Danskcolin: Sunday August 18th 2024 "Would you let YOUR child take up Russian Roulette?"

Russia's a mysterious country isn't it. And its traditional sports even more inscrutable.

Take Russian Roulette, for instance, which has its devotees even here in rural West Worcestershire, the area to which my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I moved to, in a flawed "downsizing" attempt, back in October 2022. Personally we haven't met any local "RR" aficionados yet, but I feel it can only be a question of time, as this report on the local Onion News seems to suggest.

Yikes!!

And it's sad in a way that, as some people are saying, Russian Roulette is destined to die out "within a generation", which would mean another old national tradition gone down the drain. Could it be saved, perhaps, by being included in the clamour for extra sports to be added to the currently event-poor Olympics for the next games in Los Angeles, alongside other traditional games like "marbles" and "shove ha'penny" perhaps, that Lois and I remember fondly from our own younger days?

I wonder..... !!!

flashback to the 1950's: young kids playing

"marbles" in Perth, Western Australia

Well, Russia is very much on mine and Lois's minds this morning. It's Sunday [Congratulations for 'keeping up', Colin (!) - Ed], but unfortunately Lois and I arrive late for her church's two Sunday Morning Meetings at the Village Hall outside Tewkesbury. We've already missed the first meeting - the 'Bible Hour' - and, not only that - we've got just 20 minutes to eat our packed lunches before the second meeting starts - the Communion Service. So we reckon we'd better "get busy" with our lunches and not talk to anybody, other than to say a perfunctory but friendly "Hi!", which seems sensible!

we arrive late at the Village Hall where Lois's church

holds its two Sunday Meetings, and we find that we've missed the first

meeting and the lunch break is already in full swing - yikes!!!!

As we look for one of the "good" tables and settle down, we can't help noticing that there's something in Russian written on the flipchart by the platform, something that must have been used to illustrate some point or other in the Bible Hour that we have just missed. We can't read it - it's too far away, so I use my phone's facility for zooming in, to take this picture. Good idea, isn't it - have you ever done that with something too far away to read? Answers on a postcard haha!

Luckily, before I retired, I worked "On Her Majesty's Medium-to-Top-Secret Service", and we all had to learn a bit of Russian in those crazy, far-off days. And as Lois and I sit in the hall, gobbling down our prepared lunches, I recall the words for "so" (Russian: tak), also "mir" (English: 'world', the name for some series of Russian spacecraft I think), plus the words for 'loved' and 'God'.

No prizes for guessing that this is the start of one of the most moving verses in the Bible, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life".

But why is it written in Russian on the preacher's flipchart? Well, we would need to be told, because we don't have time to ask anybody, which is a pity.

There's hardly time to do more than eat, and just do a perfunctory check that the Queen's portrait is still hanging on the wall, and to note that the Parish Council still hasn't done anything about replacing it yet, presumably waiting for somebody to make a decent "fist" of Charles - contemporary artists, please note!

due to our late arrival, Lois and I barely have time

to gobble down our packed lunches and check

that the Queen's portrait is still there on the wall

"Why were you two "noggins" so late for church this morning, Colin?", I hear you cry. [Not me, I don't care! - Ed]

Well, Lois had dozed off on the sofa the previous evening (Saturday) when we were watching Michael Portillo eating a spleen sandwich in his latest "celebrity travelogue" in the street markets of Palermo, Sicily, and then she was "restless" in bed, to put it mildly, so I let her "sleep in" this morning. Just saying haha!

Flashback to last night's "celebrity travelogue in Palermo, Sicily.

"Why not try a nice spleen sandwich, Michael", says this market-trader,

Yes we're both a bit tired today, but luckily we can get straight into bed again as soon as we get home from the church, and it's just us, one on one today, so we stay there all afternoon till 5 o'clock, which is nice - and, obviously, we need to be fully fit if we're going to face another night of TV this evening haha!

21:00 We get ready for bed with another old sitcom, a "black comedy" this time - it's "Nighty Night", starring Julia Davis, from the early 2000s.

Oh dear - yes it's that excruciating sitcom all about Bristol beauty-salon owner, Jill, the epitome of "self-fulness" - is that a word? [No! - Ed]. You know, the woman who discovers that her husband is suffering from a terminal illness. She's a forward-looking woman, and so starts 'looking ahead' to find a replacement for him, before he's even dead yet. Yikes!

Yes, Jill is a fascinatingly awful character, no doubt about that. But the writer, Julia Davis, who also plays Jill in the sitcom, does a wonderful west-country accent, and I see from Wikipedia that she grew up in Bath, so that's presumably the reason.

In this scene we see Jill at a dating agency, trying to find her future Husband Number Two, with the help of the agency's friendly IT-literate rep, Gary Furze, played by Marc Wootton. First Jill gives her ideal age-range for her new man: somewhere between 18 and 71, she thinks.

Then the 'ideal height' issue rears its head:

Well, Jill's certainly "got her head screwed on" on that one, that's for sure! But Gary wants more detail here, trying to narrow down Jill's perception of her "ideal man":