I hope you're having a better day today than me, dear Reader. And better than local man Ryan Tuttle, too, to judge from this morning's Onion News, to put it mildly!
Does that make you feel better? If you read your newspaper diligently, it's always a comfort to find out that however bad you're feeling, there's always someone else in the world feeling worse than you are, and if necessary these days you can just buy a cheap air ticket and go and watch them suffer in person, which is a comfort!
I also hope you're having a better day than Yours Truly is having, me and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois - my goodness yes!
Let me put my cards on the table at this point. Lois and I moved to our current home here in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire only 3 months ago. And today we've got our first ever appointments today with our new dentist, José, and our new hygienist, Lisa.
Yikes - a trip to the dentist's. We can't put it off any longer !!!!!
We wouldn't mind going to the dentist's usually, but José and Lisa keep us there in their surgery for over 3 hours, on the lame excuse that they've never seen us before in their lives, which for some reason makes it somehow "okay" to take up our whole afternoon, just so they can pick up on all our "issues in the mouth area" !!
Only a pair of lunatics would want to do that for a living, surely!!!!!!! And just because José identifies about 6 "issues" in our joint mouths, we've apparently got to go back there again next week, just so he can somehow magically "fix them"! The world's gone mad !!!!!
And we find out today, incidentally, that Lois and I are doing our teeth cleaning all wrong. José recommends that we brush our teeth with toothpaste as soon as we get up in the morning, just use a mouthwash after breakfast and lunch, and then brush teeth with toothpaste last thing before going to bed - with no mouthwash to follow. Also never to brush teeth till at least 30-60 minutes after a meal.
Who knew? That's not what we were told growing up in the 1950's, that's for sure - in those days it was always just "eat up your meals and then go and brush your teeth in the bathroom".
Also to avoid sugary things like fruit juice, and don't have more than 4 pieces of fruit in a day. Don't sugary biscuits but substitute cheese and crackers.
What utter utter utter madness !!!!
On the plus side today, however, we can really get to know José, who turns out to be a really nice guy - by the end of the 3 hours I feel like I've known him all my life, actually!
Although Portuguese, José speaks perfect English, but with a New Zealand accent. He tells us he's married to an Englishwoman, and that they've just spent a few years in New Zealand, eventually deciding to move to the UK, where they can be much closer to their relatives in England, and a teensy-weensy bit nearer José's relatives in Portugal. What madness!!!!
Also on the plus side, being in the waiting-room a lot, as I am while José is "doing Lois" (!) - it does give me the chance to catch up on the news in the surgery's "newspaper corner", copies donated by previous patients over the last 100 years.
We didn't know that "love is like a smile, it has no value until it is given away", as Victorian writer George Eliot apparently said. A former patient here perhaps?
On the news front, we didn't know that Gandhi was dead, number one bombshell.
Also, we didn't know that it was Keir Starmer who won the UK's last general election. Lois and I look at the news every day without really concentrating much these days, and we didn't know that (a) Keir is our new Prime Minister, (b) has cut winter fuel subsidies to a lot of old codgers, and (c) has now already gone back on this idea and is about to restore them. It certainly saves a lot of time if you only look at the news when you go to the dentist's, that's for sure!
More seriously, it's a comfort to know that at least we've got a Prime Minister whose heart is in the right place, and who isn't trying to stifle dissent, like is happening in such a lot of countries today, and in Hungary in particular.
Lois and I travelled a few times to Hungary 20 to 30 years ago, and we really got to know the place. We could also speak Basic-to-Intermediate Hungarian at one time, would you believe.
And you should have seen Lois in Hungary - she loved the place and really let her hair down, to put it mildly!
And it's painful to us to see what their Prime Minister is doing to their country, Viktor Orbán, now turning into just another authoritarian leader, like in so many countries these days.
Back in the day Orbán was a thrusting young democrat encouraging the country to throw off the legacy of the authoritarian communist system, but he's now becoming not only himself super-rich like a lot of today's leaders, but also one of the "beacons" of authoritarian non-communism, with his new bill for the misleadingly named "Transparency Law", widely seen as a way to clamp down on freedom of the press and stifle all dissent.
Editors of 85 newspapers from 22 countries in Europe have condemned Orbán's new bill, including our own Katharine Viner of the Guardian. Luckily my Hungarian pen-friend Tünde keeps me up to date with the latest horrors going on down there by the Danube. Yikes !!!!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!!
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