Danskcolin: Wednesday March 20th 2024

There's no fool like an old fool, that's what people say, isn't it. And in the US in particular the temptations to "spend, spend, spend" after your retirement are legion. The stories come tumbling out on an almost daily basis. Here's a brief digest of one, but see Onion News for the full story:

For me, my "crisis" has so far resulted only in a passion for buying fancy new hats - I recently bought a "poncey"-looking "Medieval Renaissance Scholar" hat in a futile attempt to impress fellow-members of the local U3A "History of English", that I've recently become the de facto leader of.

I had seen the pictures in the history books, and thought it would be an ideal way to control this rowdy group of local antiquarian "old codgers" and stun them into silence during our zoom meetings.

a typical Medieval Renaissance Scholar

seen here sharpening his quill

My attempt to "buy" extra credibility with the group all ended in tears, predictably perhaps, when the feather came off my hat after some "rough-housing" with my long-suffering wife Lois, who, to her credit, had tried to persuade me not to buy the thing in the first place.

Kudos, Lois !!!

before....

.. and after....

Like Oscar Simpson in that Onion News story from the US, however, I've had the occasional brush with hospitals during my now nearly 18 years of retirement. On Monday Lois and I arrived at the Worcestershire Royal Hospital for a pre-op session ahead of my hip replacement surgery next month, only to find that the appointment had been unilaterally cancelled by the hospital for unclear reasons.

flashback to Monday: Lois and I wait to check in at

the Worcestershire Hospital pre-op clinic: picture

taken seconds before we were told the appointment had been

unilaterally cancelled by the clinic for unclear reasons

We go there again today for my rescheduled appointment. I find that I get the usual grilling on health history, then I get given blood tests and an ECG. I can see that the nurse is concerned that my pacemaker hasn't been checked since March 2023, even though hospitals only ever check them once every 12 months anyway, and I happen to know that they're running 6 months late with those 12-month checks as well.

What madness !!!!

When we get home I decide to take the initiative and ring Gloucester Royal and ask if I can have an unscheduled check there. I speak to somebody nice called Anna, and incredibly she says she can "squeeze me in" next Tuesday due to a cancellation she's just had.

flashback to March 2023 and my last check-up at

Gloucestershire Royal Hospital: Lois and me in the waiting room

with our "his and hers" animal print masks - stylish or what haha!

Back of the net! What a relief! What I didn't want was for the Queen Alexandra Hospital at Redditch to tell me they can't do the hip operation until they're sure that the pacemaker is working okay.

What madness !!!! [That's enough madness for today! - Ed]

12:00 We come home and have lunch - scrambled eggs and tomatoes on toast, seeing as you've asked [I don't think we have! - Ed] but there's no "afternoon nap" time again, for fear of putting Lois's back out like we did last time. To be on the safe side we've scheduled a 3-day so-called "cease-nap" before we get back into it again, which should give us a comfortable breathing space, to put it mildly!

20:00 We unwind for bed tonight on the couch with the third leg of ex-Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo's latest series of "Great British Railway Journeys". Incredibly there are still stretches of railway in the UK and the rest of the world that haven't been "Portillo-ed" yet, in the words of the Radio Times.

For this new 15-part series Michael will be travelling around the south of England. This is his route for the new series.

Michael's planned route for this, his 15th series

of "Great British Railway Journeys"

Tonight Michael's visiting places like Swanage and Poole, in Dorset, the county where so many of world-best-selling-children's-author Enid Blyton's adventure stories are set, including her most popular series about the "Famous Five" - 4 children and a dog.

Both Lois and I read dozens of these books growing up in the 1950's, and we have witnessed all 5 of our grandchildren still "devouring" them today - when it's now 2024, and incredibly now, a full 50 years after the authoress died.

Here's Michael arriving in Swanage:

And in a particularly interesting sequence we see Michael talking to Blyton's biographer, Andrew Maunder.

"Blyton's 2000-plus adventure stories put children into heroic roles ", Andrew says, in stories where they're typically catching a bunch of crooks up to some skulduggery or other.

"The books show children as acting independently," adds Andrew. "There aren't many adults around, and the children are allowed to go off on their own here in Dorset, and go camping and horse-riding, exploring ruined castles and catching crooks etc."

To date, 600 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide.

"Yes, but how 'woke' do the stories look today?", Michael asks Andrew.

And Blyton herself has been criticised for allegedly spending long hours in her study typing her stories, in the years when her own children were growing up. One of her daughters, for instance, has since gone on record as saying that her mother "expected the rest of the household to revolve round her career".

Best-selling children's writer Enid Blyton, seen here

typing one of her stories as her two daughters look on

Andrew, Blyton's biographer, counters this, however, by saying that if it had been the girls' father who had been doing this, it wouldn't have been regarded as anything remiss - it's just because Blyton was a woman, he says, and you can see his point.

Inevitably, Blyton's books have in recent years have been described as "racist".

Michael counters by reminding Andrew that "nobody would have thought anything of that at the time", and he recalls the context of the period when Blyton was writing her books.

Andrew agrees that Blyton's books reflected the culture of the times, although he notes that there were exceptions even back then. In 1940, the BBC was forced to apologise, apparently, when one of its announcers used the n-word on air, which suggests that the word was already widely considered to be offensive in many quarters. You might argue, therefore, that Blyton could have been a bit more careful in this department. So the jury's still out on that one.

And when Blyton's heroic children came back after their exciting days of sleuthing and crook-hunting, back home to their aunts' or uncles' cosy Dorset cottages in the evenings, Andrew notes that there was always plenty of food on the table, piles of potted-meat sandwiches and "lashings of ginger beer" and that sort of malarkey. And in an era during which much of the country's food was being rationed, Blyton in this way created a fantasy of unlimited food for children of the 1940's to drool over.

Do you remember the amusing parody versions of Blyton's "Famous Five" books that were produced by "the Comic Strip", those up-and-coming younger generation of comedians in the 1980's, including Dawn French, Jennifer Saunderson, Adrian Edmondson and Peter Richardson? Like "Five Go Mad in Dorset (1982) ?