Headaches - most people get them from time to time, don't they.
I personally am one of the lucky ones - I get aches in most parts of my body, but I don't get them usually in my head. But my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois says the reason I don't get aches in my head is simply because there's nothing in it, and she may be right. Well, we'll see!
me and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois,
seen here when she last took me to the doctor's.
Lois alleges that I don't get aches in my head
"simply because there's nothing in it"
In the really bad cases, headaches can wreck lives, however. Like with this couple from Nob End, right here in West Worcestershire, the couple I was reading about just the other day on the local Onion News.
Before you read the article (see below), let me just "brief" you on a couple of things: (1) the word "hangover" is the technical medical term for a headache induced by previous, and usually recent, overindulgence in imbibing alcoholic drinks, and "hungover" is the technical term for anybody suffering from a so-called "hangover" - just saying!
Just saying! [Stop saying "just saying"! - Ed]
I'm guessing that your Intermediate Danish may be getting a bit rusty, so I've made it easier for you by highlighting Dan's new "hangover cure" right there in the text. Dan had woken up to find himself alone in the house, had had a couple of cups of coffee and then driven straight over to Egebjerg to take his daughter Laura back a bag of her laundry, something Lois and I can certainly relate to (although that's a story for another time (!) ).
Yes, Marianne's opinion is that Springsteen's music is "only for pathetic middle-aged men (Danish: kun for patetiske midaldrende mænd) who have never become the men they had dreamed about becoming (Danish: aldrig var blevet til det, de drømte om)."
And yet, and yet - all hope is not gone, I can now exclusively reveal.
Because this afternoon Lois and I aren't in bed, as we normally are between 2pm and 4pm, but instead we're sitting in front of our laptop, taking part in the fortnightly meeting of the local U3A Intermediate Danish group that we lead.
Our group is currently reading a Danish "whodunnit", Danish writer Anna Grue's "Judaskysset" ("The Judas Kiss"), and in the chapter we're reading at the moment, the book's "love triangle" of characters - failed advertising executive Dan, his wife Marianne and Marianne's lover Fleming, a detective in the local police, have all three got together one evening in their quiet Danish coastal town to stage the most almighty middle-aged drunken orgy in Dan and Marianne's marital home.
And the three of them wake up the morning after, with the most tremendous middle-aged hangovers.
,
"Judaskysset" (The Judas Kiss), a murder mystery
written by Danish writer Anna Grue, the novel
that the members of our local U3A Danish group are reading
Yes, because, you see, the morning after, Marianne and her lover Fleming decide to "bugger off" somewhere, in the words of the book, and poor Dan is left on his own in the marital home.
And guess what - Dan finds the cure for hangovers that science has so far failed to provide.
Do you remember this passage from the book, I wonder? I say that, because you may well have overlooked it, if you were paging forward, trying to get to the book's next "drunken threesome" event. Am I right, or am I right?!!!!
Well, you see, on his car radio, while he's driving over to Egebjerg, Dan plays, with volume turned up to "max", the whole of Bruce Springsteen's album "Born in the USA" (1984), a favourite album from his youth, with Dan singing along to it at the top of his voice. And by the end of the last track Dan finds that his hangover has magically disappeared. So there you have it.
Incidentally, if YOU too are middle-aged and go about boasting that "Born in the USA" is your favourite album, thinking it will somehow make you seem "cool" to your perhaps younger companions, then BEWARE!
The reason is that, if you shout too loudly about being what's now called a "Brucie", on the model of today's "Swifties" (!), then Dan's wife Marianne has "got your number", to put it mildly!
Remember this passage from the book?
So if you like Springsteen, then you'd do better to "keep quiet about it", that's all I'm saying (!) !
[Seems a bit harsh - not that I haven't become exactly the nit-picking Ed I always wanted to be, I hasten to add! - Ed]
20:00 Tired out as usual at the end of one of what we call our "Danish days", Lois and I decide to go to bed on an interesting documentary on the Sky Arts channel, "Art Matters", presented by Melvyn Bragg, author and long-time presenter of TV arts programmes.
Bragg himself, the son of a small-town pub-manager, suffered enormous emotional problems growing up in the small town of Wigton, Cumbria in the 1940's, and it was art and literature that threw him a lifeline, allowing him to find his true identity.
And Lois and I particularly like Bragg's impassioned defence of the BBC, the network where he first started working on arts programmes back in 1960. It says there's nothing like the BBC anywhere else in the world, and if it ever disappeared it would probably be impossible to assemble it again. And now, once more, this publicly-financed network is under threat, after a 30% drop in its income over the last decade.
Bragg talks tonight to satirist Armando Iannucci, creator or part-creator of "Alan Partridge", "The Day Today", "Veep", and "The Thick of It". Iannucci says that politicians don't really "get it". He says that politicians are a different breed from the rest of us, and they don't really watch television that much. And if they do, it'll be "Newsnight", plus some random "popular" programme, so that they can make it look like they're just the same as you and me!
Ordinary people just don't think like that, Iannucci says.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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