Yes, Friends, today's news is dominated by microwave ready-meals mysteriously "going pear-shaped" all over the UK, particularly pies, which is weird, for reasons not totally clear at this point!!!!!
This slightly "spooky" story, and others of a similar bent, were all over Onion News this morning - you may have seen the headlines!!!!
my wife Lois and me - a recent picture
Today, Saturday, turns out to be a day dominated by wet weather, but more importantly, dominated by Lois feeling she is coming down with a cold, with a nasty sore throat as its "harbinger", which isn't good! And we dodge the storms today but make a quick trip out this morning to the local Co-op mini-supermarket to get some ready-meals in, plus a bunch of other stuff that we forgot to include in our weekly Ocado delivery - silly us!!!!
(above) our local Co-op mini-supermarket seen here in sunnier times, and
(below left) our receipt for today's purchases including meatballs, shepherd's pie,
coq au vin and cod mornay, and (below right) us shopping here in unhappier times,
after a freezer failure, during this year's first heatwave, had forced staff
to clear some of the shelves - what madness!!!!
Yes, poor Lois comes along to the Co-op, despite her sore throat. And the sudden rainstorms today certainly aren't helping, with even more of "the wet stuff" forecast for tonight, would you believe!
What a crazy country we live in!
Lois getting a cold is a bit of a surprise, because she and I have been extraordinarily healthy on the whole ever since we started getting the COVID jabs a few years ago, and this one is only Lois's second cold in 6 years, which is amazing, and I myself have been almost cold-free too, which is weird.
Nevertheless the ready-meals, soups etc that we buy this morning will make things easier in the kitchen this weekend, that's for sure! Even accident-prone Yours Truly can manage to look like a superchef with one of these little beauties in my hands, no question about that!!!!
us this evening enjoying a CookShop ready meal of cod mornay - yum yum!
And as the town's flagship busy-looking retired couple, we have responsibilities galore, including keeping ourselves "down with the kids" (!), and (as a minimum!) understanding the basics of the new "Gen Z" 'lingo'. That 'malarkey' is a top priority for us, because of our 5 teenage grandchildren: our daughter Alison's three in nearby Churt, just over the county line in Surrey, and also our other daughter Sarah's 13-year-old twins, 9000 miles away in Perth, Australia.
There's a crazy story this week about the new Gen Z version of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations", a development, which, to Lois and me, is, as young people say today, "seriously cringe" - no question about that!!!
What madness (again) !!!! And call us hopeless 'dinosaurs' if you like, but Lois and I firmly prefer our Dickens served up in its original language, if you please!!!!
Gaelic is one of the few surviving languages from the Celtic language-family, once spoken pretty much all over Europe and even in Turkey. The rise of the Roman Empire more or less stamped these languages out, with the exception of Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic, Manx and Cornish, which clung on in the British Isles, with Cornish later being 'exported' back into Brittany in Northern France.
And youngsters north of the border are even getting into Scots Gaelic these days, we hear this afternoon on BBC Radio 4, in this week's first programme in the latest season of Michael Rosen's fascinating "Word of Mouth" language series, which is a totally heart-warming story on this rainy day in Liphook, so all is not lost!
And now, young people in cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow, are getting back into Scots Gaelic thanks to handy language apps like DuoLingo, which they can get on their phones.
kids learning Gaelic in a Scottish school
And today we hear more about the language from expert Roddy Maclean. Unusually there are no words for 'yes' and 'no' in Gaelic so you're asked "Do you speak Gaelic", you have to reply with the equivalent of saying "Speak" or "Speak-not", which is weird! Another oddity is that you have to put the verb first in any sentence so that a sentence like "the cat sat on the mat" becomes "sat the cat on the mat", using whatever the Gaelic words are.
Also, the language has, like, a billion words for hills depending on their shape e.g. the equivalent of "nose" for a nose-shaped hill, "tooth" for a hill that looks more like a tooth, also shoulder, heel etc - you name it! Gaelic also has another billion words for types of bogs, all neatly classified - fun fact: we got the English word 'bog' from Irish in the first place, would you believe (!). But what madness!!!!
A fascinating programme, although Lois thinks they should have included a section on Gaelic's crazy spelling, which surely makes it, like, a billion times harder for English speakers to master. Who would guess, for example, that the Irish name "Siobhan", is pronounced "She-vaughan" - it's total lunacy!!!
21:00 At least Gaelic, as an Indo-European language, is distantly related to English, which is something that can't be said about Chinese, to put it mildly! And tonight Lois and I decide to go to bed on the first half of a fascinating documentary about the ground-breaking visit of British pop group Wham to China back in 1985 - the first ever live performance by a Western pop group in the country, and a tour that captured headlines around the world.
And we text our 16-year-old grandson Isaac over in nearby Churt, who is studying Chinese, to be sure and see the programme too, so that's all good!!!
flashback to 2024: (left) our grandson Isaac (front, right, half out of shot) on the bus to
London's Heathrow Airport with his Chinese-learning classmates, and (right)
his student-group on arrival at the city in China where they spent much of their study trip
Lois and I find this programme fascinating. We knew that "Wham" were already big stars in the UK, but we didn't know that the main purpose of the tour, from the point of view of Wham's manager, was to create the kind of publicity that would launch the group in America and around the world.
And that plan certainly worked, with "the boys" - George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley - having to take part in press conferences in Beijing packed with representatives of the world's press, as well as coping with live-by-satellite interviews by American journalists on some of the top-rated morning news shows in the US.
Here's one such interview conducted by Phyllis George on the CBS Morning News, on the day after their live show in Beijing.
Oops - yes, the time difference !!!!
The two boys were completely unknown to the public in America at this time, so Phyllis gave her CBS audience some useful pointers for identifying who was who, which was helpful, but her descriptions also gave some merriment to George and Andrew, no doubt about that!
Good to know, Phyllis haha!!!
Lois and I were also impressed by the boys themselves - unexpectedly a well-spoken, intelligent and sensitive pair with a good sense of humour, who, while not enjoying all the attention, and, at times, looking completely exhausted, nevertheless managed to keep their feelings private and to put on a brave face, which is touching!
Fascinating stuff !!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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