other one responds with a hilarious classic look on his or her face!

We're certainly not infallible, and we forget to do lots of things, just like poor old Sheila Holt. And just this morning we got lost on our morning walk through Radford Park, even though we've done the walk, like, a billion times since moving to rural, semi-leafy Liphook in January. We're a real pair of 'noggins', almost 'numpties' at times!

us getting lost in Radford Park this morning, making some passers-by 

laugh with our hilarious classic "have we just gone up these 

steps already this morning, like, a few minutes ago?" 

Still at least our hilarious lack of infallibility brings a smile to people's lips, so we comfort ourselves with that!

One person who's famously in-fallible, however, is the Pope, and there's a new one in the Vatican today as you may have seen. Later we see him greeting the crowds from his balcony in Rome. Lois who's very Protestant, doesn't like to see the crowd's adulation - "He's only a man!" she says, and she's right, of course, although I think there's also something slightly touching about the huge crowd's joy and their obvious hope that Leo XIV's "reign" will make a difference to their lives.

It's difficult, certainly, to imagine such scenes when our own new Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed, and the post has been vacant now for, like, a billion months, to put it mildly!

And to fill the vacuum, the poor old Archbishop of York has to step in and officiate at today's 80th anniversary of VE Day at Westminster Abbey, that Lois and I watch on TV when we make our very "not infallible" way home from the park, having eventually got on "the right path" (!).

At least, however, we're not looking as flustered as poor old [former Prime Minister] Boris [Johnson], which is a comfort - looking like he's just been pulled through a hedge backwards, as people say!

Poor Boris !!!

Lois says that there's been talk recently about "disestablishing" the Church of England, and she wonders what they do on state occasions  like VE Day, in other countries. Certainly Charles has enough to do, we think, without having to be head of the Church of England as well. Henry VIII could manage it, yes, but he didn't have to go around opening supermarkets or new suspension bridges, so he had it easy in many ways (!).

Popes and archbishops, though, they all have to deal with the same touchy issues, when it comes down to it, whether Protestant or Catholic.

Religion has always had an uncomfortable relationship with pornography, and this touchy subject also comes up this afternoon when Lois and I lead the fortnightly online meeting of the local U3A Intermediate Danish "old codger" group, which we lead, "for our sins" [no pun intended!!!!!], and in the Danish murder mystery novel that our groups is currently reading together, Anna Grue's "Judaskysset" (The Judas Kiss).

Danish writer Anna Grue and her murder mystery novel

"Judaskysset" (The Judas Kiss) that our little local

old codger Intermediate Danish group is currently reading

Today, we read about a religious woman whose young son Michael has been murdered. Police have discovered that the young man was a dab hand at using "pirate-software" to download porn films from the internet for himself and his classmates, without paying for them. Police decide they don't need to tell his mother about this, but it could be involved in the reason he was murdered, which will be awkward to put it mildly. But we'll see - so watch this space !!

[I can't wait! - Ed]

20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch for a bit of "telly" and the Radio Times's "Film of the Day", comforted by the thought that Catholics around the world can go to bed happy, now that they've "got their Leo" to look after them, which is nice!

Sadly, however, many people nowadays don't always know their local priest or minister, let alone their pope (!), and the nearest they get to religion is often their RE teacher at school.

And by coincidence, "Film of the Day" turns out to be about Nancy Stokes, a retired RE teacher played by Emma Thompson, and Nancy certainly needs "her Leo", but "her Leo" isn't the Pope, to put it mildly! 

Nancy is a middle-aged, retired RE teacher, recently widowed, who had an unfulfilling sex life with her late husband, she's never had an orgasm, and now she wants to find out a bit of what she's missed out on. Hence she engages sex-worker Leo Grande, but after 3 meetings, during which she ticked off a lot of the variations she was curious about, she still hasn't "orgasmed".

One of the hazards of being a teacher, of course, is that your former students recognise you and say hello, and, embarrassingly for Nancy, as she's waiting in the hotel bar for Leo to arrive for their fourth "session", one of her ex-RE students, Becky, now a waitress, decides to accost her, using Nancy's married name - Mrs Robinson.

Nancy, or "Mrs Robinson" as she used to be known, pretends that she's meeting somebody she wants to buy a car off, 

Becky tells Leo that, although a bit uptight, Mrs Robinson was not as bad as some of the others, although there was one time she got all of the girls together for a special meeting, and had told them that they were all "sluts", mainly because of their short skirts. She told them that girls should look respectable, or they'd just go around tempting the men, which would get them into trouble. If they dressed like sluts they should be expected to be treated like sluts. 

When Nancy asks for the bill, Leo and Nancy then decide to come clean with Becky about why they're here.

Time is marching on, however, and Nancy doesn't want to stay in the bar talking to Becky for ever.

Yes, Becky, that was your old RE teacher saying those words, believe it or not !!!! 

And Lois thinks that this sudden outburst of honesty was what Nancy needed to release her true feelings, because when she and Leo go up to the room Nancy's booked for their 4th "session", for the first time she really seems to be ready for it at last, and we see her shouting "bingo!" or something similar, within about, like, 2 minutes, possibly less!

So job done, then !!!

So, two minutes later, it's "job done"! 

And now that she's had one, she can rest easy, and look at herself in the mirror with pride, so she tells Leo he doesn't need to come again, which is fair enough!

Here's how he did it...

[That's enough, Colin. A nice little post today, mainly on religious themes, with some lovely "links", but don't "push it", that's more than enough for today - Ed]

Awww, but it isn't even 10 o'clock yet!!!! 

[Just go to bed! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!!