Danskcolin: Friday August 30th 2024 "The 'chat' at the next table

Conversations, eh (!) - most of us have at least one every day, don't we, even if it's just with ourselves (!). And yet no matter how experienced a conversationalist we are, it's so tricky to get the quantity right, isn't it, to put it mildly! Are we saying too much, I wonder, or too little?

Some people we meet in the daily round overdo it a bit, and others "underdo" it. Is that a word? [Not really! - Ed]. Look at this worrying story from a recent print-edition of Onion News's West Worcestershire Desk's weekly "round-up".

The "diagonally" opposite problem - not having enough to say - is the more common one in my humble opinion (!) - same "source" by the way (!).

[That's enough exclamation marks in brackets (!) - Ed]

Yes, getting it right, that's to say, neither too much nor too little - that's the key, as my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I often say to each other.

Another point - often overlooked - is: not to make your conversation so overly interesting, so that bystanders stop their chatting and start listening to yours: not an experience that Lois and I have to suffer very much - we're both dyed-in-the-wool introverts, so our "chat" is a bit on the dull side, to put it mildly! And I'm a few degrees "dyed-er" than Lois is - is that a word? [Definitely not! - Ed]

Today's an exception, however. My conversation with Lois in the Poolbrook Kitchen and Coffee Shop this morning is so electrifying, so absolutely riveting, that I witness the pleasantly chubby girl with the tattooed legs sitting at the next table to us actually making a signal to her companions to stop talking for a minute, so she can pick up on what we're saying.

us at the Poolbrook Kitchen & Coffee Shop this morning, shortly

before Lois and I begin having "that conversation" - you know

"that one" (!) - note shop owner Andrew hovering casually but

strategically in the background, also well within "earwigging distance" (!)

the scene at the coffee shop minutes before the pleasantly

chubby girl with the tattooed legs at the table next to ours

makes a signal to her companions to be quiet a moment

so she can "earwig" on what Lois and I are saying - yikes!

And Lois and I keep returning to the subject, even when we're in bed this afternoon - the only difference being that there's nobody "in the next bed" (!) to "earwig" on us, although we've often suspected our bed is "bugged", although we're not sure who's doing it. Back in March, we saw our afternoon "nap-time" conversation about our newly-installed shed - the one with the faulty bolt on the door - being quoted verbatim in the local Onion News, although with a different couple, arguably more photogenic, being substituted in the picture.

Yes, it was a "doozy" of a blog post, wasn't it, and it quickly went viral at the time.

the actual scene [redacted] on which the Onion story was based,

featuring Lois and me - the real-life but allegedly 'less glamorous'

couple than the pair in the Onion print-edition above (!), with,

in an inset, the faulty bolt that had wrecked our

dreams of owning an "ideal shed"

But let's, for a moment, get back to mine and Lois's chat this morning at the coffee shop (!).

flashback to this morning at the local coffee-shop, minutes

before we begin "that conversation" that everybody's talking about

"Well, Colin, and what was your riveting conversation with Lois all about today?", I hear you cry! [Not me, I lost interest several - like a billion - column inches ago! - Ed]

Well, seeing as how you're asking (!) we were merely reviewing some of the most interesting stories in Lois's copy of "The Week" magazine, that "plopped" through our letterbox this morning, the weekly periodical that gives a digest of all the big news of the week from home and abroad. Did you get yours today?

As always there's a whole bunch of "doozies" in the mag this week, but if you've got your copy handy, make sure you don't miss the review of their "Book of the Week" on page 23, an assessment of Sarah Rainsford's "Goodbye to Russia". Sarah is now the BBC's East Europe correspondent, based in Warsaw.

Lois and I have often discussed why Russia is still such an awful country. After centuries of having the chance to become civilised, they still can't manage to get it right, can they. They've never really sustained an existence as a decent society like most other countries in Europe have managed to do since medieval times. They're less civilised now than England was 1000 years ago.

What's wrong with them? In the 1980's and 1990's, Lois and I definitely got the impression that things were moving in the right direction, under Gorbachev and then under Yeltsin - both fundamentally decent men, we thought.

Rainsford, the book of the week's author, was 18 when she first visited Russia, in 1992, where she encountered what she called "a warm, chaotic country" with "unlimited possibility", writes reviewer Charlotte Hobson, writing in The Spectator.

flashback to 1992: the young Sarah Rainsford's Russian ID card

Rainsford, impressed by what she saw in 1992, stayed on in the country, studying and working in an Irish bar in St Petersburg. She eventually joined the BBC in 2000, and in 2014 she returned to Moscow as the BBC's Russian correspondent. However she was expelled with a bunch of other foreign journalists, in 2021, with no right to return.

flashback to 2021: the BBC's Sarah Rainsford

is expelled from Russia with no right to return

And The Guardian's Luke Harding, who was expelled at the same time, in his review of Rainsford's book recalls how both their expulsions were preceded by visits from "FSB goons", who left "f*** you" calling cards in both their apartments: a sex manual in Harding's and a large unflushed deposit in each toilet in Rainsford's.

"What Rainsford's book captures so well", writes Harding, is Russia's "dysfunctional slide into mass murder". Mid-1990's Russia may have been a "gangster's paradise", but for Rainsford and others it seemed to have a bright future, but no longer, however.

"There is little left now", notes Rainsford, that does not seem tainted.

"Looming over the book is the personality of Vladimir Putin"

In The Times, reviewer Edward Lucas writes, "Looming over [Rainsford's] book is the personality of Vladimir Putin, whose career stretches from the rackety St Petersburg of the 1990's to imperial Moscow and its devastating war machine. Rainsford tells us how Putin wanted to "remake the Russian state as a fearsome instrument of power". But for a long time, there was still enough normality [in Russia] for Putin's objective to remain obscure [my italics].

And Lucas' conclusion? [Rainsford's book] is an important account of Russia's transformation, from a place that "bewitched outsiders" into the "nightmare" of today.

Fascinating stuff isn't it!

21:00 We go to bed on tonight's re-run of "'Allo 'Allo", the 1980's sitcom about René, a French café-owner in World War II, who tries to keep on good terms simultaneously both with the local German army officers and the local French resistance, both of whom drink coffee in his café.

Yes, it's that sitcom series that ran for longer than the war itself, to put it mildly, i.e. from 1984 to 1992: what madness!!!!!

In this episode from the first series in 1984, René is down in the café cellar with his waitresses, trying to cement a valuable old painting, Van Klomp's "The Madonna With The Big Boobies" into a fireplace, so that the local Gestapo doesn't come to "liberate it".