Danskcolin: Thursday May 30th 2024 "What's your favourite Hungarian joke? Answers on a postcard please, and be quick about it, if you can!"

Have you ever, dear reader, had the experience of your mind literally going round in circles trying to find "that perfect sentence", whether it's to start a speech, or just to start a conversation with a stranger you maybe find yourself mysteriously attracted to?

Like this local woman from Nob End, a village only a few miles away from where Lois and I live, in Malvern.

It sounds as though the cute guy was already interested, and that Vivian never had to make her "perfect opening line" to her "approach" to the cute guy in the "back end" of her costume, but let's wish the two of them all the best for their future relationship, as they maybe "take things to the next level", as people say nowadays!

I'm not so lucky as Vivian - what I'm having to "draft" today is more than a "pick up line": it's a whole presentation that I've got to give our local U3A History of English group a week tomorrow, on zoom, so in other words, only 8 days away now - yikes !!!!

flashback to 2022: me, waiting nervously with a previous talk of mine,

prepared and printed out on notes lying on the keyboard in front of me,

as I wait for a zoom meeting of our local U3A group to start

"What's the subject of your talk going to be this time, Colin?", I hear you cry! [Not me! - Ed]

Well, it's the little matter of "The Hungarian Language: its past, present and future, its long journey from the Ural Mountains to the Carpathian Basin in the heart of Europe; the ways in which it differs from English and other European languages, and the main points of its rules of pronunciation, grammar, and syntax".

So far, I've got my title and also a nice picture showing the Hungarians on their long journey to Hungary from the Ural Mountains in Russia:

The subject is quite a complex one and my talk may take about 8 hours in all, conceivably (!), but I haven't written any of it yet, which is what's worrying me today. I haven't even got my opening sentence yet, which is becoming a concern to put it mildly.

"Always start with a joke" - that's what the advice the pundits usually give, but who knows a joke that's relevant to my topic? I've got this one, from the Pope, but it's hardly a "doozy" is it, to put it mildly!

Answers on a postcard please, and I want those jokes by this weekend if you possibly can haha!

14:00 Yes, today, I need jokes urgently and I try to "pump" Lois when we get into bed for naptime this afternoon, but there are other things to occupy us: Lois's Huawei won't stop beeping, for a start, and my Samsung is "diddling" like crazy!

And the great thing is that we can be nosy neighbours with even having to move: our bed is perfectly placed to monitor our neighbours and the builders, and spot any suspicious activities.

the view from our bed

This is a new-build housing estate, and either our neighbours, or the builders, are always up to something - this afternoon Angela, next door but one, is getting delivery, from the builders, of a suspicious package in a large cardboard box. I try to read the writing on the box, but it's too small, so I take a quick photo and blow it up with my fingers: it's a fireplace "surround".

my photo of our neighbour Angela's suspicious

delivery, as "blown up" by my fingers

Funny... what does Angela want with a fireplace surround? [Just planning to have an electric fire installed, shurely, I expect it's cheaper to buy them in the summer - haven't you two noggins thought of that? - Ed]

And apart from our both being "nosy neighbours", Lois is also monitoring the progress of Donald Trump's trial in New York on the BBC - I think the jury's still out at the moment - literally, but later we hear that they've found him guilty on all counts.

But what happens next? Will there be years of appeals, like in a lot of US trials, it always seems.

Lois says that even if Trump goes to prison, that doesn't stop him standing for the presidency or even being president. Is that true? I think we should be told don't you!

21:00 We go to bed on another programme in the "War Walks" series, in which historian Richard Holmes "walks" or more often "rides (on horseback)" the battlefields of the world, and tries to explain how these sometimes game-changing encounters changed world history in one way or another.

The Battle of Naseby in the English Civil War, really spelt the end of our monarchy, under Charles I, and heralded the beginning of our short "flirtation" with the idea of being a republic, but I expect you know all that!

It was quite a complicated old battle between the King's forces and Parliament's forces, the so-called "New Model" Army, with lots of phases and lots of "fortunes ebbing and flowing" throughout the day, but in the end the King's forces came out clear losers, and the King was soon on the road to the scaffold.

What strikes Lois and me the most was how indecisive the King was. Was this because he was already becoming aware that "the game was up" for the monarchy, for a period at least?

Before the battle even began, and throughout the battle itself, the King's advisors, including his nephew Prince Rupert and the King's senior officer Lord Digby, were coming up with one suggestion after another to try and stem the tide of the increasingly likely-looking victory of the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell and his "New Model" Army.

The King, however, just kept saying, "Well, let me think about that a second, will you!"

What madness !!!!!

[You can talk, Colin! I can just hear you saying, "Let me think about that for a second, will you?". even on the scaffold, when the executioner was already getting his axe ready! - Ed]

Fascinating stuff, though, isn't it!

And very nostalgic for Lois and me, because we visited the battlefield ourselves, back in 2007, when we'd been retired for about a year.