In the dim and distant past, when I would be stuck in traffic ( and to think I actually complained about that ) I would spend most of the day listening to Radio 2. There would be Chris Evans first before he moved to Virgin, then Ken Bruce with Pop Master, then Jeremy Vine ( who I always turned off because the programme was about current affairs with some pretty awful music in between the great British public phoning in and I really, really hate phone-ins though I suppose they save folk a fortune in psychiatrists’ fees ) but then there was Steve Wright in the Afternoon and after him Simon Mayo and his listeners’ confessions which I loved.
My favourite confession was from a guy who wanted to apologise to his parents. They’d been away on a holiday in a caravan park. The parents had gone out and left the kids alone ( different times, I guess ) The confessor had convinced his younger brother ( aged 6 I think) that as he was coming up to his seventh birthday he would wake up the next morning and find that he had been turned into a girl. The confessor had told the poor kid that he , himself, had been a girl who’d turned into a boy. The younger sibling went hysterical, didn’t sleep for the rest of the holiday and the parents could never figure out just why the holiday had turned into a nightmare because the older boy had told the younger he must never speak of this!
I think you may be able still to get the podcasts, but I sometimes had to stop driving as I was laughing so much. There was another about a group of women on a hen night in a hotel who managed to convince an elderly couple that they were the GB synchronized swimming team, demonstrated by miming their performance on the floor of the bar and then told the couple they would be doing it for real in the hotel swimming pool first thing in the morning. To avoid facing the disappointed couple, who doubtless set their alarm clock, the hen party rose even earlier and took off in their doubtless hung-over state before they could be rumbled.
I love a good joke ( then why don’t you tell any ? I hear you ask ) There’s a little 8 year old boy ( definitely didn’t change from being a girl ) near Birmingham who has posted a joke at the front of his house every day since the lock-down started. I loved his first effort,
“ Why do seagulls always fly over the sea?
“ Because if they flew over the bay they’d be bay gulls ( beigels, bagels , get it ? “
Big controversy in the Jewish community as to how you pronounce that. Eastern Europe (from whence my grandparents came…. here’s a good story about that which maybe I will return to another day if I haven’t told it already… who knows? I can’t even remember what I told you yesterday, pronounce it baygels, New Yorkers and the younger generation hear say Bygels . Doesn’t really matter when I can’t go out to buy any buygels!
But back to radio. Seems the BBC has lost millions of listeners to commercial stations like Virgin , Classic FM, Talk Sport ( which still, unbelievably is on the air finding things to talk about… or not talk about. Probably lots of Pinteresque silences there if you want to be bothered to listen. I don’t) A big sufferer has been Radio 4 which my wife has on all the time and I know a lot of my reader are also aficionados ( I did spell check there but don’t think what it came up with is right, but you get my meaning. Sure there are two ‘f’s’
I only listen to “ The Archers “ on Radio 4. And at the moment like all the addicts am hanging on to every word of the repeats. They are even better than the real thing, because as you know what happens it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep in the middle as I often do. Seems that they resuming new episodes on May 31st and the cast are recording from home. The actress who plays Kirsty, she who is heading for another disastrous end to a relationship, got so tired of her child interrupting that she told her ( or him, I forget ) that if he ( or she ) did it again that the people from the BBC would be very cross and would punish her ( or him) by banning her from watching anything on BBC 1-Player . Sounds like a confession to come in years to come.
You would have thought that working from home I would be listening to more radio, but I seem to be on zoom, or the phone or dealing with emails most of the day and the radio is a bit of distraction. When we used to pick up Sam from school every Tuesday and Thursday we would listen to Steve Wright in the car at 35 minutes past the hour between 2 and 4 ( well, that’s actually 2.35 and 3.35 to be precise ) because that’s when he gave out Factoids. Little snippets of obscure information that we would change to “ True or False “ questions for Sam.
Examples would be “ Is it true or false that the first mouse was used on a PC in 1964? “ the answer is “ true “ but I might mix it up to win the point ( always very competitive in my family ) and substitute 1965 for 64. Just as a matter of interest is it true or false that the first computer mouse was made out of wood and was triangular shaped? The answer is true.
So now I am reduced to making notes of the factoids and using them when I see Sam on Facetime or texting them to him. I’m still as ruthless as is he when he thinks the facts are wrong and somehow or other manages to contrive to beat me. Can’t wait to get back to doing it for real and I am thinking nor can he, despite my awful jokes. He always got a little gingerbread biscuit, a packet of mentos and a peanut butter sandwich and a drink. He is the only person I have ever met who loves school meals but his only complaint was that there wasn’t enough of them. He took the packet of sweets in the playground, made the kids form a queue and gave them out one by one until he only had a couple left for himself. Very generous little boy ( I think I wrote some time ago about how a school assistant put a stop to that ) . We would then walk to the car with me asking him true or false questions and then he would tuck into the sandwich as if he’d not seen food for a week, Then, on to the gingerbread man where he bit the head off first and the rest didn’t survive too long. So a tad worried about that given the cannibal story I relayed a while ago
You’d think he might be a bit podgy with all the sweets I’ve fed him over the years, but no. He’s really slim and fit-looking. Unlike a lot of the population it seems. Headline in the paper today as I picked It up off the mat was . “ Boris Declares War On Fat “ Mat and fat, notice the nice internal rhyme there? Anyway I can imagine Trump seeing the Times today and asking his advisers exactly where this place called Fat is and him maybe thinking it’s slightly to the left of Vietnam and if Boris is declaring war on it then shouldn’t he be too in order to Make America Great again.
Obesity is a big problem in the States with all those fast food outlets. Seems a burger place opened in Scotland as well this week and the burger starved population flocked to it in such droves that the police had to close the road and then the establishment. Imagine, over-weight kilted Scots sitting in the vehicles in a mile long traffic jam with the bagpipes flowing from the radio speaker and carbon-monoxide flowing from the car exhausts. Definitely need to save the NHS for those people. I think the rumour that Trump had flown over to his homeland to be first in the queue is grossly ( get the pun ? ) untrue.
We once went on a plane in the States over the Grand Canyon and a very small plane it was. They weighed us before we got on board so I was a bit concerned to see that one of our fellow travelers was so large that he could only get down the aisle sideways. There is a great episode in the lasts series of “ Curb Your Enthusiasm “ by the way, about passengers being weighed before they go on a small plane. Do watch it.
An do have a nice, sunny weekend. Looking good. Stay safe and also have a good Sabbath and see you all on the other Sabbath on Sunday.