January
We
celebrated the New Year in a quiet way at midnight. After a somewhat rusty rendition of ‘The Day
Dawn’ and a token first footing, we found some fireworks to watch on the
television, but no Scottish music.
Jay’s birthday
on Tuesday 2 was similarly quiet. For
the first time in several years, one of her presents was non-horsy – a set of
mats for Fizzy, which she now drives regularly, and seems to prefer it to the
driving school car. She is still some
way off the test though. Here she is
cutting her birthday cake.
On Sunday 7 Jay and
On
Wednesday 17 Teresa visited the dentist for a check on a tooth which had been
troubling her for some time. Sure
enough, it needed a filling, but the bad news was that several others do too,
so more visits to be scheduled over the next few months, and quite an expense
too (on top of Roger’s extraction last month), as NHS dentists have virtually
disappeared from this part of the county.
On
Saturday 20, Roger and Teresa set another quiz for the bowls club. For the first time we included a music round,
which, thanks to the lap-top, was, I have to say, quite the slickest music
round ever presented. Jay was at the
helm of the computer for the night, and also did the score sheet, the latter
not computer-assisted, but written up on the back of one of The Guardian
wall charts. (I knew we’d find a use for
them one day!)
We must have pitched the
questions about right, because all the teams had the satisfaction of some
high-scoring rounds, and the winning table included some new faces. The most testing round asked which fictional
dogs belonged to the given owners: the
last (difficult, I thought) question being which dog was owned by ‘Corporal
Rusty’? * I think only one team got that,
but, by a big coincidence, four days later, on 24 January, the morning
competition on Classic FM comprised clues to ‘a German Shepherd rescued
from the Western Front in 1918, which died in the arms of Jean Harlow 14 years
later’. *
On
Wednesday 24, Teresa had another short item published in The Guardian – a
humorous contribution to Notes and Queries on the subject of ‘the sun
has got his hat on’.
*
Footnote. The dog in question was Rin
Tin Tin. Strictly speaking it was not a
fictional dog, but, originally, a real one trained by its American rescuer to
such an extent that it starred in 26 Warner Brother movies in the
twenties. However, its adventures with
Corporal Rusty were fictional, and later led to the television series in the
50s. To continue the coincidence, we
also had a round of sobriquets, which included ‘the Platinum Blonde’ – answer: the very same Miss Harlow. I had not seen the touching story of Rin Tin
Tin’s demise when researching the quiz, but it is a