The day of the Eurovision Song Contest draws nigh. It's to be held this coming Saturday night in Malmø, Sweden, which is just over the Øresund Bridge from Copenhagen.
Lois and I are sure that our daughter Alison and her husband Ed, now in their late 40's, will be watching the Contest - it'll be very nostalgic for them, because they were living in Copenhagen for 6 years or so, from 2012 to 2018, and they often drove over the famous bridge to Malmø, and on to nearby Lund with its nice cathedral - they even took Lois and me over there once, in December 2016.
flashback to Boxing Day 2016: Lois and I visit Lund, Sweden,
with our daughter Alison, son-in-law Ed, and their 3 children
Happy days !!!!
And in May 2014 Ali and Ed attended the Eurovision Song Contest in person, in the B/W Hallerne, Copenhagen, both waving their Union Jacks - exactly 10 years ago this month. Ed's even wearing "the t-shirt". And how young they both look, don't they, in these pictures - my goodness, yes!
Eurovision Song Contest finals in Copenhagen
Ali (left) meets Molly (centre) the singer of the UK entry,
which sadly was only placed 17th out of 26 - poor Molly !!!!!!
The Eurovision final that Lois and I remember best - and not in a good way - was in 2006. We had just retired a couple of months previously and we were on an extended holiday to Hungary, Austria and Belgium. We were staying at the Baross Hotel in Budapest on the night of the Eurovision finals (May 20th), and unfortunately 3 Finnish girls were in the adjoining room, watching the contest and partying through the night.
Those Finnish girls were really whooping it up because the Finnish entry came out the winners that year - I think that 2006 was the first (and maybe only?) time that Finland has ever won the contest. We complained to the hotel management about the noise the girls were making, but I don't think much was done about it - what a madness that was !!!!!
Finnish group Lordi winning the Eurovision Song Contest
in May 2006 in Athens - what madness !!!!
the Baross Hotel, Budapest, built round a courtyard in
Central European style, where Lois and I were staying in May 2006,
also featured: the bed where we didn't get much sleep - what madness !!!!!!
Lois and I aren't big fans of the Eurovision Song Contest these days, to put it mildly - we used to like it in the 1950's and 1960's when they had proper songs with nice words sung in the contestants' own languages. Not like today when a lot of the songs are totally overshadowed by the singers' crazy antics on stage, and all the so-called "songs" are in English.
What's the point of that then, eh?
We used to notice how for decades the UK entry rarely got appreciative marks from the continental juries. We assumed that this was because the UK has never been popular across the Channel for various reasons: firstly because we've always "done our own thing", and, for instance, weren't ever enthusiastic members of the EU, and secondly because the continental countries, we felt, were secretly jealous of the UK pop industry's success worldwide.
The last time the UK won was in 1997, when Katrina and the Waves won with their song "Love Shine a Light", and there's an interesting interview with lead singer Katrina Leskanich, a native of Topeka, Kansas, in next week's Radio Times, showing what a random event that win was, in fact.
for the UK with their song "Love Shine a Light"
The song hadn't even been written for the contest, says Katrina in the article. The song had originally been written for the Swindon branch of the Samaritans. The group's drummer worked there, and they needed a theme tune for their 50th anniversary celebrations, she says.
Swindon Samaritans
The group's guitarist Kimberley Rew wrote the song, but then it just got shoved into a drawer on the grounds that it was too "cheesy" to be included on any of the group's albums.
Adds Katrina, "So much of what happens depends on the night, and on what all the other songs are. There was a good feeling about the UK that week, because Tony Blair had just come to power, and he was hugely popular across Europe. All that stuff plays a part."
What a crazy world we live in, don't we! This must have been before people noticed that Tony Blair was more style than substance, and also he was perhaps a little too desperate to suck up to George W. Bush, which wasn't a plus point for many.
Sheer madness !!!!!
one of George W Bush's fan letters, this one
from UK Prime Minister Tony Blair
Crazy times, weren't they !!!!!
For us, the best ever Eurovision Song Contest winning song, as it probably is for most old codgers our age, is still Abba's "Waterloo", which won the 1974 contest in Brighton.
Hard to imagine now, but at the time of Abba's win, Lois and I were still a young recently-married couple living in rental accommodation, although by the time the 1975 contest in Stockholm came round, we had bought our first house and Lois was 6 months pregnant with Alison: no connection with Eurovision as far as we know haha!
flashback to summer 1975: Lois, now pregnant, sitting in our back yard,
busy reading up on "The Know-How of Breast-Feeding", by Sylvia Close (1972)
Happy days !!!!
18:30 After dinner we've got about an hour and a half before Lois has to log into her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom, so we watch an old Alan Bennett TV play, by coincidence also broadcast in the early days of Lois's first pregnancy.
Yes, this is a repeat of Alan Bennett's play from 1975, all about a couple from Leeds, Yorkshire, who retire at the age of 65, and move to a seaside resort, something they've wanted to do all their working lives.
However, after they get settled, in Morecambe, Lancashire, they find themselves at a complete "loose end", not knowing anybody and spending most days wandering around the sea-front and sitting in the little shelters along the promenade, bickering in their armchairs in the evenings, and bickering in bed through their long nights of fitful sleep. Oh dear!
"Dad" (Harry Markham) and "Mam" (Gabrielle Daye)
bickering their way through their long nights of fitful sleep
- oh dear !!!!!
We don't even know the couple's real names, because the wife always calls her husband "Dad" and the husband always calls his wife "Mam" (Yorkshire dialect, see!). Their only child, a son called Bertram, lives in far-off Sydney Australia with his wife and family - and this, of course was in the days before cheap air-flights, cheap phone-calls, Skype or Zoom video calls, whatsapp calls and texts etc, so that the only communication was by the occasional airmail letters that the couple have to cut open with one of those letter-opener / paper knife thingummybobs.
Lois and I are always interested in the lives of other old couples, if only for comparison purposes haha!
We moved to a new-build housing estate in Malvern, Worcestershire in October 2022, and we quickly realised that almost all of our neighbours are young couples who go off to work in the mornings, so we don't see much of them. However, we have got to know most of them, including their full names, mainly through the fact that we tend to be at home during the day, and can take in their Amazon and other online deliveries etc for them. What a crazy world we live in, don't we!
flashback to November 2022: Lois and I move to this new-build
housing-estate in Malvern, to find that pretty much all the other
residents in the street are young couples who are out all day
We sometimes wonder what all these young couples think of us, "the only old codgers in the road", but the brutal truth is that they almost certainly don't think about us at all - I'm sure we've become completely "invisible", to put it mildly.
Be that as it may, the big question for Lois and me tonight, as we watch Alan Bennett's 1975 TV drama, is - how do we "stack up" in comparison to the play's "Mam" and "Dad"?
Our first thought is that "Mam" and "Dad" make Lois and me look pretty good - they're only 65 and we're 78 this year, and yet we believe that there's plenty more life left in us, than there is in them. That's our story, anyway and we're sticking to it haha!
"Mam" in the play is doing okay on the whole - women's lives, particularly in those days, didn't change that much in old age, what with all the cleaning and the shopping and the cooking continuing as before. "Dad", on the other hand, looks very much the lost soul now that he's given up work, telling everybody "I used to have 6 men under me, you know".
Poor "Dad" !!!!!!
We notice in particular how much bickering the couple seem to do, whether they're in bed at night, or sitting in their armchairs in the evening, it's all "bicker bicker bicker".
They're even bickering when they go out to one of the town's cinemas in the afternoons. taking advantage of cheap prices for old age pensioners at matinée showings.
When they're sitting in their seats, listening to the piped organ music, "Dad" offers to get "Mam" an ice-cream while they're waiting in their seats with the other old couples for the film to start.
"Mam" wants an ice-cream but she "doesn't want a whole one". Oh dear!
The movie starts up, and yes, it's that marvellous film "The Go-Between" (1971) starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie, with its wonderful opening quote from the LP Hartley novel, "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" etc etc, you know the one!
And the story? Well, of course, it's that "tale of torrid and forbidden love in the English countryside", set in the early 1900's, all about the affair between Marian, a beautiful young aristocrat and Ted, the earthy village butcher. You remember it, don't you!
scene from "The Go-Between" (1971): local aristocrat Marian (Julie Christie)
gets busy in the hayloft with earthy village butcher Ted (Alan Bates)
The cinema's organ music comes to a stop. "Mam" and "Dad" settle down in their seats, as the lights go down, and the film starts up at last.
When they emerge into the afternoon daylight and the streets of Morecambe at the end of the film, "Mam" reveals that she "didn't think much of the film", while Dad thinks it was "all right". "Mam" objects in particular to the unresolved and ambiguous endings that she says most modern films have. And she's particularly dismissive of the sex scenes.
Blimey - and they're only 65! Thirteen years younger than us - imagine !!!!! But Lois comments that people did age more quickly in those days: most people lived far harder lives than people do today, men at their jobs, and women if, on top of their housework, they also had to do jobs, or if they had also had to bring up several children.
Very often men and women were old by the time they reached their 50's, Lois recalls, and I have to agree that she's right. And we both think back to some of the old people we each knew when we were children growing up in the 1950's and 1960's.
In 1957, for instance, people like my cheerful grandmother Gladys, who had brought up 9 children in depression-hit South Wales, seemed incredibly wrinkled and completely ancient to me, even though she was only in her early 70's. I remember that!
flashback to 1957: me, aged 11 (front row, second from left) next to my sister
Kathy (9), with my Auntie Ruth and some of my cousins plus my grandmother Gladys
(back row, second from right) outside Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, London
Still, plays like this are a bit of a warning, aren't they, when you get to our age. Yikes !!!!!
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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