Saturday January 10th 2026 "What does YOUR old dad do on his mobile phone?! Mystery solved in today's papers maybe!!!"

Yes, Friends, have YOU ever watched your old dad fiddling with his phone, and wondering what he could possibly be doing with it?

Well, the mystery was solved for one local family, according to today's Onion News for East Hampshire. Just feast your eyes on this front page shocker!!!

Poor old Dad Branson !!!!!

But it's a truism, I think, that the older we get, the more difficult it can become to flirt, whether it's on our phones or in person. My wife Lois and I should know - we're both 79, would you believe, although here in semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, we only flirt with each other, so we wouldn't know where to start with anybody else, to be frank !

my wife Lois and me - some recent pictures

The Onion story about poor old Dad Branson, however, brings a peculiarly sardonic, and archaic, smile to our faces later today, when we turn to Lois's copy of "The Week" magazine and read about another "old codger" who, unexpectedly, was a past master (or should I say "past mistress" !!!!) at the gentle art of flirting. 

Step forward, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, no less!

Poor Maggie!!!!!

Reading this unexpected flood of saucy "geriatric" stories definitely puts Lois and me in a romantic frame of mind, and despite the chilly weather we opt to go for an intimate morning walk over the "hallowed turf" of local soccer heroes Liphook United, currently languishing near the bottom of the prestigious East Hampshire Premier League. 

There's almost nobody else around at the ground, so with "Jack Frost nipping at our bits" and all "dressed up like Inuits", to quote my own "woke-alized" version of "The Christmas Song" (!), Lois and I share some intimate moments admiring the beauty of the trees and of the birdsong on this chilly Saturday morning (!).

And then later, after statutory "naptime", what could be more romantic at around 4pm than doing the Radio Times quizzes together, over a cup of tea and some leftover Christmas biscuits! 

What is it people say? 

"The couple that quizzes together fizzes together", isn't it? Perhaps we should be told!!!!

And, now, thoroughly warmed up, we score a creditable 7 out of 10 on the prestigious Mastermind questions. See how many of these "doozies" YOU know!!!!

20:00 Back in the 1970's people certainly knew how to flirt, no question about that! And during a delightful rerun of a 50-year-old episode of "The Good Old Days" on BBC4 tonight, popular pint-size Scottish comedian Ronnie Corbett reminds us about those far-off times with one of his cheeky, slightly off-colour honeymoon jokes, which is nice!

You must know this one! It's the couple's wedding night, and the groom goes into the hotel bar for a drink, while the bride gets into bed in their room. She'd only been in bed for three minutes when a train goes past on the nearby railway line, and the vibrations almost shake her out of the bed.

The bride rings for the hotel manager to complain about the noise and vibration, but when he arrives in the room, he's mystified by her story. So she asks him when the next train is due, and he tells her that it will pass by in 3 minutes time.

You've probably guessed what happens next! Am I right? Or am I right!

Yes, the husband comes up from the bar, of course, and he sees the manager on the bed with his bride, needless to say!

Tremendous fun, isn't it!

[If you say so! - Ed]

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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

Friday January 9th 2025 "Can an up-to-date Danish Lego set defeat Donald Trump? I wonder....!"

Yes, Friends, as you may have heard (!), Donald Trump has got his beady eye on the Danish province of Greenland at the moment. And the furore is causing a certain fluttering among a particular group of "old codgers" here in Liphook, in this quiet, semi-leafy corner of East Hampshire UK, to put it mildly !!!!

My wife Lois and I, "for our sins" (!), lead the local U3A online "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group, and Jeanette, one of our group members and the only member to be of genuine Danish extraction, has been sketching some ideas for countering Trump's designs on Greenland with help from Denmark's biggest exporter: step forward Lego toy building bricks, no less !!!!

me and my wife Lois, leading one of our online meetings of the

local U3A "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group

"Denmark is ready!", says Jeanette defiantly, in this dramatic post to our group-members today!

(left) Danish-born "old codger" Jeanette and (right) her dramatic post today

to members of our local East Hampshire "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group

Luckily, my wife Lois is a subscriber to the topical "The Week" magazine, which "plopped" through our letterbox today with its digest of news from home and abroad from the last week. And having skimmed the contents I'm exclusively able to send back this witty rejoinder to Jeanette, which is nice!

And certainly Donald Trump is all over the latest issue of "The Week" which fell into mine and Lois's hot little hands today - no doubt about that!

But how to explain the Trump phenomenon? The magazine is going with the "comedian model", I notice, following the analysis popularised by US journalist Michael Wolff, according to this editorial by "The Week"'s deputy editor, Theo Tait:

By contrast, Lois and I, although obviously no experts (to put it mildly!), tend to go with the "CEO" model for Trump. To us he acts like a CEO doing "deals" with foreign powers just like he might with a business rival, and brooking no dissent in his organisation. Perhaps "Dodgy CEO" model might be a better description, because Trump's past performance as a CEO has included plenty of financial losses and business failures etc, or so we've read.

Trump reminds Lois a lot of her experience working for Czech publishing billionaire Robert Maxwell, back in the late 1960's / early 1970's in Maxwell's "prestige" documentation department, at Headington Hall, Oxford. 

Maxwell famously ruled his companies by terror, changing company policies and working practices on a whim, and, likely as not, reversing those policies the day after. What madness !!!! And we were reminded of the Maxwell era by a recent BBC documentary a few months ago. 

(bottom left) Robert Maxwell with wife and family back in the day, and (bottom right) Lois

escaping Maxwell's clutches for 3 weeks in order to visit me during my study year in Japan

Later, I famously saved Lois from "a fate worse than death", by marrying her in August 1972, which, as a happy by-product, also got her out of a business trip with Maxwell to a book fair in Germany: the great man had invited Lois to accompany him as his "special assistant", and we all know what that would have meant!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

Trump may be treating the US as a business, but how good are Trump's 'business' decisions? We listened yesterday to a fascinating BBC Radio 4 analysis of his take-over of Venezuela, designed (we think!) to open the country up to American oil companies and, at the same time, to halt, or hamper, the export of drugs to the US.

Lois and I didn't know that Venezuelan oil is apparently "tar-rich", considered "dirty" because it contains high concentrations of carbon. It's quite expensive to extract, needing specialised equipment to drill and process etc. Will America's oil companies be willing to spend out the necessary investment funds to modernise Venezuela's extraction methods?

Also we didn't know that, as far as drugs are concerned, Venezuela's world-wide drug exports are  mostly of cocaine, and not the dreaded fentanyl, which is feared for its potency and extreme unpredictability - remind you of anybody haha!!!!

20:00 Trump is something of a right-wing populist, by all accounts, and later today, Lois and I watch a fascinating documentary on the PBS America channel about two countries in Europe where right-wing populists have swept into power: Hungary and Italy.

Hungary is a country that Lois and I visited several times in the 1990's and 2000's, so we're particularly interested in what goes on there. It's been governed for a number of years by Viktor Orban's populist Fidesz Party, and it's interesting tonight to see something of Viktor's methods.

flashback to 1994 and my first visit to Hungary, made as communism was dying on its feet. 

The lively advert on the left was a cheeky poster promoting Orban's new Fidesz Party. 

with the slogan "Ha unod a banánt, válaszd a narancsot" (if you're tired of bananas,

why not try an orange!): orange being, even today, the symbol of Fidesz,

and the joke being a typical example of Hungarian women's prison humour.

What madness !!!!!

Orban's policy has to be to keep democracy notionally in place, but to destroy the checks and balances in the country's constitution, in particular weakening the courts etc as much as he can, adding extra seats which he then packs with his own supporters. 

Orban doesn't cancel elections, allowing them to go ahead, while changing the rules as much as possible to favour his own party. 

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

Nor does Orban gag the minority anti-government press, but he puts them under constant financial and psychological pressure, and in the case of index.hu, for example getting one of his billionaire friends to take it over. Fortunately the editor and the website's 80 journalists there all resigned en masse in protest at the sale, setting up a new website telex.hu, and continuing to challenge Orban's methods and policies. "Ne hallgassunk!" is the new website's slogan - "We will not keep silent!".

Here was the BBC's July 2020 report on the walk-out, dubbed by the journalists, interviewed in tonight's PBS programme, as "a sublime moment":

Fascinating stuff, isn't it!

Come back, "boring" Sir Keir Starmer, all is forgiven haha!!!!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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

Thursday January 8th 2025 "Sensitive men, do YOU get tired of the relentless female attention?"

Yes, Sensitive Men, do YOU sometimes get tired of women seemingly forever trying to pick you up? 

It's a common problem isn't it, in our crazy modern world !!!! There's a typical story in today's Onion News, in their popular "From the Archives" column - see page 94!!!!

Women, honestly! Poor Goldsmith !!!!!

Today's Onion "splash", however, gives me and my wife Lois a quiet but raucous "belly-laugh" as we read it in bed this morning. because we're expecting a visit later from our daughter Alison who's dropping by to help Lois with her challenging 1000-piece Jane Austen jigsaw, which will be nice!

my wife Lois and me - some recent pictures

Ali drops by at around 11am, wearing her shiny-new red, ski-themed sweater, and she stays for a couple of hours, sharing with us her lovely bubbly personality. And the help she gives Lois with her Jane Austen jigsaw, is described later by Lois as "significant", despite all the cups of tea drunk, which is nice to hear!

Ali has just a few days ago, returned to England after a week's holiday in a northern Swedish ski-resort, with husband Edward and their 3 teenage offspring. They  were staying at a large, comfortable and sumptuous hotel, so nice that it was difficult to get up the courage to go outside in the cold and do any actual skiing, she says. 

What madness !!!!

(left to right) Edward, Ali, Rosalind (17), Isaac (15), and Josie (19)

dining at their sumptuous Swedish ski-resort hotel last week

The other guests were almost all Swedes, she says, although there were some other Brits, and she heard one party of Danes. And if you're wondering how Ali can tell the difference between Swedes and Danes, well the explanation is simple: she and her family lived in Copenhagen for 7 years from 2012 to 2018, which made them all intermediate-level "Scandi-experts", to put it mildly!

Lois and I visited them several times in Copenhagen, often "babysitting" them when Ali and Edward were away on Edward's frequent business trips around the world.

flashback to 2017: Lois and I "babysit" our 3 grandchildren in Copenhagen, giving them

breakfast, dropping them off at school, and taking them to local attractions, while

Ali and Edward were in Hong Kong, where Edward was looking at a possible new job

Happy days!!!

Josie, their eldest, who was only 12 in those pictures above, is now 19 - you do the maths!!! And since September, she's now a first-year student at Durham, and she'll be travelling up there tomorrow, Ali says, to start her second term studying for a maths degree. 

And Josie has put some more pictures of the family's Swedish holiday onto social media today, featuring her old dad, and younger brother Isaac, which is nice.

 

Awwww!!!!!

You probably know that the Scandinavian languages have alphabets with a few weird letters, the letter a with a circle over it, the letter o with a line through it, that kind of thing. It's total madness, I know, but it's something they seem to like over there, so fair enough, Lois and I say!

above our granddaughter Josie's head - one of the

weird Scandinavian letters: an A with a little circle over the top

And this afternoon, Lois and I listen to a fascinating radio programme on the alphabet, the first in Michael Rosen's new series of "Word of Mouth" on BBC Radio 4.

Lois and I knew, vaguely, that the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were turned into a weird sort of alphabet by the Phoenicians. The Greeks saw what the Phoenicians were doing, and decided to use it too, with a few changes. And we knew also that, later, a lot of Greeks settled in Italy, bringing the alphabet to the Etruscans, who taught it to the Romans, who created the Latin alphabet, which we use today when we're writing English.

Here are the first few letters in the alphabet - you probably remember them from your schooldays, I would imagine, unless you weren't paying attention, you little scallywag!

Lois and I didn't know, or had forgotten, that the letter A comes from an Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox's head, and you can see that ox's head in the Phoenician letter, where the head has just been turned on its side, and in the subsequent Greek letter, where that "head" has now been turned upside-down.

We didn't know also, that the letter O was originally a picture of an eye, and that in one of its earliest representations, it actually had a dot in the middle, to represent the pupil. 

But weirdest of all to me, has always been the fact that the Greek alphabet starts ABG, while ours starts ABC. However, on Michael  Rosen's radio programme this afternoon, linguist Danny Bate explains that it's because the Etruscans didn't have a 'g' sound in their language, and so they used it for a 'c' or 'k' sound, which seemed to them to be similar. 

And the rest is history, with the poor old letter 'g' having to be forced in, somewhat awkwardly, at a later date.

What madness!!!!!

People tend to "write off" the Etruscans as having had little impact on the modern world, but to Lois and me, this fundamental change to the alphabet sounds like a "biggie" - call us crazy 'Etruscophiles' if you like haha!

The Etruscans were evidently "our type of guys", it seems. And I myself allow Lois "significant social freedom and status", and I shudder to think what she'd do to me if I didn't (!!!!).

And similar to typical Etruscans, Lois and I are often portrayed in pairs (male/female) also, but I often struggle to describe the smile on mine and Lois's faces, when we're absorbing an amusing Onion News story, for instance. 

I allow myself a quiet smile, as Lois reads out

an amusing Onion News story - a recent picture

However I can see now that our smiles are pretty much an Etruscan smile to a "T", to quote another letter of the alphabet (!) : that is, "sardonic and archaic", a smile which we've somehow both inherited, which is nice!

Archaic? Well we are both 79 although, unquestionably, "still marvellous for our age" haha!!!!!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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