Skip to main content

You'd be surprised how good a surprise can be


If Evie's 40, I must still be 38. From left, Washed and Ready to Eat's Phil Woodford joins the party in Liverpool.
It's frightening when your friends start turning 40. But not as frightening as being 40 yourself, of course. As someone who still wears the "late thirties" label with pride, I see myself very much as part of the younger generation of this great country of ours. And I was delighted to fly the youth flag at a surprise party in Liverpool for my old university pal, Eve-Marie. We met at the LSE twenty years ago in a hall of residence, where we'd been allocated rooms opposite each other at the end of a long corridor. I was a shy and retiring sociology student, while she sweated over law textbooks. Every couple of weeks, a "friend" called James would pop down from Liverpool to visit little Evie. I thought the relationship was all perfectly innocent and charming, but another of our neighbours - a serious-minded American postgraduate called Malory - did voice some doubts. Mal was later vindicated, as the two of them got married and now have three great kids. They also introduced me to Mrs W, but hey, that's a whole other blog. Anyway, somehow or other, James managed to organise a surprise party. It was absolutely textbook - the kind of stuff that happens on the telly, rather than in real life. Evie was getting a bit annoyed that no one seemed to be taking her big four-oh that seriously and had reluctantly settled for a meal out with her hubby. After various toings and froings, she ended up at a College north of Sefton Park where we were all hiding and waiting to jump out on her. Really good fun for all of us and Evie herself was "made up". That's Scouse for "enchanted and delighted". But don't go organising anything for me. Remember, I'm not even 39 yet.

Comments

  1. Anonymous3:58 AM

    you're 39?....you'll be 40 before you know it!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m...

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...