Danskcolin: Sunday January 12th 2025 "Are YOUR bedrooms soundproof? Mostly they're not, I suspect!"

Are YOUR bedrooms soundproof? I think a lot of us would have to hold our hands up and say "Sadly no!" to that question, wouldn't we, and, especially middle-aged parents Dale and Judy Nesbitt after their daughter Jenny, late one evening, sneaked into the house with her new "squeeze", Sam Tillard, whom Jenny's parents hadn't even been introduced to yet (!).

The story was "all over" the Onion News Local for East Hampshire the other day wasn't it.

Uh-oh! And let's hope that "that Mike guy" doesn't take the Onion News regularly, or he would have been in for a shock to put it mildly!

Bedrooms are a common locale for shocks of various sorts, aren't they, like when astronaut James Caudry returned from a recent mission. Did you see that article, source Onion News again?

Oh dear, poor Caudry !!!!!

But funnily enough, Caudry's bemusement, on awakening, is something that my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I can relate to, because when we wake up in the morning these days, we often say "Where are we?" and "Where can we find the bathroom?".

We were even in "The Onion" ourselves this morning talking about our feelings of disorientation in the early mornings - did you see us right there on page 94?

This story about us is actually reasonably accurate, to be fair, although "couple keep waking up in strange beds" would be more precisely worded as "couple keep waking up in strange bedrooms" - seeing as how, in the last 3 years, we've been waking up in 3 different bedrooms, from our two house-moves, from Cheltenham to Malvern, Worcestershire in 2022, and then from Malvern to Liphook, Hampshire in the last couple of weeks.

What a madness it's all been!

Now in our current home for nearly 2 weeks, and with temperatures scarcely rising about freezing outside, we're hunkering down inside at the moment, nursing our heavy colds, and waiting for the temperatures to rise marginally next week.

At the same time we've been trying to get familiar with our new house and also discover where all our belongings have been put by our movers - you know the kind of thing?

we're still trying to get to know our new house, and

discover where our movers decided to put all our "stuff", and

which boxes it's all hiding in - what madness!

Lois can't even join her fellow church-members online this morning for their two Sunday Morning Meetings, because of the poor quality of our temporary internet connections, so she just has to sit here in the house with her small glass of wine and hunk of bread, having to have a communion service all of our own, with God, something I always find incredibly touching to observe.

flashback to March 2024: Lois in her "meeting hat"

taking part remotely in her church's communion service

We can't even watch catch-up TV at the moment, so we have to make the best of what we can see live and as-it-happens, on our, like, billions of channels, which isn't as straightforward as you might suppose, given our weird tastes (!). [You're telling ME! - Ed]

We decide to start the evening with an old James Bond on ITV4 - "Doctor No" - I expect you saw it too, didn't you? [Are you crazy? - Ed]

Of course we've seen it before a couple of times, but once again, for, like, the billionth time, I'm struck by Lois's incredible recall for the plots of films and dramas of any kind, compared to me.

British agent James Bond (Sean Connery) on a Caribbean

beach with local shell-collector Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress)

And Lois is really good also at diagnosing faulty plot-lines, like the number of times that attempts are made to kill Bond using far-from-foolproof methods: like leaving a tarantula in his room and hoping it will decide to bite him, or despatching a runaway truck down a narrow alley to "run him down", when any fool knows that he can deftly hop into somebody's doorway and get away unscathed. It isn't exactly rocket science is it, be fair!!!

21:00 We go to bed on an old 1970's edition of "The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club", the series that brought to TV the atmosphere of an evening in one of the somewhat rowdy working-men's clubs they have in the north of England, the evening compered by foul-mouthed stand-up comic Bernard Manning, ably assisted by dour northern "turn-manager" Colin Crompton.

dour northerner and ungenial club chairman and

"turn-manager" Colin Crompton - yikes!

I don't think either of us have seen a show from this series since its heyday in the 1970's so it's a delight tonight to see again such entertainers as large, middle-aged honky-tonk pianist "Mrs Mills", plus Budapest-born singer Eve Boswell [Who she? - Ed], maiden name Éva Keleti, singing her big hits from the 1950's including "Pickin' A Chicken" and "Sugar Bush (I Love You So)".

Eve Boswell, born Éva Keleti in Budapest in 1922,

singing her 1950's hit "Pickin' A Chicken"

And most of all, what a delight to see a very young-looking Gene Pitney as the evening's "star turn", trying gamely to imitate a northern English accent for the benefit of the assembled club-members and their wives, and even persuading two of the club's barmaids to be his backing singers on one of the many songs he wrote for other artists, in this case "Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)", which he wrote for Ricky Nelson.