… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 31 …
SUNDAY 23rd AUGUST
I was recently talking (well, emailing) with a well-known comedian. The interchange went:
The Glum family, with Jimmy Edwards second from the left
HIM: In an extraordinary – sorry ‘unprecedented’ – turn of events I have become busy! How you coping? I’ve been quite glum….
ME: Sorry to hear you have been Glum, presumably in the Jimmy Edwards pater familias role. I am a nihilist, so the world this year seems just ticketyboo and SNAFU, surely those last three words deserving of a lovable Noel Gay type London knees-up song.
HIM: Your nihilism has cheered me up and my excessive laziness reduced such that I have sent 3 emails today.
We are, truly, living in the time of coronavirus.
MONDAY 24th AUGUST
I am back to waking up 10 or 12 times every night with a bone dry mouth and have to drink water. Sometimes, this means I wake up in mid-dream.
Political problems in Belarus… I woke up too soon to help
Last night, I woke up and, for some reason, I had been talking in my dream to an Egyptian general who was working for a female Russian President who was having a television programme made about her. Lurking in the background watching all this was a rather aged Melina Mercouri – the Greek actress of the 1950s and 1960s – with staring eyes. I was talking to the Egyptian general about the escalating political problems in Belarus…
…and then I woke up.
Belarus will, unfortunately, have to do without my input.
Jo Burke – now a wiser woman after interviewing me
TUESDAY 25th AUGUST
Last Thursday, I was interviewed in the back garden of a Blackheath pub by performer Jo Burke for her upcoming series of online podcasts. She kindly said there had been ‘a technical problem’ last Thursday, rather than a case of interviewee incoherence.
So we had a second attempt this evening, via Zoom. It should be more physically editable but was no less incoherent. I should perhaps have warned her I am a terrible interviewee and should definitely have researched my own life before we started… I could not really remember the order in which things happened in my life nor how they came to happen.
Comedian Malcolm Hardee had the same problem when he wrote his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake. Perhaps his problem was even worse. He could not remember in which DECADE things had happened let alone in which year.
Immediately before his book went to press, he remembered he had once been arrested by the Special Branch when he was found on a high window ledge outside prominent Cabinet Minister Michael Heseltine’s hotel room. He (Malcolm) was naked apart from a raincoat with nothing in its pockets but a pack of pornographic playing cards. He had mistaken Heseltine’s room for a chum’s.
Until then, Malcolm had forgotten all about this incident. It was just another normal day in his life. We managed to squeeze it into his autobiography at the last moment.
Someone else who was in the hotel at the same time (Yes, it really DID happen) told me the eyes of the Special Branch men who interviewed Malcolm looked stunned and mystified.
WEDNESDAY 26th AUGUST
I must have woken up six or eight times last night. Bone dry
I must have woken up six or eight times last night, my mouth bone dry and needing to drink water.
Also, about halfway through the night, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep with hiccups and heartburn, which sounds like the title of an Oasis song from the 1990s.
It was “painful and distracting” – a phrase which sounds like an extract from a review of an Oasis song from the 1990s.
I ended up sucking on a Gaviscon, which sounds like a mumbled lyric from some Bob Dylan song in the 1960s.
The above paragraphs are what I thought when I was having the hiccups, heartburn and Gaviscon. I wrote them down.
For some reason, the heartburn made me overdose on musical similes.
THURSDAY 27th AUGUST
We are living through the end of a historic period. Facebook Friend Matthew Wilkes spotted a newspaper item which said linguist Dr Lauren Fonteyn had Tweeted that teenagers and those in their 20s, who grew up using short messages to communicate, can see the full stop (that’s a ‘period’ to any American reading this) “as a symbol of curt passive-aggression”.
I re-posted this on Facebook and comments included one from Georgina Dick:
It’s not that we’re offended and need to grow up, it’s more of an understanding of the tone you’re trying to put across. There’s a big difference between saying “OK” “OK.” and “OK .”
Promoter Alex Petty of Laughing Horse Comedy suggested:
We need to put a full stop to this!
Period punctuation unsourced.
…and the quoted Dr Lauren Fonteyn aka Lauren Bliksem Tweeted:
Apparently this is based on a Tweet I never sent or something I said to the Telegraph which I haven’t spoken to.
We are now well and truly fully into the 21st Century.
FRIDAY 28th AUGUST
Argh! Got to sleep around 8.00pm last night. Woke multiple times during the night including once with hiccups and heartburn (again). Gaviscon was chewed. Just woke up again – 10.30am – and still want to go to sleep but have to get train at 12.31 for lunch with performer Lynn Ruth Miller so about to get up, sleepy. Argh! Why did Einstein not work a bit harder and invent time travel?
That was written after 14½ hours of sleep.
I went to catch the aforementioned train. There was no barrier to go through as the main area at Elstree station was closed after rain brought down part of the roof. So it was not until I arrived at St Pancras station that I realised I had left my travel pass behind at home. I had to pay £13.50 for a one-day travel card.
Lynn Ruth – an innocent in English plumbing
Lynn Ruth Miller – an American and therefore a novice in the English language – told me she had only just discovered that a ‘tap’ in Britain is a ‘faucet’ in the US.
Coming back from our lunch, it was not until I arrived at Seven Sisters station that I realised had left my thin case and iPad in the ticket hall at Stoke Newington station.
Fortunately, alert Overground staff at Stoke Newington had spotted the case and kept it for me. Including the iPad.
SATURDAY 29th AUGUST
I was standing in the front room of my house with a female friend. We were half-watching a feature film from the 1950s on my television, which was sitting on the floor atop a low wooden frame base.
A man dressed as a spiv (Photograph via Wikipedia, Chafford Hundred, England)
Through my front window, I saw a man who was dressed like a 1940s/1950s ‘spiv’ coming to my front door. I said to my friend: “There’s a spiv coming to the door”.
She looked surprised by my use of the word. She looked out the window but couldn’t see him because he was already at the door.
I went into my front porch and he had just shoved some leaflet through the letter box.
My friend and I went back to watching the movie. She was holding a doll about eight inches high with pink hair. Not an unusual hair colour in dolls. My friend decided she wanted me to hold the top of the doll’s hair down while she coiffured it.
She moved a blue pouffe over to near the wall. This entailed turning the television round so she could still see it, But she was sitting so close to the wall by the front window that I could not get in and hold the doll’s hair.
So I got a red pouffe and put it in the middle of the room, away from the window and wall where it was more accessible – and I had to turn the TV set round again, so we could both see it. I had to lift it up and put it down because it was on its low wooden frame base.
I was about to start holding the doll’s hair down when some more people arrived at the front door. There were three of them and they tried to tell me the turf in my front garden was in a mess and I needed to buy some turf care liquid. They were obviously some sort of con artists.
Turf love – Could be better but I’ve seen worse
I said: “Oh, no no no, I like the more natural, rough look, not a highly-manicured lawn.”
One of the guys started lifting up the turf with his right foot.
Another of them was standing in the middle of my front lawn with six large – maybe six feet high – green pole-shaped things – maybe rolled turf – the girth of a small tree.
I thought I will confuse them by being surreal (something I occasionally try with cold-callers on the telephone).
“I might use some of those,” I said, “but I’m thinking of painting them. Three could be red, white and blue for Britain. Three could be red, white and blue for France. And there might be some way of working the German flag in there somehow… If I paint one black, it would be very effective. It would look very good.”
This succeeded in confusing the man who was holding the earthen post-like things.
Just before this, my friend has come out from the front room and was looking at the three men with a hint of bemusement on her face. By now it was dusk, getting quite dark, so the garden con-men went away, quite confused.
My friend and I went back into the living room.
I looked out the window and there was a man at the bottom of the garden – a supervisor who was obviously allowing salesman to come in and profer their services to people living in our square.
“…I looked at my bedside alarm clock… It was 6.49am…”
I thought this was very strange.
Then I sort-of vaguely woke up and looked at my bedside alarm clock. It was 6.49am.
I turned over and went back to sleep.
I woke up a few more times after that. On the second occasion, half awake, I drawled the details of the dream into my iPhone before I forgot it altogether which, obviously, I would have.
Possibly even more surreal was the video my friend Lynn (not to be confused with Lynn Ruth Miller) and husband Frank sent me this evening.
This afternoon, they went to watch the Brighton & Hove Albion vs Chelsea football match. It was the first UK match since the COVID-19 outbreak started that had been played with supporters present rather than being played ‘behind closed doors’. Only home supporters in Brighton.
It is certainly a weird video, ending with what sounds to me like traditional gypsy or Turkish music and then the teams ‘take the knee’ to honour the increasing number of unarmed black men being shot by the police in Donald Trump’s USA. The last one was shot in the back seven times at close range, while bending over to get in a car door.
Strange times indeed.
… CONTINUED HERE …
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