Yes, Friends, if YOU want to "click" with somebody, you've got to feel at "home" first, haven't you, even if it's just a nursing home haha!!!! See today's local Onion News for East Hampshire, where page 94 is leading on this heart-warming story for the holidays!!!!
But it takes a bit of time for any species, including our own, to feel comfortable enough to be willing to even think about doing some "clicking", that's for sure! And you also need to catch sight of somebody attractive enough to do it with - what younger folks call "click-bait" in these crazy modern world of ours - no pun intended !!!!
Yes, I think you've got it, haven't you! Just replace the three letters of the word 'bus' with the five letters of the word 'train' in all four definitions, and you'll get something which makes a bit of sense, finally!!!!
What a crazy country we live in !!!!!
Tonight Judie's guest is fellow Thespian, the Irish actor Kenneth Branagh, and they reminisce about some of the many fluffed lines that they've been guilty of, over their long careers on the stage - 100 years between them, Judie calculates, would you believe!
Oops !!!!
And Branagh's words resonate strongly with Dench, who of course lost her husband, fellow actor Michael Williams, when Williams was aged just 65, back in 2001.
And reading the story in bed this morning, here in leafy Liphook, Hampshire, this morning, my wife Lois and I had to smile, when we saw that the couple's union was cemented with half a box of windmill cookies - some rituals never die, do they!!!!
my wife Lois and me - some recent pictures
How interesting thought that yet another couple has "sealed" their union with half a box of windmill cookies. And by coincidence, windmill cookies have been marked in our diaries for today, ringed with a big ring, because we're due to visit our dear daughter Alison today and decorate some windmill cookies, with her 3 teenage kids - Josie (19), Rosalind (17) and Isaac (15), this time for Christmas. Ali's husband Edward, a hotshot London lawyer, is not around - even in the run-up to Christmas he's got a lot of high-level meetings to cope with, we assume!
Poor Edward!!!!
Yours Truly, however, has got to hold his hand up and own up to not being a part of this pre-Christmas ritual today. I couldn't decorate a windmill cookie "for toffee", an expression you don't hear much nowadays, but it's what people used to say in mine and Lois's youth, which tells you how old we are !!!!
I'm careful take along my laptop this morning, however, when I drive Lois the 10 miles to Alison's family home in nearby Churt, just over the county line in Surrey. And, indeed, if you look carefully at that above picture, you'll see, bottom left, the giveaway "top of my laptop screen", as I surf the web, and also, bottom right, the jumbo slice of chocolate Swiss-roll that I've been in the process of "demolishing" (!).
"cookie Monday": while our daughter and grandkids
get on with it, Yours Truly busies himself with his
laptop and a huge slice of chocolate Swiss roll (ringed)
Well, you're only old once, is what I say !!!!!
Busy busy busy!!!!
And in the run-up to Christmas, Lois and I keep saying, in the morning, "When today's over, we'll be all set up for 'the big day' ", and yet, when we get into bed at night, we tend to say "when tomorrow's over, we'll be all set up", which is weird. Today is windmill cookie day, but tomorrow we've got our holiday Ocado delivery coming at 7 am, would you believe, and we've also got to pick up pre-ordered meat from the butcher's in nearby Grayshott, as well as wrap all our presents to each other and to our little family.
It's total madness!!!!
our mad week - busy, busy, busy !!!!
What a day - talk about stress!!!!
And when Lois and I flop on the couch again after our afternoon nap (!), like old-timers Horace and Helen (see Onion story above!!!) we want to "connect" too (!), and what better than to watch this week's edition of Only Connect, which tests "lateral thinking", before doing some much-need "horizontal thinking" in preparation for even more madness tomorrow!!!!!
Can YOU see the connection between these four seemingly-unrelated "things"?
For example, "rebus" doesn't mean "learn new skills", but "re-train" does, etc etc. Geddit ????!!!!
And that gives you something which programme presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell wittily calls "a train replacement bus service", something harassed rail-commuters know all about, to put if mildly !!!
harassed rail-commuters having to "de-train" and board a replacement bus
when problems on the track make "train travel tricky" - say 10 times quickly haha!!!!
21:00 After the stress of watching Only Connect (!), Lois and I decide to stay on the couch, and to unwind still further by watching "Tea with Judie Dench" on the Sky Arts Channel.
Lois and I didn't know that Dame Judie keeps a parrot, called Sweetheart, that she picked up in the East End from a Cockney parrot-seller. And Kenneth Branagh didn't know either, so Judie has to introduce them in this sequence:
Yikes! Obviously "Sweetheart" has been watching a bit too much of popular Cockney soap-opera, Eastenders, unless I'm much mistaken!!!!
And Kenneth, who's never owned a talking parrot, wants to know what kind of things "Sweetheart" tends to say:
Yikes! Obviously "Sweetheart" has been watching a bit too much of popular Cockney soap-opera, Eastenders, unless I'm much mistaken!!!!
It's no surprise that both Dench and Branagh are keen devotees of the works of William Shakespeare, and here Branagh recounts what he sees as the bard's genius. Branagh says that for him, the thing that stamps Shakespeare as a genius is his capacity to understand what we might call "the ordinary", because "the ordinary" is always extraordinary, Branagh says, and Dench agrees.
Branagh recalls how a line from Shakespeare can help with life's most difficult moments, such as the death of a loved one, events which, due to the depth of our emotions, often leave us unable to say anything at all.
When we can't find words, Branagh says, we can find Shakespeare's poetry, which go beyond the baldly literal.
The man, in the midst of his grief, knew he would have to speak about his dad at the funeral, but he felt himself at a loss for words.
And these lines gave the bereaved son some comfort in his time of grief, Branagh recalls.
Fascinating stuff, isn't it!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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