Good
Morning – or whatever it is when you open this.
Delay
this time was entirely deliberate. The hip op is due on the 3 October, having
been put back for one reason or another. But I never got that date until today.
Otherwise
the Grenyer family is tolerably well. Tennis is still being played, and beer
and wine is being consumed. Stayed at Bowood, seat of the Marquess of Lansdowne,
for a few days last week.
Met
old friends from Cayman there – the Woods and the Richardsons. Always nice to
meet friends from places that we have enjoyed living in.
Interesting
to read that the Government have squeezed police finances so far that we cannot
expect any but the most serious crimes to be attended to, and they are having
difficulty in recruiting to such an
extent that there are vacancies that have been able to be budgeted for. More or
less the same thing is happening to the armed forces, so any pretence at
defence is a joke. But we still have the underwater Nuclear Deterrent.
Talking
of police finances, the Inland Revenue has finally admitted that they are not
prosecuting the Great and the Good when they commit offences in evading taxes,
etc., because they will be embarrassed by having to appear in court, and/or if
they are generous benefactors of the Conservative party. This does not seem to
have caused the stink that I thought it would, and I cannot imagine why!! It
seemed to bottom of page 3 stuff in the papers, though.
Heard
that I may be profiled in a future edition of my school Old Boys’ Association.
Not sure why there is anxiety to air any of that, and I do hope that my
indiscretions are not going to be aired after all these years. Particularly as
the school is about to become co-ed, and my eldest granddaughter is hoping to
move there for her 6th form education. All sorts of things might
wriggle out because of that.
Enough
of that. Time for some of this:
Quotes
from stand-ups at Edinburgh:
What do you call a dinosaur with a extensive vocabulary? A
thesaurus.
England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.
I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx.
All the toilets in New York's police stations have been stolen.
Police have nothing to go on.
I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.
Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.
Velcro - what a rip off!
Cartoonist found dead in home. Details are sketchy.
+++
A tourist in Vienna is going
through a graveyard and all of a sudden he hears music. No one
is around, so he starts searching for the source.
He finally locates the
origin and finds it is coming from a grave with a headstone that reads:
"Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770- 1827". Then he realizes that the music
is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and it is being played backward!
Puzzled, he leaves the
graveyard and persuades a friend to return with him.
By the time they arrive back
at the grave, the music has changed.
This time it is the Seventh Symphony, but
like the previous piece, it is being played backwards.
Curious, the men agree to
consult a music scholar. When they return with the expert, the Fifth
Symphony is playing, again backwards.
The expert notices that the
symphonies are being played in the reverse order in which they were composed, The 9th, then the 7th, then the
5th.
By the next day the word has
spread, and a crowd has gathered around the grave. They are all listening to the
Second Symphony being played backward.
Just then the graveyard's caretaker ambles up
to the group.
Someone in the group asks
him if he has an explanation for the music.
"I would have thought
it was obvious,” the caretaker says."He’s decomposing."
++
A
short blog this month. Enjoy what is left of September and I shall try and
publish on time in October.
