Friends, are YOU the "black sheep" in your family, I wonder? You are? Do you know I've always suspected that, ever since you started sending me your crazy so-called "comments" on my blog on all those postcards!!!!
Well, thank your lucky stars that you've got no competition in your family - you're 100% definitely the "n***** in the woodpile", as people used to say. Am I allowed to say that? [No! -Ed], [But don't worry, it'll be taken out in the final "cut" (!) - Ed]
Look at this crazy local family from the lovely Worcestershire village of Upper Snodsbury, who featured in Onion News West Worcestershire Desk's Local News Round-up this morning - see page 94!!!
And that's a problem no mum should have to face, isn't it, having to cope with not one but three "black sheep", as well as being one herself, which probably doesnt help, to put it mildly!!!
But it's certainly true that sheep, whether black or normal, generally get a "bad press", don't they. Allegedly stupid anyway, liable to follow the crowd rather than "go their own way" in life etc etc.
And by coincidence, sheep and shepherds are the theme of this week's visiting preacher and his "Bible Hour", at my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois's church this morning.
And when I drive her from our home in Malvern, Worcestershire to the Village Hall, Ashchurch, the first thing Lois and I notice when we walk into the room where the meetings are going to be held are (1) it's freezing cold (61F / 16C brrrrr!!!!) - no surprise there!, and (2) the preacher has pre-arranged lots of slides of sheep, shepherds etc and that kind of malarkey which he runs through on the big screen while everybody is settling down, getting warming cups of coffee and having chats.
(left) the scene at the village hall as people are finding seats etc and
the preparations for the meetings are taking place, and (right)
close-up of this week's visiting preacher Tom (in beard and black sweater)
with slide of sheep behind him on the big screen on the screen behind him
The preacher's "text" this morning turns out to be the "bad shepherds" in the book of Ezekiel, who don't look after their sheep, but have a nice time, having lots to eat, but not caring whether their sheep have something to feed on, or not. An approach to shepherding that's surely violates pretty basic principle in S101, the first level course for shepherding at most colleges, I would have thought!
the sheep looking confused on a rocky hillside, while the
bad shepherd is looking at his phone or having a pot noodle maybe?
Not that I would know, I didn't even take Shepherding A-Level, which in retrospect may have been a bad decision. Let me know - I think I should be told, don't you?
Tom gives a couple of really stimulating talks, partly based on recent studies that show sheep are actually more intelligent than they're given credit for, and that they have longer memories than many people have - they can remember and recognise the individual faces of people for 2 years, for example.
However, he and his young wife have made the mistake of bringing their two pre-school-age children (18 months and 2 and a half maybe?) with them, who start off quiet and well-behaved, but gradually get noisier as the meetings progress, and in the end Tom's wife has to take them outside, where we can clearly hear them shouting and yelling in the car-park outside. What madness !!!!!
visiting preacher Tom (standing, rear) and his little son
sitting on Chief Elder Andy's lap helping him with the software -
slides plus simultaneous Farsi translation for the benefit
of the church's group of Iranian Christian refugees
Tom and his wife (the medium-to-large-ish woman seen here
striding to the back of the hall) have made the mistake of
bringing their pre-school-age kids, who gradually create
more and more mayhem as the meetings progress through the
sessions (3 hours in total): poor pre-school-age kids !!!!
Awwwwww!!!!
My dear late mother, in her engagingly frank way, always used to say of preachers who spoke for what she considered too long a time, as being "too fond of the sound of their own voice". Oh dearie me! But rest in peace, Hannah. You won't have to sit through any more of those now, that's for sure!
Awwww !!!! Bless them !!!!!!
Yes, David's mum - what a woman she was, sadly no longer with us. She liked to be in the audience for his TV shows, as a good mum would, but she also like to heckle. When he drank a pint of beer in one go, during one of his shows, she shouted out, "I hope you've had something to eat tonight".
It's an extended meeting, to put it mildly, not finishing till 2pm. And when Lois and I arrive home, and go upstairs to bed for "nap time", it's already 4 pm. We should skip this bit of Sunday really because it's getting a bit late in the day. However it's going to be an "easy" meal to prep tonight, a re-run of last night's, so we say, "Let's just do it anyway!" and "Never mind the time on the clock!". After all, you're only 78 once haha !!!!
And we could do with an hour of being horizontal, no doubt about that, because we had an early start to the day today also. We were speaking to our daughter Sarah and her 11-year-old twins Lily and Jessica this morning on a whatsapp video call at 9 am (5pm Western Australia time). Sarah, plus husband Francis and the 2 girls, moved to Perth, Australia in September.
a whatsapp video call to our daughter Sarah
and twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica in Perth, Australia
21:00 We go to bed on a bit of Jewish comedian David Baddiel's stand-up comedy act, the one where he talks about his family, and especially his mum, who, as he explains, wasn't really your standard Jewish mum "stuff".
Even that could be said to be a bit of a "mummish" heckle, maybe. But what "madness" !!!!
And in all other respects, David's mum, Sarah, wasn't "mummish" at all in the conventional way. She was evidently a bit of a "goer", despite her family's tragic history - her parents (David's grandparents) survived Dachau before escaping to England.
In any case I personally feel an instant connection with David's mum, because of her style of writing: lots of exclamation marks (!!!) and putting inverted commas round "expressions" that don't need inverted commas because they're just the words carrying the "meaning" that the "dictionaries" say they should be carrying. What "madness" (again) !!!!
The text of this email from his mum to David and his siblings reads as follows: "I have plenty of easy back up food that Colin can manage himself if necessary. Thanksgiving today. Hope you are all celebrating with all the "trimmings" including Pumpkin Pie !!!!!" (note the exclamation marks and misused inverted commas).
She was in the audience for a TV show David did with his comedy partner Robert Newman, when Newman, in a response to a question from the audience, said that whether he replied "yes" or "no" to the question, it would make their show "shit", David's mum heckled very audibly from the back of the studio audience, "Well, it always is!".
And she was always very frank about sex, continuing to have noisy sex with her husband during her decades of her very public affair with golfer David White, not bothering to keep the affair secret; even having pictures of White in her house and putting White's face on special mugs she had had made, and installing lots of golfing "memorabilia" around the house, even though she had no personal interest in the sport.
When, during the TV reality show Big Brother back in the 1990's one of the "housemates" caused controversy by "pleasuring herself" with a wine bottle in the garden of the Big Brother house, David's mum was in the audience for the follow-up chat-show, and shouted out, "Well, it's nice to do such things sometimes, outside in the open". What "madness" wasn't it !!!
And his mum always liked to be in the limelight, David says. When David was presented with an award for the film "Infidel" which he had written, she pushed through the phalanxes of photographers to take her own picture of her son David with actor Omid Dhalili. But the photo that she took of the two men was not the one that was for ever after displayed on the wall of the family living-room, it was the one from the newspaper that showed her taking the picture.
What "madness" (again) !!!!!
[That's enough Jewish maternal madness! - Ed]
Will this do, then?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzz!!!!!
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