Here's a question that will put you "on the spot". If you were me, what would you buy my wife Lois as a Valentine's Day present?
It's my annual "conundrum", and - keep this confidential, but I've half-decided this year to go for a skirt. And inspired by the excitement of our recent celebration of Burns Night (January 26th) I've decided I'll probably go for something Scottish, to go with the Scottish hat I bought her a couple of weeks ago.
flashback to last week: I buy Lois a Scottish hat for Burns Night
Here's: what I have in mind for Valentines:
I hope I've chosen the best length for the skirt - 20 inches. Look at this photo below, and, to help guide you, Lois is about 5ft 3in, and she likes her skirts sort of knee-length-ish, either exact, or a bit below. So fingers crossed!
flashback to the winter of 1969-70, Lois,
seen here when we had just started "courting"
The thing is, as Lois always tells me, it's hard to find much choice of after-shave bottles in chemists these days. So many men have opted for the "the bearded look", that the bottom has now fallen out of the aftershave market, and you're much more likely to see rows of beard-care products than aftershaves.
a typical group of bearded young "go-getters"
flashback to Victorian times: included for comparison
purposes, a bunch of bearded men of various ages
Well, we'll see next week, that's for sure! If I find she's bought me a beard-care product I'll have to take that as some kind of hint, although I think it's unlikely for me at my age - don't you?
Lois (ringed) pops into Boots to get me a Valentine's Day
present, and then makes for Specsavers, shown here "wedged in"
between Mountain Warehouse and Costa Coffee
Earwax isn't a subject you see focussed on a lot in sitcoms, is it, but by coincidence last Friday the first episode of the new series of "Here We Go" it was kind of the main subsidiary theme wasn't it, because Dad Jessop (Jim Howick) was trying to solve his major earwax problem with some do-it-yourself treatment.
But then the "Here We Go" sitcom has always been a bit of a pioneer, hasn't it. It solved the age-old mystery of how-come we can see into a family's private life and watch all their "doings", when we don't even know them.
The solution? Well, if you remember, the solution was to use footage shot by an actual family-member, Sam (Jude Collie) - either a son or one of the daughters' boyfriends, who later made some of his film sequences available to the BBC.
It's a bit old-hat now as a "modus operandi" for a family-life sitcom/documentary, but it was certainly ground-breaking in its time, wasn't it. Sometimes the video seems to go over what I consider the proper boundaries of privacy, when the footage becomes a bit too intimate, for my taste at least!
And here, it's clear that "Dad" (Jim Howick) feels the same when he realises he's being filmed in the toilet haha!
And it's interesting that Lois, who has had a similar problem to "Dad", has been self-medicating for a few days now, using the millennia-old "olive oil in the ear treatment", first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Whereas "Dad" - typical man!!!! - can't seem to manage that on his own and has had to get his own mother (Alison Steadman) to do it for him with an ear-trumpet.
Tremendous fun, though, isn't it !!!!!!
What a truly crazy world we live in !!!!
Perhaps the most superficially "questionable" parts of tonight's intimate footage, however, take place later, when "Mum" (Katherine Parkinson), who's a mature student at a local college, tries to impress her much younger fellow-students with how young-at-heart she is, by challenging a bunch of them to a traditional student drinking-game.
Of course "Mum" soon passes out, and next day "Dad" finds her sleeping it all off on the kitchen floor of the family's house. And it's when he tries to help her to her feet that the arguably "questionable" incident occurs, as something arguably unpleasant drops in a kind of blob, on "Mum"'s right shoulder.
Did you notice? You had to be quick to catch it - it was all over in a flash.
Men!!!! Honestly !!!! What would you do with us !!!!! Answers on a postcard please haha !!!!! Be gentle with us, but not TOO gentle haha !!!!!
18:00 It's not all laughs today though. Back in the real world, on the six o'clock news tonight we hear that the King has been diagnosed with cancer, and is having to take time off from his official duties while his treatment begins.
And Europe's problems with Hungary's crazy Prime Minister Viktor Orbán rumble on, as seen in this email from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend.
Look at this ridiculous picture of the Hungarian Parliament today, when MPs from the governing party Fidesz and their allies, absented themselves this morning while an important issue was due to be debated - Sweden's accession into NATO.
Fidesz stayed away from extraordinary parliamentary session on Swedish NATO membership, but US Ambassador David Pressman was there
There were almost more people in the visitor's gallery than there were on the floor of the House. A bunch of important ambassadors were there from NATO countries, including US Ambassador David Pressman. Also present were ambassadors from Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia.
And the lack of a proper quorum meant that the Speaker had to suspend the session without a vote being taken.
there were almost more people in the visitors' gallery
than on the floor of the house, including at least 6
ambassadors from NATO countries
flashback to 1994: my first ever visit to Hungary. The poster
on the left is for the Fidesz party, when they used to be "the good guys".
Showcasing the party's emblem of the orange, the slogan reads:
"If you're bored with bananas, try an orange!"
(an old Hungarian women's prison joke).
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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