Wendy and I went to the Natural History Museum last night to see Bohemian Rhapsody, as staged by the Lunar Cinema. Great films in iconic places.

They kindly gave me free tickets after I’d said the Valentines Night buses and tubes had prevented us getting there that night.

Amazing venue for anything, that place.

We went by bus and got there early – imagine that! 45 minutes rather than 4 hours, this time…

Well I’ll tell you what… things do seem to have changed. Two or three years ago I was regularly being made to feel very awkward/ being refused entry to buses when the bus had a baby’s buggy in the wheelchair space already. Drivers would frequently just not put down the ramp for me, or just shake their heads and drive off. Now that isn’t happening.

Before, it was quite common for a parent with a buggy to absolutely decline to give way to the wheelchair ( despite the law and the clear signage ). Now parents are smiling politely at me, moving buggies off the buses and ushering me on with cheery words. Males in particular are very gracious.

I do feel guilty when I effectively bump the pram off the bus, but to avoid confusion all round as to who has priority, I do board the bus and obviously thank the exiting buggy pusher.

It would seem to have crept into social convention then, this acceptance, at least in the areas I travel. The bus drivers too are smiling more.

Good, isn’t it?

And a happy St David’s Day to you all…..

🍺

My carer ( who is in her 30’s ) has spent her caring career looking after the very old or the very young.. obviously I’m not the latter but I’m not quite the former either.

Well apparently you have to be quite ‘ careful ‘ with your language at both ends of the age spectrum, for obvious reasons with the kids, and cos the elderly aren’t exactly ‘risqué ‘ as a rule, she says.

As a consequence ( and cos she is the churchy type ) when she is moved to ‘ insult ‘ me, she says such things as a ‘ you’re a Nincompoop !’ Obviously having been born in the wrong era to be insulted I just start laughing.

Today she went completely overboard and called me Cheeky Bones…?!

I don’t know but I think she’s overstepped the line there… so I’m monitoring the situation before making an official complaint.

In the meantime I’m wheeling carefully around her to avoid any more of her vicious name calling. Any advice from those experienced in domestic abuse environments welcome ….

I went to a talk by Michael Palin last week, with Marky P. If you don’t know, he’s a pretty famous fella, old Michael P.

He’s written a(nother) book, called Erebus – the story of a ship. In the talk he read extracts ( I’ve since realised ) rather than ‘ talked ‘ . I know that cos I’ve downloaded the audio book, which is narrated by him, and bits sound very familiar ( that’s cos I heard him read em out last week… )

Anyway, it’s a fascinating true account of a maritime world long gone, a time of extreme hardship at sea, with potential death around every corner ( or beyond every wave perhaps ). The ship was eventually lost at sea, all hands lost, along with Terra, her companion sister ship. However they recently discovered the wreck of Erebus in the frozen Canadian Arctic, hundreds of years after she disappeared without trace, so her story has been resurrected you could say.

Last night I met my buddy Russ in Richmond. The 2 Russ’s went to see Trevor McDonut McDonald speaking, but at the last minute he was substituted by Alistair Macgowan, the impressionist off the telly. Blimey that bloke is talented. His impressions are off the scale accurate, and he’s very intelligent and comedic with it. He also played the piano – classical pieces no less, rather than Les Dawson stylee, so it was entertaining on many levels. He might have crested in terms of career, but it’s a shame that he’s not still on the TV, as he’s a bit of a superstar. That’s the way of celebrity though- you only have a short shelf life these days, before some dopey reality tv ‘star ‘ gets far more limelight than their speck of talent deserves. I watched that fella Danny Dyer’s show the other day, then realised he’s on all the time. How can that be? He’s totally bereft of any talent at all. I think he’s off East Enders, which he’s only on because he has an East End accent. That hardly qualifies you to have your own show about history, does it? I doubt he couldn’t spell Enry the Aitff , let alone Henry the Eighth, so how has he ever been allowed near a history program? It’s a bleedin misstery to me mate, it is. He makes Phil Mitchell look like Einstein.

Wendy and I saw My Beautiful Boy the other night. Now that’s worth watching. Powerful and a bit tragic yes, but a very common tale for sure, and undoubtedly set to be more commonplace for kids growing up now. We went to the Body Worlds exhibition last week, and there’s a bit in it which explains that if your brain is largely only exposed to the ‘ thrill’ of computer games, smoking spliffs and screen excitement ( rather than social skills) whilst developing ( yes your brain develops neural connections when it experiences pleasure ) then you come to only experience pleasure when exposed to those same stimuli for life, rendering a kid/ young adult cerebrally addicted ( irreversibly ) to his / her computer, forever ‘ socially inadequate ‘ . That’s scary isn’t it?

GET YOUR KIDS OFF THEIR COMPUTERS then.. or be (partly) responsible for the ( lack of ) personality outcome.

You were warned….

What do you do when repeated efforts to fix something fail ? Well you change tack and try another way, I have learned.

My looker afterer, G, is a talented girl. There are lots of things she does well, and enthusiasm isn’t missing at all.

Hoovering however seems to be beyond her. So bad in fact that you can’t tell any difference between the area she has done and an area she hasn’t. I fairly regularly pointed out the, well let’s say shortcomings, of her efforts, but ultimately all I achieved was a flat that wasn’t any better Hoovered and a put out help…..

So I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner instead… and she ( I’ve called her Henrietta, after her well known bro ) is a little dream. She’s thorough, DOESN’T GET DISTRACTED, DOESNT STOP TO CHAT, doesn’t ever take offence if I nudge her to go over a certain area again etc etc

Every paralysed bloke should have one, if not ( maybe ) every bloke full stop…. the home harmony she brings is definitely, definitely worth the pounds paid.

I did a tad of research online. She was rated No 1. She’s a Bagotta – black, slinky and slavishly obedient…. I think some people could get a Robovac fetish.

But not me – things aren’t quite that desperate ( yet )

So I’d booked special tickets for a screening of a romantic film inside The Natural History Museum for Valentines night… being the romantic type.

It’s only about 5 miles from here, so I reckoned an hour and a half travel allowance shoulda been more than double the time needed, even in the rush hour.

Best laid plans then… first bus was there straight away, and about 25 minutes to Hammersmith tube station. Few stops to Earls Court and 0.7 miles walk/roll after that – simples.

Getting off the train at Earls Court – following signs for the lift out, back and forth… until a chap in orange said ‘ no lift working at the moment, mate ‘… Brilliant, out of about half a dozen bloody District Line stations that are possible to use, they don’t see it as a priority to fix a lift out of one of them.

Ok then…. so with 25 minutes to go, arriving on time not looking so good. Next accessible station- Victoria….

Did that…. 1.8 miles back to the museum by bus …one that didn’t arrive for 15 minutes… and then got us within half a mile 10 minutes after the film was starting. Never mind, I was sure they’d let us in… no, they had closed the entrance altogether, and the main doors

No choice but to head back home really as iBot battery by this time depleting… another bus then… this time there was a bloke obviously completely off his face on drugs that thought he was Michael Jackson.. break dancing in the bus aisle right next to us for 25 minutes… which was actually a bit threatening as he looked ‘ well dodgy’…

20 minutes to Hammersmith, then another bus to where I live…

4 hours after we’d set off we were back where we started then …. filmless.

Never mind. Netflix and bed…. to the rescue.. The Notebook was a nice film. Neither of us had seen it before. At the end I realised that Wendy was looking a bit sad. I ( bit surprised having not been particularly moved ) said ‘ awwww’ etc etc.

Then she said that she’d been crying for at least 20 minutes and accused me of being totally cold hearted… blimey that’s so not true! I think one of us is definitely more ‘ emotional ‘ than the other though.

You gotta love her – she is so cute.

Oh wow. I’ve been reminded by a lady I used to work with that I actually had a patient ( undoubtedly now deceased ) called Fanny Stribling…

Thank you Natalie for that very welcome reminder!

Police questioned two men yesterday… one had drunk battery acid and the other had eaten fireworks.

They charged one, and let the other one off.

C’mon… that is funny! 😂

PS There was a third one, wearing jump leads around his neck. They warned him not to start anything.

Well the Kaiser Chiefs were just brilliant, and blimey the iBot didn’t half make it better. For a start I could see the band, and getting through the crowd to the bit I was headed to is about a zillion times more possible when you look like a Transformer …

Kaisers 9/10 for me. They totally smashed it.