Are YOU ever what people call "absent-minded" ? I know that both my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I both have to hold our hands up and admit to this common human failing in ourselves, and we always hope that our friends will overlook our occasional lapses!
Making mistakes with one's finances can be especially galling, I know - like this poor local guy, the one with the secluded mansion, you know the one - in the lovely Worcestershire village of Lickey End.
Oops!!!!
Being absent-minded at your job can be especially dangerous. However, at least Lois and I are both medium-to-long-retired now, and our occasional lapses of memory seldom threaten to bring the country to its knees, which is something to feel relieved about, at least!
Unlike for this local recruitment specialist Kristin Petrie, may I say!!
Fortunately her superiors and co-workers found it in their hearts to forgive her, so that was all right [Source for both stories: Onion News]
Although we're pretty good on the whole, we sometimes forget things ourselves, and earlier this afternoon, about 2 pm, when we were leaving the Village Hall near Tewkesbury, where Lois's church holds its Sunday Morning meetings, Lois left her handbag with all her money and credit cards etc on the floor of the village hall, in our usual haste to "get away before all the rush in the car-park".
Oops !!!!!
And I'm not blaming Lois here - I could have checked for myself, but failed to do so, when I picked up our other, much bigger, bag containing the boxes that we use to put our packed lunches in, together with other essentials.
Lois's little handbag, seen here in happier times,
in our kitchen, and not left somewhere else in the UK
e.g. in some building or public transport vehicle etc
Anyway no harm done, because two of Lois's fellow church-members mounted their now famous and by now well-rehearsed, emergency "Lois Handbag Retrieval" routine. Chief Elder Andy drove the bag the 10 miles over to fellow-church-member David's house in Upton-on-Severn, and David then brought the bag the remaining 6 miles of the journey over to us, here in Malvern Rise, and placed it in Lois's hot little hands.
Drama over! And no bones broken which is nice!
And now you know what Lois's handbag looks like [see picture above], do write to us, won't you, if you happen to see it lying about unattended, almost anywhere in the UK. We don't venture overseas now, so if you're in some other country don't waste time keeping an eye out for it, will you - that would just make us both feel guilty, which is something we don't like haha !!!!
In a way it's not surprising that we left the handbag in the hall after the Sunday meeting, because Chief Elder Andy, who was this week's preacher, had given one of his inspirational talks today, in a way quite 'numbers-based, about the feeding of the five thousand and the feeding of the four thousand etc, and the number of baskets of bread collected, and that kind of thing.
flashback to this morning: this week's preacher,
Chief Elder Andy (right) gives his Bible Hour talk
and Exhortation, while this week's President, John,
looks on: the software provides a simultaneous
Farsi translation of Andy's remarks on the top of the screen
for the church's contingent of Iranian Christian refugees
Andy had explained that the numbers involved all had a special significance in Jewish culture at the time - for instance, '7' is the number indicating perfection (days of the week?), '12' is a reference to good governance (hence the 12 apostles), '5' is a reference to the concept of grace etc.
Who knew? Well Andy did - he's made a special study of it, and quite an exhaustive one!
But I've noticed that members of different Protestant denominations all tend to have their own particular specialist skills and interests, e.g. Salvation Army members have a love of music. Members of Lois's church excel in studying, and the Bible is an ideal object for study: it's a huge work, written a couple of millennia ago, filled with what to us today are strange concepts, and containing many apparently awkward contradictions, all of which need patient study in order to explain and reconcile.
Anyway back to "that handbag" (!!!!!) !
[Can you "cut" some of these unnecessary exclamation marks and brackets please, Colin? Thanks (!) -Ed]
Just for the record, here's the "Lois Handbag Retrieval Operation" (July 2024): how it was done -
And luckily, when David arrived at our house with the handbag, Lois and I hadn't got into bed yet, which was lucky. There's nothing worse than being interrupted during "nap-time", is there, especially when your car's out there in front parked in its usual space, so any caller knows that we're officially "in" - embarrassing!!!
You're probably wondering what we were doing in bed, aren't you? [Not me, I don't care! - Ed]
Well, seeing as how you've asked (!), we were discussing the vexed subject of "river names".
Under the bedclothes, my Samsung had started to "diddle", and Lois's Huawei had started beeping in sync, because we've both programmed our phones to notify us whenever anybody on the Quora website posts something about river names.
Lois's Huawei a-beeping and my Samsung a-diddling
like crazy, under the bedclothes this afternoon
- it was total madness !!!!
Everybody knows that there are a huge number of rivers in England called "The Avon". And everybody knows that when the first English settlers arrived here from their homes in Denmark and North Germany, they asked the native Britons what this or that local river was called, and the Britons just said, "Oh that's the Avon", because "Avon" is just the Welsh word for a river.
It was just like when, centuries later, the French first landed on the shores of Canada, and they asked the Indians "what's this place called?", and the natives said "Oh it's Canada" - which was just the native word for "village".
Today, we're delighted to see one of our favourite quora pundits, Anthony Durham, weighing in on this vexed subject (see also www.romanera.names.uk).
We all know that most languages of Europe and India originated from the same Indo-European source language of the 4th century BC, spoken in the Steppes region of modern Russia.
flashback to 4000BC and the homeland of the Indo-European
languages in the steppes of what's now Russia
Who knew, however, that "afon" (pronounced "avon"), which is the Welsh word for a river, is related to the "-ab" of the Punjab, which means literally, [the place of] the five rivers. The Welsh for "five rivers" is just "pum afon". See? Simples!!!
Durham writes:
Fascinating stuff isn't it! [If you say so! - Ed]
20:00 We go to bed on an amusing film, "I Give It A Year".
Or witness this earlier session...
We then overhear the phone conversation when Linda, the marriage guidance counsellor, tells her husband a thing of two - oh yes!
Warning - if you don't like strong language, even when it's camouflaged by asterisks, then look away now haha!
guidance counsellor, has a very public and vocal row with her husband
on the telephone - see behind the glass partition (ringed in picture)
"I can't believe we've having the same f****** row!", we hear Linda tell her husband. "Oh, not listening, not listening! No, f*** you! Oh my god, you're such an a***hole! Yes, you are, you're such a c***-sucking, s***-stabbing, f****** a***hole! I could just f****** stab you right in the eyes!"
Then, in an apparent aside to a woman colleague in the office, Linda explodes, "What the f*** are you looking at! You could do with a f***, you f****** frigid a***hole! Yeah, f*** you!"
Then, returning to the call to her husband, she tells him, "No, not YOU, nobody wants to f*** YOU, you f****** frigid a***hole!!"
Josh and Nat, still sitting in uncomfortable silence, having to
listen to their marriage guidance counsellor, Linda, (top right)
having a very vocal fight on the phone with her own husband,
and abusing a woman colleague at the same time.
Oh dear!
But tremendous fun!!!!
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment