Dear Reader, another personal question for you, I'm afraid, although I make no apology for it! [Why not? - Ed]
Here's the thing, dear Reader: is YOUR plastic Christmas tree "up" yet, or is it still up... "but only in the attic"? Most of them are one or other, aren't they, unless you buy a new real one every year, like many claim to! And have you noticed, by the way, how inventive tree decorations are becoming now? For me and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois, however, this one is still our favourite.
Just take a look at this "doozy"!!!
At this point I've got a rather embarrassing confession to make: Lois and I aren't even sure we're going to bother with all that "Christmas Tree" malarkey this Christmas. We're trying to sell up and move to a house 137 miles away, in Liphook, Hampshire (as you do!) either just before or just after Christmas, and we want to keep things simple if we can and give ourselves one less household object not to have to pack up - call us "Modern-day Scrooges if you like! [All right, I will ! - Ed]
We're tempted by the Christmas trees we see today, however, when we visit local "eating-hole" Clive's Fruit Farm, just outside Upton-on-Severn, to stock up on cut-price "goodies" in their "Scrooge" section (!), and we spot some of their unsold Christmas trees in their car-park.
on a visit to Clive's Fruit Farm, Upton-on-Severn to "plunder"
cut-price items in their "Scrooge Section", we spot these
unsold Christmas trees in the car-park
Luckily, their Christmas tree salesman guy must be taking a break when we arrive so we're able to slip into their café and "mini-grocery-shop" "un-buttonholed", which is nice.
But, dear Reader, have you ever spared a thought for those hard-working Christmas Tree salesmen guys at this time of year, the poor souls. Not many people have, it pains me to say.
Lois and I were glad, however, to read a sympathetic study of their wretched lives in this week's Onion News West Worcestershire pull-out "Christmas Tree Special". Has your copy "plopped" through your letterbox yet?
We shed a tear for poor Martin as we discuss the story in the café, but try not to let it spoil our day too much: we're all heart haha!
Lois scours for "near-to-sell-by-date products in Clive's "Scrooge Section", and I indulge
myself with a flapjack and a hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows in the café:
Lois is the cook in our relationship and she's on a diet, so, by default, I'm on a diet too,
when I'm at home, that is: poor me !!!!!
And there's a reflective note in the air as we enjoy our drinks, because we're also marking the passing of our favourite film director, Jim Abrahams.
there's a quiet reflective air in the café this morning, as Lois and I
pause to reflect on the passing of our favourite film-director
Jim Abrahams (right)
It was Jim Abrahams who, with his friends David and Jerry Zucker, created our favourite film, "Airplane!" (1980), Jim's low-budget spoof of the disaster movies that had dominated the cinema of the 1970's.
Although not the first comic "send up", Abraham's brilliant idea, in our view, was to have his mock-serious lines spoken not by comic actors but by straight-faced dramatic performers, capable of Oscar-level performances in real tragedies like Shakespeare ones, to put it mildly. Hence the starring role given to Leslie Nielsen, who apparently immediately got the idea behind the spoof, and loved it.
The three men's idea for "Airplane!" was inspired after watching TV one late night, and seeing another drama with an exclamation mark in the title, the 1950's drama "Zero Hour!", in which the pilot and crew of an aeroplane contract food poisoning, leaving it to one of the passengers, a nervous World War II pilot to land the plane.
There are loads of memorable exchanges you can get from the "Airplane!". Here's "Colin's Pick of the Dead-Pans":
[I'm surprised you're still married! - Ed]
But this one, in my view, is the "dooziest" of them all:
Tremendous fun, isn't it. And Rumack's "put down" of Striker is, helpfully, repeatable every time one of you're friends starts a question with the word "Surely....". And don't think your friends will ever get tired of it - they'll just laugh more loudly, the more times you repeat it!
[So that's why you haven't got any friends, Colin! - Ed]
There's like a billion memorable scenes, even more probably - they're almost "legion", to be precise!
18:00 Today Lois and I are getting ready to "batten down the hatches", because we know that Storm Darragh (crazy name, crazy storm!) is on its way. Did you not see the story? It was in the Daily Mail !!!!
And guess what - right on cue, at around 9 pm, when Lois and I have just "plopped" down on the couch to watch some of our favourite TV shows, the power goes off, and it stays off till around midnight. We've only been in this house for 2 years, having downsized and thrown away a lot of stuff - as it's turned out, we threw out all the useful stuff, and kept a lot of useless "tat", as it's turned out.
flashback to November 2022: me, my daughter Alison
and granddaughter Lucy in front of the new-build
home in Malvern that Lois and I had just downsized to
In our previous, much larger house in Cheltenham we used to have a lot of useful electric torches and candles and our other "survivalist" gear, but, unwisely, as it appears, we threw most of these items away so that could "squeeze ourselves" into this much smaller new-build home in Malvern. But it's too late to do anything about that now - damn !!!!
So tonight, without even a candle to our name, Lois and I have no option but to go to bed. We can't watch "telly" or listen to music, so what else can we do? Luckily it's 9 o'clock already, so only an hour earlier than our usual bedtime. We wouldn't mind, except that we've already spent a couple of hours in bed this afternoon, so it's not so much of a novelty as it would have been otherwise! Poor us!!!!
We must buy some candles next time we're in a candle shop. Candlelight creates a nice ambience too, apart from anything else. Do you remember the Tom Jones film scene, where Tom is having a romantic candlelight dinner with his latest squeeze, a Mrs Waters, in a hotel in Upton-on-Severn, not far from here?
the medium-to-highly sensual dinner-for-two scene at an Upton Inn
- from the 1963 film of the novel, starring Albert Finney as Jones
Flashback to August 2019: Lois and I visit the White Horse Inn
at Upton-on-Severn, where Tom Jones, in the famous novel
by Henry Fielding, was seduced by the mysterious "Mrs. Waters".
And don't worry about Lois and me somehow triggering a "baby boom" in this area. We're both 78, so ever-so-slightly past being "fertile" to put it mildly (!).
Lois and I didn't know, until we googled it recently, that the famous "baby boom" in New York, supposedly triggered by a power cut, turned out to be a complete myth?
Surprisingly, one of the few such "catastrophes" thought to have caused a real baby boom, came in 2007 in this area, during the great floods of Tewkesbury, would you believe (!):
Tewkesbury Abbey, seen here in happier times,
before the great floods of July 2007
flashback to July 2007: the 900-year-old Tewkesbury Abbey
transformed into a virtual island - yikes !!!!
a typical street bowser in Gloucestershire during the days of the Great Floods
of 2007 - what a madness it all was! How very "third world" !!!!
flashback to 2007: the cars "squelching" past our house in Cheltenham (left)
and (right) me filling our containers with drinking water from the
Government "bowser" at the end of the street - what madness !!!!!
Just saying !!!!
21:00 And, more importantly tonight, Lois and I don't get to watch any "telly", which I'm sure is a disappointment to you, dear Reader - I bet you were waiting for one of my hard-hitting so-called "TV reviews".
By way of compensation, however, this is what we would have watched...
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
Byeeeeeee!!!!!
21:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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