It's so awkward, isn't it, when maybe your partner, or one of your close friends, or a roommate, say, is having a bad day, and your patience is starting to run a bit thin! Am I right? Or am I right!!!!
There was one such case in this morning's Onion News - it was all over page 94 of the print edition, so I feel sure you must have "clocked" it !!!!
Poor Briggs !!!!!!
However, my light-to-moderate wife Lois and I, who live just down the road from that "fractious" Briggs guy, here in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, are feeling a bit the same as him today, would you believe!
We've always had a tendency to get overexcited, and then act all surprise when we feel all tired and grumpy afterwards, I'm sorry to say!!!
my light-to-moderate wife Lois and I,
getting a bit overexcited in the park
And I have to say, however, that we've got little excuse for throwing tantrums any more, which makes it worse!
We're older, much older than Briggs for starters, having passed the critical "thousand month stage" just weeks ago, and so are at an age when people like us are supposed to have "grown out" of that kind of malarkey, and maybe starting to get a bit more sensible! The truth is that we had a lovely time yesterday (Saturday), looking round a bunch of old Roman ruins, but today we're paying the price for it, and feeling like a couple of "old ruins" ourselves - oh dear!
I got a bit silly, jumping all over the ruined walls, leaving Lois to trail behind me, wrestling with our map of the site, which was so large that it was more of a nuisance than a help, a bit like me myself !!!!!
flashback to yesterday, when Lois and I visit the old Roman town of Silchester,
up near the Berkshire county line - I get a bit silly jumping all over the Roman ruins (left),
leaving Lois (right) to wrestle with our enormous map of the site (!)
Oh dear, my bad !!!!!
Today we both feel like "death warmed up", as they say! And our official diary entry for today reads just "
felt shattered,
went to bed in the afternoon, got up, had tea, watched some "telly", went back to bed again."
Not bad, though, because I personally have always had a liking for the world's best laconic diary entries.
"Forgot what did", as Katy wrote in her diary, in one of Susan Coolidge's classic novels.
That quote "Forgot what did" was also the English poet Philip Larkin's all time favourite diary entry. Larkin embraced ordinariness, as Douglas Murray writes in an article sent to me many years ago by Steve, my American brother-in-law. Although Larkin "conjured up the divine" in his poetry, he had a very ordinary life as a librarian in the unexciting city of Hull, Yorkshire, and lived in a supremely unattractive house there, drinking cheap supermarket port. How different from the life of those other poets, the Brownings, when you think of the exotic life that they chose to lead in exile in sunny Italy with lots of nice wine etc etc.
Other short diary notes that I remember include one that Lois and I read in a Scandi murder mystery we were reading: the guilty man's diary entry for the day in question read simply "Stuffed girlfriend in freezer".
In 1916, Hubert Parry was asked to compose a melody for Blake's poem "Jerusalem" to boost the country's morale at a difficult time in the war, and Parry managed to compose a piece that has been called "the song of the century."
But in his diary on that day, all that Parry wrote was just, "Wet and very cold, wrote a tune", as a TV documentary revealed at the time:
As usual this evening, I find myself writing what Lois calls "the usual load of rubbish" on my blog page - see above for details!!! But what should I put in my more official Desk Diary?
I do remember that Lois and I see a bit of "telly" before going to bed, the latest in Griff Rhys-Jones' new series about his travels in the American South. Tonight he's in Alabama.
We learn tonight that Alabama is the US state with the highest proportion of Protestants, and 80% of adults in the state believe in God. It's also the state with one of the highest proportion of gun-owners. Is there a connection?
I think we should be told!
One of Alabama's most popular sports is drag racing, and presenter Griff Rhys Jones agrees, somewhat nervously, to take a ride in the front passenger seat with one of the state's foremost drag racers. Here we see him looking terrified in the passenger seat, while his driver turns on the ignition...
Too late to back out now, Griff haha !!!!
Poor Griff !!!!!
Luckily, the drag racing strip is only about 400 yards or thereabouts, so poor Griff's torment doesn't last long, which is some comfort, at least. Although typical speeds can be up to 300 mph - yikes !!!!!
Poor Griff (again) !!!!
At the same time, Griff seems, on the whole, energised by what he calls "the whirr and the thump" of it, which is nice to see!
Lois and I
think we know what Griff's referring to here, but we aren't 100% sure, so answers please -
postcards only, and no illustrations this time, thank you very much!!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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