Danskcolin: Wednesday October 18th 2023

Oh dear! Lois and I are not achieving much today, to put it mildly.

We manage to put in a Morrisons supermarket order for delivery Friday morning, but we're not thinking straight, and it's only later that I realise that we haven't ordered anything for Halloween.

Big mistake! Luckily we can amend our order at any time up until 2:35 am on the day of delivery, which is a relief.

some of the "goodies" we add to our Morrisons order

Morrisons send me this crucial, and very comforting confirmation email

on receipt of our amended order, which is nice

For Lois and me also, October 31st 2023 will be our first real Halloween in Malvern. On paper, we took ownership of this new-build house here actually on Halloween itself last year, but initially we were staying in a local B&B, only visiting the house for short stints during the day to spend a bit of time making it minimally habitable. What crazy times they were!

So we have no idea what to expect in the way of trick-or-treaters on Halloween this year. It could be that the demand for sweets and chocolates will be fairly low here. There are only about 5 children, we think, living on this stretch of our road, and you'd be crazy to let your kids wander at large around this still-being-built housing estate at night with its poor lighting, and with all the unfinished pavements and poorly positioned traffic cones etc.

It would be total madness, as well as a total dereliction of parental duties, wouldn't it. Go on, admit it !!!

a typical scene as viewed from our bedroom window

- Persimmon's men ripping up the pavements again.

What a madness it all is !!!!!

At least Lois gets her narcissi planted before the rain starts. And after that, the afternoon proves to be non-stop rain, and the prospects for the evening don't look much better.

What a crazy country we live in !!!!

For our daughter Sarah, it'll be her first Halloween here since she and Francis and their 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica, moved back to the UK in May this year, after 7 years in Australia.

So, like us, Sarah doesn't know quite what to expect in the way of trick-or-treaters at the family's rental home in Alcester, which they moved into a couple of months ago. And she's not sure, either, what to expect when she turns up at her office in the accountancy agency at Evesham where she's got a job as a chartered accountant.

I do a bit of research for her online about Halloween work etiquette in Evesham, and I turn up a few clues from the local Worcestershire News section of Onion News for October 2013 - a bit ancient history perhaps, but it all helps to give pointers, doesn't it.

EVESHAM, Worcestershire —Praising his Halloween costume as “extremely realistic,” employees at local software firm Sterling Data Analytics confirmed Thursday that boss Donald Barlow has come into the office dressed as a guy who’s firing Sean.

"Wow, he absolutely nailed it,” marketing associate Susan Dominguez told reporters, adding that Barlow’s depiction of a stern middle manager who, due to Sean’s recent performance issues, is forced to lay him off is “absolutely perfect.”

“He’s got a suit on and this really serious look on his face just like a man who’s about to explain to Sean that his position has been terminated, effective immediately, and that he needs to clean out his desk and turn in his key-card. Very authentic. And it looks like he just called Sean into his office, too. Man, he’s really selling it.”

At press time, Sterling employees were similarly impressed by Sean’s decision to dress up as a weeping man who had just lost his livelihood.

Certainly, a degree of imaginative approach in the workplace tends in general to be good for morale, rather than the opposite. I personally think there should be more fun, not less fun, in work situations, and that productivity at Sterling Data will probably only rise as the result, I think, especially among Sean's former work-colleagues.

But what do YOU think? Answers on a postcard please!

19:00 After dinner Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch the latest programme in the series "Moulin Rouge: Yes We Can-Can!" on BBC2.

This is proving to be a fascinating series. Lois and I had no idea that the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Paris employs mainly dancers from the UK, Canada and Australia, and that the choreographers and artistic directors are mainly Brits too. Apparently the French dancers left the club in droves during the pandemic lockdowns, and went home to the provinces. And they've never returned.

Tonight the mainly Brit dancers and choreographers are preparing to do a show for French TV on New Year's Eve 2022-3, and, if their performance is a hit, it will mean extra ticket sales at the Moulin Rouge itself the following year, so there's a lot riding on it.

They've planned a big "pirate-theme" routine for the show, for which they've got the costumes from old shows in Paris, but the skirts are starting to look a bit the worse for wear, to put it mildly.

Also, the old pirate costumes were designed to be worn topless for nightclub audiences, so the biggest headache in the costumier's department will be knocking up something to cover up the women up top, so that they can appear on early evening TV over there.

The dancers are also going to be doing the New Year's Eve TV show not from the Moulin Rouge, but from a French chateau, where the logistics of getting the women on and off the stage looks like it's going to be a health-and-safety nightmare: only one exit and entrance at the top of a flight of wooden stairs, and over a dressing-room floor littered with flashing LED screens and wiring all over the place.

What utter utter utter madness - or "Quelle folie!" as the French say.

A lot of the women are already injured from kicking their legs up too high in the rehearsals. Let's hope the whole troupe are not all going to go back to the UK on stretchers after this TV show.

My goodness !!!

20:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. When she emerges, we wind down on the sofa with the final programme in the Sky History channel's fascinating new series, "Sex: A Bonkers History", presented by Amanda Holden and TV historian Dan Jones.

This episode deals with the 20th century, a century which Lois and I tend to think is synonymous with "now" or "the present", but of course that's out of date now, isn't it haha! [And time for you and Lois to sharpen your ideas up a bit, I think! - Ed]

Well, we should have guessed this in advance, but of course Lois and I, as certified baby-boomers, born in 1946, know most of tonight's stuff already. The big thing, of course, was the advent of the contraceptive pill in the late 1950's: at first the NHS prescribed it only for married women, but starting with efforts by GPs on college campuses, it was quickly extended for use by any woman, married or not.

Lois and I were a bit surprised that no mention was made of the Lady Chatterley case [Shome mishtake, shurely?!!!!], when, in 1960, a jury, after just 3 hours' deliberation, found Penguin Books not guilty of obscenity for publishing this DH Lawrence novel: a decision which opened the floodgates for more of the same in books and films.

However, we were interested to hear something new to us, all about Jane, the saucy cartoon heroine, whose adventures in the Daily Mirror apparently kept the troops' morale up during World War II.

Simpler days haha !!!!

Unlike the Moulin Rouge dancers, however, Jane wasn't allowed to appear topless, until a special Victory edition of the newspaper, in May 1945, finally gave the men a little glimpse of what they'd been missing.

Poor men !!!!

And Lois and I love the war-weary, but excited, women's cries of "Tee hee!!!!" as they rush to grab Jane's hand-outs in the street, advertising "Jane's Gym" - definite echoes there seen later in the "tee-hees" of 1950's children's comics like Beano and Dandy, we feel - the comics Lois and I both remember with affection from our childhoods in those crazy, far-off days.