Wednesday February 22nd 2023

The dreaded day dawns - the day of my dentist appointment, during which I'm expecting to have two loose teeth taken out. 

10:45 I drive Lois and myself from our new home in Malvern to Cheltenham, the town where we lived until October 31st. We still don't have a dentist in Malvern yet. Lois is fully expecting to have to drive us back afterwards, on the assumption that I may not feel up to it. 

Poor Lois !!!!

In the event, the appointment today isn't that terrible, to my great relief. I didn't realise that my dentist was only going to do a scan of my teeth today - and it's a scan which he does digitally, which is a nice surprise! He uses a kind of white probe-thingy. And when he's finished he presses a button and sends the scan off electronically to the "lab". 

Isn't modern technology wonderful ?!!!!!

a typical dentist giving a patient's mouth a digital scan:

see how much fun she's having haha!!!

My dentist warns me, however, that the lab guys may reject the scan as not clear enough to meet their requirements, in which case he'll be calling me back for an "analogue scan", which doesn't sound very nice at all, in my book! 

Call me a wimp if you like haha!!!

And the bad news is this: the really horrible appointment is still to come - not till next month luckily, but come it will, that's for sure!

Yikes !!!!! And double yikes !!!!!!!

14:00 I check the news, using as my primary source Onion News, the influential American news website.

At last somebody has confirmed my long-held opinion, often rubbished by my friends, that you can tell when dogs in movies aren't really talking. 

LA GRANGE, IL—Demonstrating his extensive knowledge of the film industry, astute moviegoer Xavier Hoffman was reportedly able to discern Wednesday that the dog on screen was not really talking. 

“It may look real to the untrained eye, but if you look very closely, you’ll notice that they’re lips aren’t actually moving,” said Hoffman, who pointed out that although the golden retriever’s head occasionally jerked to and fro as the character addressed the others on screen, for the most part, the dog actor’s mostly panting mouth did not line up with the dialogue of the film. 

“Yep, that’s fake. Back in the day, Hollywood used to use real talking dogs all the time, but I guess they’re too cheap and just cut corners now. I only know because I watch so many movies. Another trick you can use is to look up the credits. I’ll give it to them though, they almost had me. That said, the cat is actually talking.” At press time, Hoffman added that at the very least, the filmmakers were using lip-synching.

Hurrah at last! I've been telling people this for ages, but most people just scoff - it's total madness!!!!

16:00 An email has come in from Tünde, my penfriend in Hungary. It seems that the country's crazy Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has been cosying up to a priest, James Blount, who's been practising exorcism for 40 years. Blount on a visit to Budapest gave a speech the last week in St Stephen's Basilica before meeting the Prime Minister in his official residence.

Later the two men posed for a photo.

Father James Blount, "the exorcist priest" (left), with

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

The email begs this question: If Blount is so good at casting out devils from people's souls, couldn't he have a go at casting out Orbán from Hungary? 

It's worth a try, isn't it, surely ?????!!!!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa with a programme in the series "The Secret Life of the Forest" on Channel 5.

Who knew that Viper's Bugloss flowers (crazy name, crazy plants!) tend to attract mate-seeking bees, because the flowers look as if they've got a female bee sitting on them? 

But Lois and I can't help thinking "Poor male bees !!!!!". And also, "How would that sort of system work with people?". I think we should be told, and quickly!

And who knew that northern hairy wood ants make their nests out of piles of twigs, where thousands of them live together. Cosy! They're almost all females, because the males don't live much longer than it takes them to mate. When searching for food, they just find some aphids to tickle, and the tickling makes the aphids release drops of honeydew - a wood ant's favourite meal. And in return for this ready source of food, the wood ants "protect" the aphids, which is generous.

But what a crazy planet we live on !!!!!

a typical wood ant tickling a bunch of aphids, so that they release their honeydew:

"Tee-hee!", we hear them cry!!!!  Luckily they're quite ticklish anyway, which is nice!

21:00 We go to bed on an interesting programme about the Festival of Britain, which took place in 1951, on the hundredth anniversary of the original event in Victorian times.

This period fascinates Lois and me We were both "baby boomers", born in 1946 into the Britain of the post-war austerity years and the first Labour Government, but of course we just accepted our surroundings as what normal life must be, and we don't remember much about them anyway. We often wonder about the trials and tribulations of life that our parents must have gone through, unknown to us.

flashback to 1948: me and my baby sister Kathy, with my father,

outside our home in Dover

1948: Lois sitting on a bale of hay in the Oxfordshire countryside

1948: me on my 2nd birthday, with Kathy and our mother

1950

It's ironic that the Festival was designed to bring a bit of brightness and hope for a future of new designs and new technology into the drab lives that people had been leading, among all the rationing and uncleared bomb-sites from the war etc. However, as soon as the Conservatives were returned to power in 1951, they closed the festival down - they had never been big fans of the idea, and thought it was a waste of money. But to be reasonable to them, they did then work to end rationing and brighten up people's lives in other ways, e.g. starting up ITV etc, so fair enough!

For us, the most touching and heart-warming scenes in this documentary were the mass open-air dancing - just conventional ballroom-hold dancing, that took place in the summer evenings at the Festival of Britain on the south bank of the Thames : couples just revelled in the friendly atmosphere and the chance to dance and have fun after all the greyness and bleakness of wartime and post-war Britain. 

Go for it, couples!!!!

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