lifestylesupportguru

Category: Culture

Living Life To The Full

Live Life to the Full

Good evening, one and all! As the Lifestyle Support Guru, I like to think that I have a broad range of interests to match the interests of you, my adoring followers. It is with this in mind that I spent last week ‘researching’ a variety of events, all with the purpose of helping us to live in harmony – WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER, you know! I have plumbed the depths of sorrow and risen to the dizzy heights of near-hysteria, with just one point in mind: LIVING LIFE TO THE FULL!!!

So, how do you go about this? As always with the LSG, there are just a few simple rules:

1. Go and see a screening of Hamlet with that fabulous actress, Maxine Peake, playing the title

Hamlet actor

role. Whilst you will be AMAZED by the acting, I can guarantee that you will not come away feeling full of the joys of spring – indeed, as one friend (a Sunderland supporter, but I suppose someone has to be, and that may go some way to explaining her state of mind) who accompanied the LSG said: “A grand performance, but you feel like saying, ‘Get a grip, Hamlet.’” I couldn’t have put it better myself!

2. Invite a sibling to stay and ask him to have a look at your (new) dishwasher, which hasn’t drained properly of water, because he knows about these things. (The LSG doesn’t need to concern herself with such mundane subjects because she has siblings to do that for her!) You also ask him to look at your new vacuum cleaner, which has already had to have a replacement part, but you have been unable to take the screw out of the ‘old’ part to replace it with the new part. Of course, he sorts everything because a) you had opened the dishwasher door before the cycle had finished and b) you had been using a ‘cheap’ Phillips screwdriver rather than a ‘proper’ one.

Screwdriver

To the LSG, one screwdriver is much the same as another. However, this is not the case, I was told, and nor is it the case with screws themselves (we are talking ‘proper’ metal screws here; none of this smutty ‘Benny Hill double entendre’ stuff, of course!), as is evidenced by a subsequent conversation that said sibling had with a friend – how can you have a 20-minute chat about the relative properties of Phillips versus flathead screwdrivers on a Saturday afternoon (or at any time, come to that)?

3. Go and see the Lady Boys of Bangkok, who do a tour of the UK every year. Make sure that

dancing octopus

you book a table right at the front, which will ensure that the aforementioned sibling gets his comeuppance for being so practical and good at everything (see 2. above) when he gets dragged up on stage by the lead Lady Boy for a rendition of ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ and the presentation of a giant box of Viagra at the end of the song!
I nearly choked on my glass of Prosecco, dear devotees!

So there you have it – from the Prince of Denmark to Bangkok, there is something for everyone if you just know where to look for it. LIVE LIFE TO THE FULL!!! You know it makes sense.

PS I have the whole Lady Boy song on video – I’m saving that for the future when I may need other practical things doing!

Organise A Family Games and Quiz Night – NOT!

daffodil

A very happy St David’s Day to all my followers from the Lifestyle Support Guru! The sun is shining, the birds are singing and all’s well with the world, so I thought I would help improve the day by sharing one of life’s important lessons – HOW TO ORGANISE A FAMILY GAMES AND QUIZ NIGHT.
Like some of my followers, the ten rules are simple…

1. Make sure that the person who has asked you to run the FAMILY GAMES AND QUIZ NIGHT has had no access to the 6 Nations Rugby timetable, so you have to miss the second half of an important game in order to get to the venue on time. This means you will also miss an important try.
(Get a glass of wine to help you make it through the night.)

glass of red wine

2. Make sure that the person mentioned in 1. doesn’t realise that you are not really that fond of little children as the place begins to fill with overexcited, hyperactive small people.
(Take a large gulp of wine.)
3. Make sure that one of the teams is a Spanish family, so their chances of winning are low (as is your knowledge of Spanish). Frantically text a WONDERUL friend who you think has nothing better to do on a Saturday night than tell you how to say ‘Good evening’ in Spanish. (Thank you,Karen!)
(Take a large gulp of wine.)

Social Awareness Quiz

4. Make sure that you forget to bring the answers to the three handout rounds on Disney and the Mr Men, which were designed to keep the small people entertained and quiet.
(Take a VERY large gulp of wine.)
5. Make sure that there is no wi-fi at the venue, so you are unable to access the missing answers on your computer at home from your smartphone.
(Take a large gulp of wine.)
6. Make sure that you have a WONDERFUL friend who has nothing better to do on a Saturday night than come to your aid and text you the names of 15 Disney heroines so that you can use at least one of the handout rounds. (Thank you again, Karen!)
(Take a large gulp of wine in gratitude.)
7. Give out the Peppa Pig ‘beetle drive’ sheets and get bored after three games, so call a halt to that and send all the small people to the tuck shop for another sugar ‘high’.
(Take more wine.)

Large glass red wine

8. Ask the quiz questions and apologise constantly to the Spanish family for the questions on English nursery rhymes and English phrases and sayings. You weren’t to know that foreigners would turn up!
(More wine.)
9. Make sure that one team turns up an hour and a half after the evening started and that their children are already high as kites and wind up all the other small people (who had just been coming down from their last sugar rush).
(More wine.)
10. Give out the bingo cards for the final, thrilling section of the evening and make sure that the person drawing the numbers out for you is the slowest person in the world and seems to think you have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than sit waiting for each number to be slowly drawn out of the bag. After three games you get bored (again) and wonder what it would be like to stick white-hot pins in your eyes.
(No wine left.)

And that, dear acolytes, is how to run a successful FAMILY GAMES AND QUIZ NIGHT – and get a large round of applause at the end because everyone’s had a good time, despite the fact that you feel like you’ve been through a fast spin cycle! The only cure for that is to retire to the nearest hostelry and go through the wine process again, but without the other bits in between! Enjoy St. David’s Day!

Translations

Translation

A very good Friday evening from the Lifestyle Support Guru! Once again, I am here to help you manoeuvre your way through the maze of troubles and difficulties that some people laughingly like to call ‘Life’, but which I prefer to refer to as a ‘maze of troubles and difficulties’.
In my Last Post (which also happens to be the name of a micropub in Derby!), I said that I would be taking about TRANSLATIONS. Do not worry – those of you who think you have very little linguistic ability will have little trouble with these, since they don’t really involve any foreign languages. Obviously, as the LSG, I have few difficulties picking up other languages, but I realise that not all of you have this facility (even my beloved Deputy LSGs, Debbie and Sue, who still have many stages to go before they can hope to achieve my level of near-perfection), but these TRANSLATIONS are to do with understanding what other people mean when they come out with what seems, at first sight (or, rather, hearing), a perfectly harmless statement in English.

Firstly, once again, as I have done so many times before, I must ask you to imagine that you have a sibling and, preferably, one whom you haven’t seen for a number of years (let’s say three and a half, for the sake of argument) because he has been in foreign parts (again for the sake of argument, we’ll say Australia). Now, you kindly agree to put this sibling up in your own home temporarily, expecting no recompense (the occasional meal out, perhaps) apart from an eternal expression of gratitude whenever he sees you. A little bowing and scraping and doffing of caps wouldn’t go amiss either.

untidy garden

Sibling:

Would you like me to do anything in the garden while I’m here and have some time on my hands before I start my new job?

Translation:

Your garden looks incredibly untidy and overgrown, even for winter. And why have you still got the sun loungers out on the lawn?

Sibling:

I suppose the spiders in your house are quite large?

Translation:

There are an awful lot of dead flies caught in the cobwebs in the fanlight above the front door; don’t you think you should get your feather duster out and get rid of them?

Second scenario – you have arranged to go out for lunch with a friend (let’s call her Karen, for the sake of argument) whom you have known for years but whom (‘whom’ is currently my favourite grammatical word) you haven’t seen for a few months. When she walks into the restaurant, your jaw drops when you see how much weight she has lost. (She CYCLED to your lunch date – CYCLED!!!!).
The first thing you say is:

You:

Good God! You’re not going to lose any more, are you?

Translation:

You absolute b**ch! You look stunningly slim!

Blue Whale

Third scenario – and the MOST IMPORTANT! This applies to males and females alike, because we have all been guilty of it at some time or other. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER say to someone you haven’t seen for quite some time: “You’re looking well.” This phrase has several TRANSLATIONS, depending on whether the person saying it is male or female.

Male:

Lovely to see you. You’re looking well.

Translation:

Good god, you’ve put on a whole load of weight since I last saw you three days/weeks/months/years/centuries ago.

Female:

Lovely to see you, daaahling! You’re looking REALLY well! (Note the addition of ‘really’, which makes the comment doubly barbed.)

Translation:

Good god, you have REALLY turned into a blue whale since I last saw you three days/weeks/months/years/centuries ago!

Do NOT – I repeat ‘Do NOT’ – EVER say ‘You’re looking well’ to ANYONE. The TRANSLATION can only ever be misunderstood and you will go into a steep spiral of depression, resulting in you opening a bottle of wine with which to drown your sorrows and make sure that you look even more like a blue whale next time you see that person.

Enjoy the weekend, dear followers – you’re all looking REALLY WELL!!

Life Lessons from the pub

London buses

Good evening from the Lifestyle Support Guru! I have several LIFE LESSONS to share with you tonight and, since there is nothing to watch on telly on a Saturday night (which is why I’m in the pub), you may as well do something constructive and learn from my experiences. But first, I have something desperately sad to communicate to you (apart from Wales losing to England last night, that is). My friends and followers, I have had a complaint… yes, A COMPLAINT!!! Someone has had the temerity to say that my posts (sorry, ‘LIFE LESSONS’) are inconsistent – a bit like buses, really, in that you get nothing for a while and then several come along in short succession. Well, MR WHINGER (I’ll keep his full identity secret, but his first name is Richard), that’s what it’s like for LIFESTYLE SUPPORT GURUS. We cannot control when the Muse may strike us – actually, I say ‘us’, but I don’t know of any other LSGs (although I have now recruited two Deputy LSGs, but they’re still in training), so it’s a lonely life in reality, but I carry on because I know that there are people out there who NEED my support and help.
Now, on to the LIFE LESSONS, all of which are pub-related – this may surprise some of you, but someone has to support local businesses, and it may as well be me… oh, the sacrifices I make!
First LIFE LESSON:
1. Picture yourself in a quiet, pleasant, little real ale pub where sartorial elegance is not the first thing on your mind – you’re only there for the beer (or wine), after all.

Joan Collins

2. In walks the equivalent of a blonde Joan Collins, accompanied by Benny Hill. She is wearing a short, lacy black dress and black lacy stockings with a seam and pattern up the back, topped with a faux leopard skin coat. He is wearing grey trousers, a black overcoat, a mulberry-style scarf and a grey beanie, the ensemble completed with heavy dark-rimmed glasses on a rather pale face.

news nerd

So, what is the LIFE LESSON? Don’t judge a book by its cover (or its leopard skin coat or beanie) because they are sitting opposite you and obviously observing you as well, judging by the looks they keep giving you – what’s wrong with an orange jumper paired with green and navy trainers?
Second LIFE LESSON:
I was so impressed with the Joan Collins/Benny Hill. combination that I’ve completely forgotten what the second LIFE LESSON might be! However, look out for a LIFE LESSON in TRANSLATION – coming soon to a pub near you!

Have a lovely evening (what’s left of it!).

Recognising SPIES!

Wordsworth Graffiti

A very good evening from the Lifestyle Support Guru with some absolutely invaluable advice on recognising SPIES. I appreciate that many of you will be glued to the television watching either Wolf Hall or the National Television Awards, but I shall persevere nevertheless.

First of all, I have read Wolf Hall and I DID NOT ENJOY it! In fact, I DID NOT ENJOY it almost as much as I DID NOT ENJOY studying Wordsworth at A Level, but I am expecting a great deal more from the TV series, mainly because I know how it ends (a bit like ‘Titanic’, but I won’t give any spoilers in case you haven’t seen it) and because there are one or two good-looking males in it (although I wasn’t that impressed with Damien Lewis saying that he’d had a good training for playing Henry VIII because he went to Eton. That’s like saying you’d had a good training for being the Yorkshire Ripper because you’d been to Scarborough or Halifax. SILLY!!)
And as for the National Television Awards, as soon as I saw Simon Cowell on the screen, I felt an uncontrollable urge to get out of the house and come to the pub! (Actually, that happens quite a lot, regardless of who’s on television.)

Spies

Now, moving on to SPIES – these are not as difficult to spot as you might think.

1. No one else is talking in the pub, but you can hear a voice speaking. You realise that either a) you now have a direct line to God or b) someone is talking to him/herself.
2. Upon looking up, you spot a man close by who seems to be speaking to his wrist and you IMMEDIATELY know that this is a spy who is transmitting information to his paymasters. He is obviously passing on information about the suspicious-looking characters who have appeared in the last few minutes under the guise of being part of a male choir. HA! They are very cunningly disguised as harmless-looking older gentlemen but you just know that, really, they are finely-honed ninja warriors wearing fat suits and a lot of make-up (or might it be Katie Price in disguise?).
3. You decide not to attract too much attention by showing that you have SPOTTED THE SPY and realise that you had best leave before THE SPY recognises that you are onto him and could blow his cover, so you smile sweetly and point to his wrist and ask for the time, saying that your watch ha stopped. All suspicion foiled and you can carry on being the unobtrusive SPYCATCHER who could SAVE THE WORLD!
Sleep well, devoted followers – I am keeping my eyes peeled on your behalf!

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