Cough, Cough

 

It’s my choir’s concert tonight.  We’re doing stuff from musicals, including a fantastic arrangement – by Ollie Mills, our choir director – of Cats.  His alto line for Memory is the most fun I’ve had singing anything, ever, not least because that’s the only bit in the whole show I can sing without mistake.

Don’t tell that to the audience.  I’m pretty sure Ollie and everyone around me already knows, but we still have some tickets available.

We had a rehearsal last night and I coughed all the way through it.  I have had a persistent cough for months, for which I’m now being treated because I finally dragged myself to the doctor after hearing a horror story from a friend about a friend of her friend’s who ignored a persistent cough, and things ended badly.  

Mine is nothing so dramatic; it’s probably a post-nasal drip.

I misspoke when I told my singing chauffeur (the lovely woman who gives me a lift to choir) about it, accidentally calling it a post-natal drip, and we giggled for an hour about me developing a twenty-one-year baby-related condition that wasn’t excess weight.

The cough is always worse after exercise: for example, from the walk to church on Sundays.  I hack through the first half of the service but I’ve noticed that it improves after communion, just from one sip of wine.  That thought brought on a brain wave – I’ll take alcohol with me tonight!  

Alex tells me alcohol is bad for the vocal chords, but we’re not talking great singing on my part; and I’m thinking, better no voice than Coughy McCoughy in the chorus, ruining the best bits.  You might suggest that I could, of course, nobly stand down and not be in the concert tonight; but I’ll thump you if you do.  I didn’t spend six months learning these songs (some of them, anyway; my first paragraph refers) only to sit sulking in the audience on my big night: yodelayee-yodelayee-yodelayeeNO!

I tested my theory when I got in from choir by supping a tot of rum and, yup, no cough after it.  I’m taking a small bottle with me, to sip throughout the concert. I’ll just have to be careful not to get drunk: no one wants to see a sozzled alto tottering around the stage, defending McCavity against the slurs on his character.

Although…if you do, tickets are a fiver.

 

Joke 807

Image taken from Answer It’s blog.

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SIGNS THAT YOU’RE A DRUNK

• You lose arguments with inanimate objects.
• You have to hold on to the lawn to keep from falling off the Earth.
• Your job starts to interfere with your drinking.
• Your doctor finds traces of blood in your alcohol stream.
• You fall off the floor.
• That damn pink elephant followed you home again.
• You have a reserved parking space at the bottle store.
• Your career won’t progress beyond Member of Parliament.

From jokes.com

 

Joke 705

Things that are difficult to say when you’re drunk

Kitteh drunk on non-alcoholic beer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

a) Innovative
b) Preliminary
c) Proliferation
d) Cinnamon

Things that are VERY difficult to say when you’re drunk

a) Specificity
b) British Constitution
c) Passive-aggressive disorder
d) Transubstantiate

Things that are DOWNRIGHT IMPOSSIBLE to say when you’ re drunk

a) Thanks, but I don’t want to sleep with you.
b) Nope, no more booze for me.
c) Sorry, but you’re not really my type.
d) No kebab for me, thank you.
e) Good evening officer, isn’t it lovely out tonight?
f) I’m not interested in fighting you.
g) Oh, I just couldn’t – no one wants to hear me sing.
h) Thank you, but I won’t make any attempt to dance, I have zero co-ordination.
i) Where is the nearest toilet? I refuse to vomit in the street.
j) I must be going home now as I have work in the morning.

From Will & Guy.

Joke 669

Some thoughts on drinking:

Alcohol! (Photo credit: Lynda Giddens)

• Beauty is in the hands of the beer holder.  Anonymous
• What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?  W.C. Fields
• Work is the curse of the drinking classes.  Oscar Wilde
• My Grandmother is over eighty and still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.  Henny Youngman
• Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony.  Robert Benchley
• You know what alcoholics call New Year’s Eve? Amateur night.  Elmore Leonard
• An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.  Dylan Thomas
• Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel doesn’t go nearly as well with pizza.  Dave Barry
• The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.  William Butler Yeats
• 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not.  Stephen Wright
• I saw a notice that said “Drink Canada Dry” and I’ve just started.  Brendan Behan
• Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.  Dave Barry
• The University of Nebraska says that elderly people that drink beer or wine at least four times a week have the highest bone density. They need it – they’re the ones falling down the most.  Jay Leno
• Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.  Ernest Hemingway
• You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.  Dean Martin

Source: all over the internet

In The News

Image via Wikipedia

In spite of continuing stories about British binge drinking, a report out today says that we are drinking less:

The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) said 2009 saw the sharpest year-on-year decline in alcohol consumption across the board since 1948. 

http://latestnews.virginmedia.com/news/uk/2010/09/03/record_fall_in_alcohol_consumption

Sky News had a roving reporter out in the pubs:

***********************************Reporter: Are you drinking less?

***********************************Old Man: I’m drinking more now I’m old. 

***********************************Reporter: Than when? 

***********************************Old Man: Than when I was younger.

Looks like all that booze hasn’t impaired his common sense.

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I assume it was an old man because he sounded like one; I had my back to the telly so I don’t know.  Technically, then, I overheard that conversation, which brings me to this week’s Big Tent prompt: eavesdrop on conversations and use the words in your poem.  As all I have done this week is stay home, that didn’t work for me.  However, I dug out this old senryu from a few years back: 

Hindley’s Dead 

‘Well, at least one good
thing happened this week,’ I heard
an old lady say.

*

 Two senryus for the price of one today: this one is for Haiku Heights, the prompt being resurrection.

The Good News

The Resurrection:
God breathing new life into
an old religion.

 

Time For Kick-Off

It’s almost midnight and I’m supposed to be tucked up in bed, fast asleep; but my neighbours don’t want me to. Remember our seige a while back? We’ve just had the night version. I don’t have any photos for you this time, but I can give you an eyewitness account.

I was reading in bed when I suddenly heard screaming and I looked out of the window to see who I now know as thirteen-year old ‘Callum’ screaming at the flats opposite. I won’t bore you with the details – just take six teenagers, an England-US draw and some booze, throw in as many eff words as you can find, add one large family and assorted friends and neighbours, and you’ll get the idea. It all really kicked off, though, when Callum phoned his Dad to complain he’d been beaten up and Dad came tearing round in his car – which he abandoned in the middle of the street – and chased the lad who had touched his lad down the street.

It was about this point that I noticed a nosey woman in a ground floor flat opposite, watching the action from her open window. She was lucky not to get a brick through it: we’d already had the beatee kick a parked car and the beater urinate all over the same car until someone complained it was her friend’s car; that’s when the beater turned, water stick in hand, and continued his business in the road. That nosey woman really should know better than to let herself be seen by aggressive drunks – turn off the light like I do.

One family imploded, goading an elder sister who was trying to calm things down, encircling her in a rather frightening way, particularly given that they were all related. The police finally arrived at that moment, so the younger lads ran off to watch the Dad batter the beater of his son and then get arrested.

The head count was a little lower this time: only four police vehicles, two ambulances, four paramedics and eight cops. No guns, as far as I could see. The police stayed for about forty minutes, calming things down, warning some, cautioning others, and telling off my next door neighbour for interfering in police business when she came out in her nightie to complain that her grandchildren were trying to sleep.

Tempers finally cooled and the police and paramedics went off to tackle another bunch of volatile drunken England fans on another street just like ours elsewhere in the lovely town of Stockport. Some of the neighbours celebrated that no-one went to hospital or jail by cracking out the pear cider and Stella, and now a little party is taking place on the steps further up and some of the lads are yelling profanities at some of the mothers (not necessarily their own) and vice versa.

O, to be in England…not.