A wonderful, wonderful evening together

I don't usually put jokes onto my blogsite, but I thought I'd share this one
with you... this one was sent to my by a good friend ...

(by the way, Mrs C and I are having yet another holiday next week, with other
family members to celebrate my mother-in-law's 90th birthday ... she's known
me longer than I've known her, as she gave me a bath when I was baby, when
my mum was laid up in bed with mumps! ... I'll be back in Blogoland next
weekend).



A man is dining in a fancy restaurant and there is a gorgeous redhead sitting
at the next table. He has been checking her out since he sat down, but lacks
the nerve to talk with her.

Suddenly she sneezes, and her glass eye comes flying out of its socket toward
the man. He reflexively reaches out, grabs it out of the air, and hands it
back.

'Oh my, I am so sorry,' the woman says as she pops her eye back in place.
'Let me buy your dinner to make it up to you,' she says.

They enjoy a wonderful dinner together, and afterwards they go to the
theatre followed by drinks. They talk, they laugh, she shares her deepest
dreams and he shares his. She listens.

After paying for everything, she asks him if he would like to come to her
place for a nightcap and stay for breakfast. They had a wonderful,
wonderful time.

The next morning, she cooks a gourmet meal with all the trimmings. The guy
is amazed. Everything had been SO incredible!

'You know,' he said, 'you are the perfect woman. Are you this nice to every
guy you meet?'

'No,' she replies. . .






Wait for it. ...








It's coming. ..







The suspense is killing you, isn't it?





She says:

'You just happened to catch my eye.'

The England v Slovenia match

Kick-off for the match will be in 5 minutes' time. England's chances
of carrying on in the World Cup will be decided very soon.

Not surprisingly, the roads around our house have become very quiet
... a bit like it does early on Christmas Day morning. Most blokes
will be sitting around a TV set somewhere, at home, in the pub or in
their workplaces (if their managers are as keen to watch the match).

Like most Brits, I was disappointed by England's lacklustre performance
against the USA and Algeria, and if the team doesn't pull up its
socks this time, they'll all be coming home on the next plane.

........................................................

Postscript 3 hours later ... well, what a fantastic performance ...
a 1-0 win to England ... a brilliant team effort. England is through
to the next round of matches. Well done, lads!

Long weekend in London

Last week Mrs C and I spent a few days in London with our family there…







the highlights of which were a trip to Café Nero (Costas was closed for refurbishment) …



and going to Wimbledon Fair, which is an annual event, staged on Wimbledon Common.



I didn’t spot any Wombles there, but saw this lovely looking machine ...



…. I didn’t ask the guys for the price, as I’m not looking for another
car just now.

I’ve put a few more photos onto my Flickr site (there’s a link to this in the side-bar), together with a couple of photos of “red skies at night”.

PS ... I've just checked out this car on the internet. The price is a snip, at £112k.

The Fab Three

This morning I joined a couple of mates at a recording studio in Nottingham,
to put down a few more tracks of us singing and playing electric guitar
together. It went much better than I expected, including my own choice of
"When I saw here standing there", a song which takes me straight back to
the 60s (and meeting the first girl I dated, at a school dance).



Hearing my own voice played back to me later on, felt rather strange ...
I hardly recognised it ... and I haven't got a very good singing voice
either, (so I would never have made it to "Top of the Pops"). Anyway, we
had a good time, though I'd felt very anxious about my own performance, in
the past few weeks. Two of my guitar strings broke during the session ...
my friend B replaced the first one, but after the second one went, the
sound engineer very kindly loaned me the studio's Fender Strat (which was
as good as, if not better than my own). If we ever do this again, we'll
bring in replacement strings and extra guitars.

I think the worry about this and several other factors have been the cause
of quite bad indigestion pain, which I've had on and off in the past few
weeks. The pain eased slightly with cutting out alcohol and coffee in the
past 10 days, and even more so today, which makes me think it was mainly
stress-related. It reminds me of the bad indigestion I had from time to
time, when working under a lot of pressure as a hospital doctor and then
as a family doctor. It disappeared when I retired!

Catch-up on my news

Since we’ve been back we’ve had a small family get-together to celebrate
Mrs C’s upcoming birthday, for which I made a couple of Sophie Dahl’s
chocolate cakes.





The recipe for the latter is a good one, but I found the cooking temperature
and timing for our fan-assisted electric oven needed to be increased (190
deg C for 55-65 mins).
Anyway the end result was really lovely, as was having all our girls together
(plus nearly all their partners and our grandchildren). The weather was great
for most of the day, but later on we had torrential thunderstorms which lasted
well into the night.

I spent the next few days processing over 200 photos of our Strasbourg trip,
and putting them onto my Flickr site. Why I put so many on, God only knows,
but then I thought they were my best photos of several hundred more, so why
not share the best with everyone? Why indeed. However, several of my shots of Strasbourg Cathedral weren’t very good, owing to bad lighting / poor technique,
but I’ve put them on partly to remind me to take better ones next time we go …
one of my sisters lives there, so we’ve got no excuse not to go and see her
again.

Here are three of the many photos I took …

The Opera House



One of the most photographed buildings in Strasbourg …



The tram at Place Kleber



It looks very like one of our trams in Nottingham, but in a more stylish setting.

Today, we’ve had our two Nottingham grandchildren with us the best part
of the day, and later on, we put on a meal for two of Mrs C’s friends,
all of them former counsellors at Relate. I spent some time on the computer
upstairs while they talked shop and about their personal lives, but joined
them later for tea and a chat. We looked at each others photos later on,
until bedtime (as one of Mrs C’s friends is staying with us overnight,
returning home to Scotland tomorrow).

To end on … a little quiz for you. Who do you think painted this fabulous
picture, and in what year? Where can you see the original painting?

Back from Strasbourg

Hi folks ... yes, we're back from a wonderful whirlwind tour of Strasbourg
and the surrounding region in Alsace (in France).

Mrs C and I went as groupies of the symphony orchestra in Leicester ...
my sister-in-law is the principal cellist and one of the main organisers of
their trips abroad ... a huge undertaking to organise all the transport,
hotels, meals out and outings, for everyone.

I've spent the last few days going through all my pics, and have selected
about 200 out of the many hundreds I took. I've yet to process all these
and get them onto Flickr, which I'll do in the next few days.

Mrs C and I have hosted a family get-together to celebrate her birthday
rather early, as it was the most convenient weekend for all our girls,
and their partners and children to attend. I'll post a few pics of that
too. We could have done with another day or two to potter around, to wind
down from all of this.

Well it's now 5.40am, so I've got about 3 hours free to get on with some
photo-editing. Later on this morning, I'm meeting up with a couple of mates
for another jamming session on electric guitar (and singing some of the
golden oldies). Talk to you soon.