A day of two halves: a lot of underlying tension till 1:15 pm and then an extreme lack of tension in the afternoon - oh dear!
Lois and I roll out of bed early again - we've got our appointment at 13:07 at the County Fire Station for our booster coronavirus jabs and our general winter flu jabs. That's all good, but we're wondering how the traffic will be - yesterday a 3-day race meeting started at the nearby racecourse, and the level of traffic round our house was horrendous, with backups in all directions. Will we be trapped in our home, unable to get to the Fire Station for our life-saving jabs? Shock horror!
typical crowds and traffic heading for the racecourse
So, just in case major traffic jams develop, I take the car out at 10 am and drive it a quarter of a mile away from our house. I park it in front of a block of flats on the road to the Fire Station, which will give us a good start. This is the kind of thing I do, and what I'm mainly famous for - although only locally haha!
12:30 Thankfully, however, when we drive off to the Fire Station, we find that the traffic is much lighter than yesterday for some reason. We go into the building and queue up to be jabbed. We come out again double-jabbed inside of 30 minutes, including the recommended 15 minute "sit-down" afterwards, which is nice.
we sit in the car in the lido car-park waiting to go into the Fire Station
for our COVID booster jab and our general flu jab
we take this picture after exiting the Fire Station,
after we've had our jabs
13:45 We come home. And after all that excitement in the morning, the tension suddenly evaporates and we become strangely lethargic. We go to bed, but we find we just don't want to get up again, not yet at least - so we lie there under the covers till nearly 4:30 pm.
And then after that we just sit on the sofa and watch videos on YouTube - what's happening to us?!!!!
we eventually get out of bed and drag ourselves onto the sofa -
but then we find we can't get off the sofa [archive picture from September]
Heaven knows when we're going to get around to eating dinner - what madness! And what a crazy day!!!
20:00 After a sophisticatedly "late" dinner - late for us, at about 7:15 pm (yikes!) - we settle down on the couch. We're both feeling an ache in both arms after the double-jab and a bit under par generally.
We watch an interesting study of the life and career of the film star Clark Gable.
We learn lots of things we didn't know about Gable. Who knew that, according to the talking-heads on tonight's programme, that Gable was quite a right-wing Republican? He didn't cover himself with glory during the McCarthy years apparently, according to Derek Malcom of the London Evening Standard. He didn't defend his fellow artists, and accused several of being communists. Oh dear!
How true this was, Lois and I don't know. Gable certainly seemed to get along fine with the "love of his life", Carol Lombard, who was known for her liberal views, and the couple seemed to be able to rub along together.
Gable is perhaps best known for playing Rhett Butler in "Gone for the Wind", a role he never really wanted - he himself thought it was a mediocre film, and like his friend Gary Cooper, who had already turned down the role, he thought it was going to be a flop. According to the programme tonight, Gable mostly just "sat the and smouldered", and "smiled superciliously at Scarlett" in the film - and didn't bother very much with the accent. Oh dear!
Gable's wife, film-star Carole Lombard, died in an air crash in 1942, and the grief-stricken Gable quit acting and joined the Army Air Forces, and spent most of the first year in England as an air gunner, winning an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross.
Lois and I didn't know that one of Gable's better-known fans was Adolph Hitler, who apparently said, "Capture this man, and bring him to me unharmed." What madness !!!!!
Clark Gable serving with the US Army Air Forces in England
during World War II, speaking to reporters about his job here
Gable never thought of himself as a great actor, or as anything special. And another thing you can say about him - he always looked after his crew and people generally below him on the ladder.
He was lucky in that the natural macho personality he was born with was a type of personality Hollywood very much needed at the time, together with his looks. Women are said to have gone crazy over him, and he certainly had a huge number of affairs during his lifetime. Lois has never liked him though - oh dear! Still, you can't please everybody, that's for sure!
22:00 We shamble up to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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