Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Keeping up the Joneses

We had a fantastic few days in north Wales. We wandered around taking photographs, eating loads of rich food, drinking the first festive Baileys of the year and generally chilling out. I can reccomend holidays in the first week of December. One thing that peturbed me all weekend was the sight of an elderly man with auburn hair who took the comb-over hairdo to new heights. Rather than just a plain old Bobby Charlton sweep across the pate he had grown his hair down the back of his head and was combing it up and over, across his baldy patch. This was quite something I'm sure you'll agree. It struck me that prior to the morning comb forward and application of Brylcream his hair would hang right down his neck whilst the top remained naked. I was haunted by this vision of a hair crime all week. I'm not sure if I should alert the authorities.
Reading the guest book in holiday cottages is always entertaining. You always get a few classic entries. Lots of people complain about the tiniest of things, one woman wrote it all in green marker, some people go back again and again. In our cottage in Cornwall, that's us saddoes. The one entry really caught my eye was from four lads who next to their names had written in brackets (not gay)just in case you had any doubts. The fellas had gone off to North Wales for a bit of largeing it in the sticks. They had a great time, although their holiday was marred by the fact that the bar staff in the village local spoke Welsh. So they've gone to a Welsh speaking village in Wales and discovered that locals speak Welsh. Whatever next, Germans speaking German in Germany or even (heaven forbid) Spanish speaking Spaniards in Spain ? The lads gave their address as Reading, Berks. The emphasis clearly on the berks then ;-)
Got the chance to watch quite a bit of S4C. It's quality viewing and my Welsh learning was enhanced no end by the wind and rain which meant that the reception on the Teletext service was naff. This meant no English subtitles but we watched anyway and I managed to pick up enough of what was being said to be able to explain to Rach. The gathering of Joneses in Cardiff was featured as one of the programmes. It was a bit of a variety type event with lots of Welsh language speakers performing safe middle-of-the-road family stuff for a largely elderly audience. Then at the end of it all a mad Grace Jones appeared to cap the night off. It was horrendous. She did her two crappy hits, minced around in ridiculous outfits and tried hard to look sexy. Frankly she looked more than a bit overweight and to say it jarred with the previous acts on the roster would be like saying that perhaps Cradle Of Filth might not be the best support act for Daniel O'Donnel. There were some terrified looking septugenarian Joneses in the audience I can tell you.
Other than that we had a rare old time of it. Go have a look at Northern Sky for a bit of snapshot of what we did. We've got to wait until February now until the next hols. I'm sure I'll be winter stir crazy by then.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My dad had a friend with the same hair do! It was quite a source of amusement for us kids on a windy day :-)