Monday May 6th 2024 - "Don't you just feel for Donald Trump?"

10:00 A good start to the day. Here I am, sitting at the laptop, pretending to my wife Lois that I'm working on the so-called "presentation" that I'm due to be making next month to our local U3A History of English group on some incredibly obscure linguistic so-called "issue", when ping! - there's a welcome distraction, which is nice! 

 

not even dressed yet, I find myself already sitting at the laptop

in the kitchen, working on another of my incredibly obscure 

so-called "presentations" on the history of the English language

Ping! Yes, and hey presto, I can put aside my so-called "presentation" because the "ping" is signalling to me that there's an email come in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, containing another of the series of amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors for us on a weekly basis from the Internet.

Yes, Trump's legal battles, my goodness! Have you ever thought how difficult it must be even for Trump's lawyers, let alone Trump himself, to keep track of it all. How does Trump remain motivated, or  awake even, during those long sessions he has to sit through in that New York courtroom?

I think we all saw that report about him Thursday last week on Onion News, suggesting that Trump was allegedly watching a movie at full volume on his iPad in the courtroom, effectively drowning out not just witnesses' testimonies, but also the judge's disruptive use of his precious "gavel".

I want to stress that this report, while being highly amusing, isn't exactly true, however - much as we'd maybe chuckle if it were! It comes from the Onion News website's daily "spoof column". Stories in this section are deliberate fictions, clearly labelled as such, and they're merely a light-hearted way to put a smile on readers' faces as they contemplate their dreary commute to work in the morning.

And yes, I think we all had a jolly good laugh at that "spoof" Trump story last Thursday, and some of us may even have brought it up, just jokingly, at the office water-cooler later that day. It's all just a bit of fun, isn't it, and no real harm done.

But there's a serious point here too, isn't there. How does Trump stay focussed, and at the same time look like he means business? I read somewhere that he sometimes brings into the courtroom a pile of papers under his arm, - papers that some observers suspect may be just some totally random prints that he picked up off somebody's desk before walking to his seat. 

Well, we'll see. And perhaps we should be told. I wonder.....!!!!

But before we pass on to other things, let's not forget the other side of this Venn diagram: the password variations. They're a complete nightmare, aren't they.

I personally keep all my website passwords in a little book - I'm not going to tell you what colour the cover is, just in case you're a burglar. However, even if you were to steal it, I've got to warn you that the number of crazy pages where dozens of passwords have been crossed out and replaced by others makes the book practically unusable - even by me, which is a bit of a madness isn't it !!!!

Here, locally in Worcestershire, England, local geek and whizz-kid Larry Winters has been making a bit of a name for himself with his slick use of this new internet "craze" that's now sweeping the Western world, and his enthusiastic endorsement of some of the latest state-of-the-art search-engines like "Altavista", and others, that nobody else in this area has even heard of yet - until now, that is! 

And now everybody wants to find out where you can "download" it from - my goodness!

But now I'd like your input here, dear Reader. 

Where's all this internet-mania going to end, do you think? Today, it's just Bisquick packets that are looking a bit tired and "last year". But where will it end? Phone books, yellow pages, newspapers, tourist guides, encyclopaedias - where will we be if all these are put on the rubbish-heap of history? It's a serious point isn't it, and it needs answering, no doubt about that!

Get on those postcards in the mail to me, and send me your "take" on this hot issue. You know you want to haha!

21:00 Lois and I see an extraordinary documentary tonight on a big story from the 1980's, one  that we'd both half-forgotten. It's all about one of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet ministers Cecil Parkinson, and the scandal that sort-of took its time but eventually slowly "erupted" - if stories can erupt slowly - after it was revealed n 1983 that Parkinson had got his secretary, Sara Keays, pregnant after a 12-year long secret affair that nobody had known about.

The revelation of Parkinson's affair and his secretary's pregnancy came after Maggie Thatcher's landslide election victory over Labour and its left-wing leader Michael Foot, which Thatcher achieved on the back of the Falkland War success story, and with the economy 'coming out of recession faster than in France and Germany', according to the ministers of the time. 

the BBC announces Maggie Thatcher's landslide

Conservative Party victory in the 1983 General Election

Maggie Thatcher, with husband Denis, and Party Chairman 

Cecil Parkinson acknowledge the cheers of their supporters 

from a window at 10, Downing Street on Election night

And the Cecil Parkinson "love-child" scandal eventually broke, embarrassingly, later in the year, on the eve of the Conservative Party's 1983 Annual Party Conference in Blackpool. And it all tended to overshadow what had been predicted to be two weeks of self-congratulation and triumphalism by Thatcher, her ministers and MPs, not to mention all the party faithful, gathered at the seaside town's Imperial Hotel for their annual "junket".

Oh dear!

flashback to 1983: ITV current affairs pundit Brian Walden

- remember him? - introduces a discussion of the Cecil Parkinson scandal

We hear tonight how badly Cecil Parkinson  behaved all along, both to his wife Ann, and to Sara, his secretary and mistress, and how he refused to answer any press questions about the affair, and also refused even to see his handicapped "love-child" Flora ever - he finally died in 2016 without ever having met her. 

And yet, in those far-off, crazy days, there were plenty of people, from Maggie Thatcher down, in the Conservative Party and even in the press, who were willing to look sympathetically on Parkinson. Of course, it's well-known that Maggie always had an eye for handsome, charming young men, which Parkinson certainly was.

I don't think that would happen today, but in those days, both the House of Commons, and the press in Fleet Street were very much, for the most part, "boys only" clubs. There were only 23 female MPs in the House of Commons in 1983,  compared to 226 today.

1983: Cecil Parkinson with Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher

And how extraordinary that Parkinson even managed to get a misguided "gagging order" injunction from a judge, on highly spurious grounds, prohibiting anybody from making even a mention in public of Flora, his love-child, until she came of age. This injunction was ostensibly intended to protect Flora, but is widely believed to have been mainly intended to save Parkinson himself from any public embarrassment.

Channel 5 had assembled an impressive array of talking heads onto the documentary to talk about the issue - former Cabinet ministers like Kenneth Baker, MPs like Matthew Parris and Edwina Currie, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, plus Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, whose satirical magazine Private Eye was the first to break the story. 

How young they all looked in 1983! And how old they look today, in 2024, appearing in this TV programme ! Still it happens to the best of us doesn't it!

[Especially to you, Colin! - Ed] [I resent that remark! - Colin]

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