Yes, friends, is YOUR marriage in trouble? Plus (important condition!!!!) do you also live in East Hampshire, as well as having a troubled marriage?
If you can answer a resounding "yes" to both questions (!), then local psychologist Dr Roger Vernon is the guy you ought to see - he can work wonders, as the lead in today's local Onion News for East Hampshire makes abundantly clear!
Certainly, Vernon's affinity for herbal tea is one of his key weapons in his fight to save troubled marriages, and is a red flag for most people, even they're unmarried, would you believe!
And this heart-warming Onion lead story brings a knowing smile to the faces of me and my wife Lois, as we sit in Lois's church for the Sunday Morning Meeting this morning in a village hall just outside bustling Petersfield, Hampshire, to put it mildly!
flashback to this morning: my wife Lois and me this morning,
having a bit of a quiet "giggle" over the lead story in this morning's
Local Onion News (!), as we wait for the meeting to commence
The fact is, that herbs and herbal essences are very much on our minds at the moment, and it's top of Lois's agenda today to plant some herbs - sage, rosemary and thyme and one other that I can't remember, the dear little plants that we bought this week, at the garden centre in the nearby village of Rake - no pun intended!!!! - a village that straddles the county line between Hampshire and West Sussex.
flashback to Thursday: Lois and I visit the garden centre at Rake, where Lois
picks out some herbs and I mostly just push around the trolley (!)
How did the village of Rake get its quirky name? Well, glad you asked!
See? Simples haha!!!!
But oh dear!!! This Sunday, for Lois and me, is quickly turning into yet another "busy busy busy" day, would you believe!
First thing this morning we had a rushed video phone conversation on my phone with our daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia with husband Francis and their 12-year-old twin daughters Lily and Jessica. Lois and I had sat waiting for 20 minutes on the couch for our regular Sunday morning "catch-up" laptop zoom call with Sarah to begin, but from the Perth end, answer came there none, until Sarah came through on my phone for a hurried bit of "chit-chat", apologising for the delay.
graphic illustrating graphically - no pun intended! - mine and Lois's frustrating
start for the day when our poor daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, fails to
come through for our weekly Sunday morning "catch-up" zoom call today.
Poor Sarah!! And Lois and I don't blame Sarah in the slightest for forgetting about our weekly zoom this morning. She's under a lot of stress this weekend, following her first week in her new job in central Perth, having to fight the rush-hour traffic, managing a new team, and being given what sounds like an inadequate handover from her predecessor. What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
And poor "Two Jobs" Sarah is still doing her old job back in Evesham UK in her so-called spare time - online in evenings and at weekends, which is mad!
(left) our daughter Sarah (second from right) with colleagues in Evesham UK,
and (right) leaving her Perth office when Lois and I picked her up after work
back in 2018 - what madness, isn't it !!!
Lois, getting "down and dirty" in the veggie beds of our tiny back garden in one of
Liphook's picturesque 1970's housing estates, (bottom left) planting a bunch of herbs
and (bottom right) some "lily-of-the-valleys" - is that the plural? [No! - Ed]
Busy busy busy!!! But in compensation, extra nice tonight to relax in the best way we know, by watching a fascinating old documentary about 19th century writer Oscar Wilde. And it's nice to see that Wilde appreciated "Lilies" as much as we do, after our hour spent planting some in our garden (!), not just lilies the plants, but "Lilies" the women of that name too, into the bargain!!!!
As a young man seeking to become famous, Wilde gravitated to the company of the era's great actresses, hobnobbing with actresses like Lily Langtree, and and in a publicity stunt, dropping lilies at the feet of French actress Sarah Bernhardt when she arrived in England for her first tour, in 1879.
Richard D'Oyly Carte, who was then staging the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in Britain, more or less hired Wilde to go ahead of the company's planned American tour of the opera "Patience". The idea was for Wilde to give lectures in towns and cities all over the States, to explain some of the obscure British jokes and cultural references in the opera, especially the ones satirising England's aesthetic poets. The idea was to drum up expectations for the opera's forthcoming American tour.
A typical Gilbert and Sullivan song from Patience goes as follows:
"The sentimental passion, of a vegetable fashion, must excite your languid spleen,
An attachment a la Plato, for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean,
"Though the Philistines will jostle, you will rank as an apostle, in the high aesthetic band,
If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily, in your evil little hand,
"And everyone will say, as you walk your flowery way, if he's content with a vegetable love,
Which would certainly not suit me,
Why, what a particularly pure young man, this pure man must be!"
Meaning obvious, surely haha (!!!!).
But, anyway, Wilde said (in effect) challenge accepted!
When he landed in New York, he famously said, at the customs, "I have nothing to declare but my genius!", and after that, his every word was reported, we're told tonight. In a letter home, he wrote, "I have great success here. I am torn in bits by society - immense receptions and dinners - 'nothing like it since Dickens', they say. Crowds wait for me. Girls lovely, men simple and intellectual.
At last, his name was "up in lights", in letters six feet tall:
And all very nostalgic for Lois and me, because we remember the surprise we felt, back in the 1980's, during our three years in the States, when we were touring with our two young daughters "in the back of beyond" in Colorado. By complete chance we came across Wilde's name high up in the Rockies, when we visited a remote town called Leadville.
The tourist office there told us that Wilde had given a lecture in the town's theatre almost 100 years previously.
flashback to 1983: (above) our two young daughters Alison (8)
and Sarah (6), and (below) me with Sarah, when Lois and I stopped by the
small town of Leadville, Colorado, while touring the Rocky Mountains.
Happy days! Leadville was a lovely quiet town, with hardly a soul around, as I remember.
In Wilde's time, however, Leadville was described as "America's most dangerous town". However, despite that, it appears that Wilde gave a lecture there about "interior design" in the small local theatre to an audience consisting entirely of silver miners - my goodness! He told them they were the spiritual heirs of Benvenuto Cellini, the famous Italian silversmith, which they are said to have found flattering.
The miners asked Wilde why he hadn't brought Cellini with him to the theatre, and Wilde replied that Cellini had unfortunately died a long time ago. The miners then reportedly asked "Who shot him?"
These tough young miners in the audience finally fell asleep, it's said, but when they woke up, they invited Wilde to visit their mine, asking him to officially open a new mine shaft with a silver drill. Afterwards they all sat down for “supper” at the bottom of the mine: the first course was whisky, the 2nd course also whisky, the 3rd course more whisky, and so on.
It turned out, however, that Wilde could drink them all under the table. I suspect he had previously got a lot of practice in back in London with his drinking buddies, but I'm not entirely sure about that - the jury is still out on that one, but it was certainly the subject of one of his famous epigrams:
After visiting Leadville, Wilde told his agent that it was now high time to travel back to England. He explained that people were beginning to take him seriously (!).
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
