Here in the United Kingdom we are coming to the end of Rugby’s Six Nations tournament, where teams from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France and Italy all play each other over 6 weeks or so. Whilst football is the more popular game here, rugby has a dedicated following and is a more physical game. Think ‘rugby forward’ and you think ‘big’; the six prop forwards in the current pool for the English team average 125kg each, while the lock forwards are over 2 metres in height. The rules are constantly changing to ensure than injuries are minimised, unrecognisable to those being applied when I hung up my boots aged 31 some decades ago.

Given the human brawn on display during these matches, it was surprising to see on the electronic advertising panels alongside the pitch during one match, in between ‘Enjoy Guinness today’ and ‘O2 for your mobile network’ (Note 1), ‘Dove’s Men’s Moisturiser’.

We have come a long way!! In 2019 the UK Men’s Grooming Market was worth some £500 million and is increasing year-on-year. Of course it’s somewhat dwarfed by the Women’s Cosmetic Market – £9.8 billion in 2017. (See also ‘What Moisturiser Do You Use?’ PC 162 October 2019)

I had to go to our local doctor’s surgery the other day and managed a face-to-face with a real, live human doctor. The following day I was on the bus on my way back from the morning hot yoga session and saw I had an email from the NHS. I opened it; to access the message I needed to add my email address, then decide whether the diagrammatic car’s final destination was at ‘X’ or ‘Y’ to prove I was a human being, which I managed to do eventually (!), re-input my email address, wait for a six-figure ‘security code’ to arrive on my mobile, find my password and eventually get to the message: “How was your visit to your GP?” Think I should get another appointment to check my mental health?

I’ll never need Ayesha Vardag, a lawyer the super-rich call to help them get divorced. Rather like the model Evangelista who famously said during an interview for Vogue magazine: “We (as in we super-models) don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day”, Ayesha specialises in cases where the assets are in excess of £100 million. But she was interviewed for the Sunday Times’ ‘A Life in The Day’ column which, at the end, asks the subject what their ‘words of wisdom’ would be:

Best Advice I was given: – “You have to howl until you find your pack”. Although I spent twenty years in the British Army, it was only when I left and found a different group of people to mix with did I experience a greater affinity!

Advice I’d give: – “When something bad happens, remember it may have saved you from much worse, or may bring you something much better.” I am an eternal optimist so concur. There’s always an upside.

What I wish I’d known: – “Don’t waste time on people who don’t care about you, and move mountains to be with the people who do.” Ah! Yes! The ‘false friends’.

My friend Eddie in Weymouth sent me this lovely story and claimed it is true. I asked where it had come from and he replied an old man down the street had told him (Note 2). OK then!

“On 20^th July 1969 Commander of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, Neil Armstrong, stepped onto the surface of the moon. We all remember his: “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” As he re-entered the Lander, he murmured: “Good luck, Mr Gorsky.” Many people at NASA thought this casual remark concerned some rival Soviet cosmonaut, but research found no such surname in any of the space programmes. Over the years many people had asked Neil Armstrong about this remark and he would simply smile, giving no explanation.

But in 1995, in the follow-up questions after a presentation, a reporter asked the same question, “Who is Mr Gorsky?” As Mr Gorsky had by now died, Neil felt he was able to answer. “In 1938, I was playing baseball with a chum in the back yard at home in the mid-west when the ball went over our neighbour’s fence and landed by a window. My neighbours were Mr & Mrs Gorsky. As I bent down to pick up the ball, I heard Mrs Gorsky yelling at her husband. “Sex? You want sex? You’ll get sex when (pause to think of some unlikely event) the kid next door walks on the moon.”

Somewhere in a February postcard, PC 321 ‘All I want …’, I wrote: “And on the subject of acceptance, we have a number of religions on the planet and there is a degree of ‘If you don’t agree with our beliefs, you must be against us.’ No! I am not; I just want you to accept I am not.” I was pleased that our Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, recently publically agreed: “We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them on this country. There is no right not to be offended. There is no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion. The lodestar of our democracy is freedom of speech. Nobody can demand respect for their belief system, even if it is a religion. People are legally entitled to reject — and to leave — any religion. There is no apostasy law in this country. The act of accusing someone of apostasy or blasphemy is effectively inciting violence upon that person.”

Exactly!

And finally, here in England we often say “A pinch and a punch for the first of the month” on its first day, the ‘pinch’ referring to throwing a pinch of salt to keep witches at bay and the punch to banish them forever, but used in a school’s playground in a physical way. Saying ‘White Rabbits no return’ means no one will pinch you back, although somehow I think on the 1^st of March you say March Hares, but I could be very confused! Interestingly, according to Rahmi, in central Turkey they say ‘Open the door and bring the log in’ as by the beginning of March all their chopped firewood has been used up and they have to resort to bigger bits.

More scribbles next week.

Richard 10^th March 2023

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

PS Why does the battery of one’s smoke alarm always fail between midnight and 0300 causing its incessant beep to invade your sleep?

Note 1 O2 are one of the sponsors of the English Rugby team

Note 2 Maybe he was Neil Armstrong’s boyhood friend.