09:45 I drive Lois a mile down the main road to Barnard's Green for her haircut with Rachel at the Divine Salon (slogan: "it's just the name of the salon, dear!"). Today I decide to just sit in the car in the carpark and listen to the car-radio while Lois "gets done" by Rachel, and when she comes out, I get her to pose for this selfie before we drive home again. Capture the moment, that's what I always say!
Lois says she asked Rachel to cut it short today "in case the warm weather returns". Uh oh - if I were superstitious I'd say "Goodbye summer!" on the basis of past experience - oh dear! Luckily, however, I'm not superstitious so who knows? Well, we'll see!
in the car-park Lois showcases her new short hair
after her latest appointment with Rachel.
flashback to May: Rachel cutting Lois's hair
during her last appointment
Last time I actually went into the hair-salon with Lois and sat with her in the waiting-area, which is just a few feet away from Rachel's booth, while Rachel finished the previous woman off. It was all a bit embarrassing, however, because Lois and I could hear the two women's intimate chit-chat. Let's hope that nothing like that happens today, but there's always a slight risk isn't there.
flashback to May: Lois and me, sitting in the Divine Hair Salon's
"waiting-area", becoming increasingly embarrassed
by Rachel's intimate chit-chat with another customer
Did you happen to see that story on the Onion News local news website just the other day, about local woman Carrie Vance's awful experience in her hair-stylist's waiting-area?
CHELTENHAM —Increasingly confused and embittered after
noticing several eerie similarities over the course of their chit-chat, local
woman Carrie Vance reportedly felt a twinge of betrayal Friday while sitting in
the waiting room of her local salon and watching her hairdresser make small
talk with another customer.
“What the hell? I thought we had something special,” said
Vance, looking on in horror as she overheard her hair stylist asking the other
woman about her job and the weather just as the two of them had discussed at
their first appointment three months earlier. “Now she’s asking her where she’s
originally from? Wow, this sort of stings. We had such a nice conversation
during my last haircut—I really thought she was opening up to me—and now it’s
clear it was all an act. God, I feel like such an idiot.”
At press time, Vance reported feeling “completely devastated”
after her hairdresser began their follow-up appointment by repeating the exact
same small-talk as when they first met.
Yikes! Luckily this didn't happen again today, Lois reports afterwards, which is a bit of a relief, to put it mildly! We didn't think that that other woman was right for Rachel anyway - and we really should have said something at the time.
Lois tells me that the salon has some special offers this month on hair extensions, with several leaflets like the one shown below, lying around in the waiting area for customers to pick up and take away.
Lois stresses, however, that she wasn't even thinking about having extensions, especially now, when she had just had her hair shortened - it would be a bit self-defeating wouldn't it, she says, and I have to agree with her.
Do you remember those 11 so-called "wild women" in Tennessee, USA, who were recently rehabilitated and eventually released back into civilised society? When they were first captured by zoologists, the brightness of their so-called "hair extension plumage" was one of the prime indicators that these were indeed "wild women", along with other tell-tale signs: the torn tank-tops, the threadbare Daisy Duke-style cut-off shorts, and the bright orange skin with patterned lower-back markings.
You must remember the story, surely? It was in all the papers at the time, but the news was broken first by the influential Onion News:
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, TX—In
what wildlife-style reformation volunteers are calling a "positive
step," the first group of rehabilitated Girls Gone Wild were released back
into the civilized world Monday, and early signs indicate that they are
adjusting smoothly, according to the director of the group responsible for
their rescue.
"At first, the girls
were disoriented," said Janet Ottley, director of the South Padre Island
Wild Life Rescue Foundation. "They were frightened by the absence of
familiar comforts such as overt male attention, binge drinking, and camcorders.
But over time, we've seen improvement: so far, no reports of nipple exposure,
so we're very hopeful."
The 11 girls were captured nearly one month ago during
their annual spring migration to the area and then put through an intensive
rehabilitation program. "They have come a very long way," Ottley
said. "When we first brought them into our clinic, they could barely
function beyond baring their breasts, and they communicated solely through
loud, sustained hoots."
As their subspecies does every year, the Girls Gone Wild,
roaming in packs, flocked to bars and clubs during the spring break migratory
season. Lured by drink specials, promotional merchandise, and the chance to
"go wild," they were discovered at Señor Chug Chug's, a nightspot
where the girls gathered to perform a pre-mating ritual in which brief nudity
is exchanged for Jell-O shots and Smirnoff Ice trucker hats.
[That's enough silly hair news! - Ed]
10:30 Lois leaves Divine's and crosses the road to the car-park where I'm waiting.
11:00 Apart from that little excursion this morning, it's a pretty quiet day today - we'll be going away to stay at our daughter Alison and family later in the month, so we do a few admin tasks to do with that - cancelling milk, making arrangements for our car's servicing at the Honda dealer in Worcester tomorrow, plus regularizing our new local dental surgery, with the new monthly payments etc.
We moved to Malvern from Cheltenham only 6 months ago, and we kept our old dentist in Cheltenham on for a few months: a distance of 25 miles isn't a big deal. But eventually we thought, "Why travel 25 miles when there's a dentist just a mile away down the main road?" See - makes sense to us anyway! Call us "autophobes" or "un-petrol-heads" if you like haha! [I'm not going to do that - "un-petrol-heads" isn't a proper word, and "autophobe" means something quite different! - Ed]
Well, all these things have just got to be done, haven't they!
14:00 I go upstairs for our usual nap. And downstairs Lois spends a lot of the afternoon ironing the clothes she wants to take with her, before eventually coming up.
Meanwhile I've been under the covers browsing the quora forum website. I'm pleased to see that one of our favourite pundits, Willy Lupus (crazy name, crazy guy!) has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "Why do I get a strange feeling when visiting Sweden? It's a very nice country with very nice people, but something's just off about it".
Pundit Willy, who "claims" to have studied at Northern Alberta Institute of Technology [Why would you claim that, if it wasn't true! - Ed], says he knows what the question-poser means.
He says, "If you get out of some of the bigger centres like Malmø especially. The country is almost TOO manicured. It completely lacks that sort of
edginess that you find anywhere else. Even in rural areas. In most western
countries, even rural places have a tractor that has been kind of parked off a
little haphazardly, or some other kind of farm equipment that looks weathered
or placed without much thought. Not in Sweden."
And Lois and I know what Willy means, even though we've only ever spent one day in Sweden, with our daughter Ali, husband Ed and their 3 children, and that day was spent entirely in the little town of Lund, near Malmø, back on Boxing Day, December 2016: brrrrr !!!! Ed had driven us there over the bridge from Copenhagen, where the family were living between 2012 and 2018.
Lund is an old town, but there was no litter or graffiti to be seen in the streets, and the snow had been gathered up neatly in the middle of the town square, so that the pavements were all safe to walk on, and the snow was all in one place - nice touch!
flashback to December 2016: Lois and I visit Lund, near Malmø, Sweden
with our daughter Ali, husband Ed and their 3 children
And quora pundit Willy adds: Swedes
are very structured. You can go to a popular beach destination on the last
weekend of August. It will be 26 degrees, the place is packed, ice cream
vendors will be selling their wares. People will be splashing and enjoying the
weather. You will go back to the same beach on the second weekend of September,
also 26 degrees. The place will be a ghost town, ice cream vendors boarded up
for the season because for Swedes “summer is officially over".
One thing I read about Sweden that particularly impressed me was the fact that, in supermarkets, shoppers are expected to position their items on the check-out conveyor belt in such a way that the bar-code is immediately visible to the checkout person.
"What a good idea!", I thought, and one which would greatly speed up the check-out process. And I started doing that myself here in England for a year or two, but I think I gradually started to forget and just began dumping our items down haphazardly again. Probably there's an age factor here - shopping gets harder as you get older, doesn't it, and it's a big enough achievement just to get the right stuff off the shelves and into your trolley, and not forgetting anything, isn't it! [You won't get any sympathy from me, Colin, you lazy bastard!!! - Ed]
And I think we get more selfish as we get older, don't we. One thing I try to ensure when I'm pushing the trolley round a supermarket is that the heavier items go in the front of the trolley, and the lighter ones go towards the back. When we get to the checkout, it's Lois's job to put the stuff in our bags, and my job to load the full bags into the trolley again and also pay. It helps if the heavy items go into the bags first, so they don't squash the lighter ones - makes a lot of sense suddenly, doesn't it!
But Sweden - "Great country!" Lois and I said, back then in Lund in 2016.
And even in 1938-9 it was already a great place. I checked the description written about Sweden in the stamp album our son-in-law Francis has lent me - the one his father Frank used to stick foreign stamps in when he used to collect them as a young lad.
What about King Gustaf, though. Still playing tennis under the pseudonym of "Mr G", when in his 80's, back in 1938-9.
flashback to May 25th 1938, King Gustaf V of Sweden,
alias "Mr. G", playing tennis in his 80's
What a guy, on the tennis courts at least. Anywhere else, not so much. He was the one with the pro-German sympathies, remember.
19:45 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. When she emerges, we wind down for bed with an old episode of the classic 1950's sitcom "Hancock's Half Hour", starring comedian Tony Hancock and his sidekick Sid James, broadcast earlier this evening on BBC4.
In this scene the chronically pretentious Hancock, attired in his "artist's cravat" and "Noel Coward dressing-gown", is trying to take a "character study" photograph of his dodgy friend Sid, "him of the craggy features", using an antique camera from the early 1900's.
Sid, however, gets fed up with the long exposure-times that Hancock demands - 5 minutes a pop - and he impatiently demands that Hancock stop messing about and "get on with it".
You must remember this episode! Go on, admit it!
Hancock then tells Sid that he's something a bit a cut above your regular jobbing professional photographer, you know, the types who in the 1950's used to spend August going up and down the promenades of seaside towns, taking random pictures of holiday-makers and giving them tickets to collect the developed photos when they were next passing his shop.
You know, you must remember those days, surely haha!!!!
Enough said haha!
And do you remember when I got "snapped" by one of those jobbing photographers when I was 9 years old, sitting in the North Sea - just the shallow bit near the beach haha - with my father, my sister Kathy and my brother Steve? You must do - I've bragged about it often enough haha!
[That's enough hahas! - Ed]
Photo X54168: flashback to August 1955: (left to right)
my sister Kathy (7), my brother Steve (3), my father (41)
and me (9), in a shallow bit of the North Sea at Broadstairs, Kent
Happy days !!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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