10:00 The Brussels sprouts have arrived in time for the holidays - hurrah! We sent back the single, individual sprout that Sainsbury's delivered earlier this week, and armed with the 3p refund, we ordered 2 lbs of sprouts yesterday from Budgens, the convenience store in the village. So we won't be "sproutless" for the holidays after all, which is something of a relief!
Budgens have two volunteer delivery men, and also 2 assistants who process orders from elderly residents, Jo and her sister Lisa, every Friday/Saturday. We pay a £2 delivery charge each week, but we sometimes wonder if this is enough to express our gratitude. So Lois had the idea of including an order for 4 big tins of Quality Street chocolates in our groceries for this week, and inviting each of these 4 guys to hold back one of these boxes each, as our Christmas tip to them. Lois is so kind-hearted - if only I could be more like her!
Novák has praised women's
abilities to "bear the burdens of others," and encouraged female
viewers to "dare to take responsible decisions," "not give up
our privileges in a misinterpreted struggle for emancipation,” and to
experience "the beauty and opportunities that arise from the harmony of
differences between men and women." (At this point a sick-making video apparently depicts a man
handing an item to a woman from a tall supermarket shelf that she cannot reach - my god!!!!)
"We should be glad we were born women,
that we can give life, and that we were given the beauty of love and caring for
others," Novák said.
I tell Lois this, because she is highly critical of sexism and the gender pay gap in the UK, and she comments that Hungary under Orbán at least has the virtue of making the UK look good for a change.
What a crazy world we live in !!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, an interesting documentary on the making of the iconic Christmas song, "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues.
Nostalgic to watch, and we learn lots of things we didn't know about the Pogues. They came to fame as an "Irish" punk/folk group in the 1970's and 1980's, but really only the lead singer, Sean MacGowan, was Irish, and even he had spent most of his life in England. His accent - a mixture of Dublin and London - actually makes him sound like a Bristolian, which is weird. Is Bristol halfway between Dublin and London? [No! - Ed]
And Sean laughs like Bert from "Bert and Ernie" out of Sesame Street: what madness!!!!
The group spent a few years honing the song, and trying to get it to sound right. By the time they got to recording it they had lost their female band-member Cait O'Riordan, who was supposed to sing the female part of the song. So they drafted in English folk-country singer Kirsty MacColl, mainly because she was married to the record producer Steve Lillywhite.
The record was finally released for the 1987 Christmas market. I had forgotten (although Lois remembers - what a woman!), that the 1980's were not a good time economically for the Irish Republic, and around 100,000 Irish young people moved to the States during the decade. As a result the record's underlying theme of Irish immigrants arriving in New York had become very resonant again.
The video features the New York Police Department's Pipe Band's bagpipe players, supposedly mouthing the lyrics to the Irish folk song Galway Bay. But the producers found out that the band members didn't know the words to that song, or to any other Irish song, so instead they got them to mouth the lyrics to the M.I.C.K.E.Y M.O.U.S.E song, which they all knew - what madness!!!!
It's also nice to hear the proper lyrics. I read somewhere that BBC radio channels have been bowdlerizing the lyrics this Christmas to remove "faggot" and "slut" etc. As far as I know, however, no other broadcaster has followed suit - and certainly it's being shown "as is" on the "Now Christmas" cable-channel that we switch to if there isn't anything else on.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
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