lifestylesupportguru

Category: Pub

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!

How to Become Invisible

Invisible

A very good Sunday evening to you all from the Lifestyle Support Guru! Having returned from a weekend in Hereford, I can now share with you what I have learned from venturing into the wilds of the Welsh Marches area. You may well ask, ‘Why Hereford?’ And I will answer, ‘Why not?’ There was a reason for choosing Hereford which, simply put, was because the other place my friends and I wanted to go to was full!
So, what have I learned from my sojourn away? Well, I have learned how to BECOME INVISIBLE!!! This can be a very useful trick and one that came about quite accidentally, but it’s an easy one to learn, especially if you are female. Here are the basic rules:
1. Make sure you are the only female in your group.
2. Find a nice little pub in which to settle down to watch a day of rugby (having researched the pub the previous evening on a test run – notice that I didn’t say ‘a DRY run’!).

rugby

3. Sit down in a cosy corner facing the television. Now, here I need you to picture the scene, if you will… the four male members of the party are all seated on a corner bench seat around a couple of tables, while the female member is on a chair opposite them.
Now, having sorted the basics, this is how you BECOME INVISIBLE – a large group of young women in various forms of Welsh national dress will enter the pub and sit down behind the female member of your group, thus facing the male members of your crowd. From that point on, the female member will find that she has BECOME INVISIBLE and that she could be speaking in Swahili for all the notice that is taken of anything she may have to say, however important it may be (world debt, starving children, the price

garter

of a pint, that sort of thing…). She is not helped by the ‘leader’ (i.e., the bride-to-be in this hen party) occasionally raising her skirt to show off her garter (in the Welsh colours, of course!). A glazed look will have come over the faces of the males sitting opposite you and you could swear that tongues hung out at one point!
So how do you get rid of this INVISIBILITY, you ask? Well, all you need is for a group of Morris dancers to enter the drinking establishment. Yes, Morris dancers, dear followers. You will feel a bout of hysteria coming on as one of the Morris men, in all seriousness, asks one of the hen party, ‘Why are you dressed up like that?’ This comes from a man wearing a white frilly top, trousers tucked into his socks, bells hanging from his knees and his face blacked up!

Morris Dancers

The hysteria builds up further when, after you get talking to the girls – a very nice crowd from Cardiff, as it turns out – the bride-to-be tells you that she’s getting married in Marrakech in a couple of weeks and the only married man in your group says, in all seriousness, ‘Oh, we went there last year. It’s really nice.’ Somehow, I don’t think an almost-60-year-old man and his wife and daughter will have quite the same priorities as a twenty-something blonde getting married in Morocco! I shall simply say that his list of things to see and do didn’t really bring a gleam of joy to her eye!

And on that note, I shall say ‘Hakuna Matata’ – which is Swahili!
Sleep well, dear followers.

The Spy At The Bar!

Beanie cap

Oh dear me, dear me, dear me! I never realised that the Lifestyle Support Guru could come close to using up her almost limitless reserves of patience (ha ha!) but a skinny young man in a brown knitted beanie hat came close to causing a fracas of Jeremy Clarkson proportions about 20 minutes ago!
Imagine the setting:
You decide to have a little light refreshment and relaxation in the Little Chester Ale House after a testing Italian class, so you settle yourself down quietly in a corner, disturbing no-one and nodding a quiet greeting to acquaintances as they arrive. You should have realised that the skinny young man was going to be a nuisance when he stood talking to the lovely barmaid long after he’d been served, even though you are standing next to him with an empty glass and a £5 note in your hand (as well as your loyalty card) and then goes on to interrogate a group of cyclists (it’s a healthy Ale House!) about the fact that one of them comes from Birmingham. (So?)
The cyclists leave and Mr Brown Beanie turns to you, asking if you have ever travelled, because you look ‘interesting’ (you should have walked away at that point!) so you tell him that you’ve lived in France and have visited Togo and Malawi, at which point he tells you that he’s not really familiar with central Africa (check a map of Africa!), but he knows north Africa quite well; the conversation then goes as follows (although you’re not really that interested):
You: North Africa, eh? Tunisia? Morocco? Algeria?

secret

Brown Beanie: Well, not exactly.
Y: (Guessing wildly and joking) Libya, maybe?
BB: Somalia and LIbya. But I can’t really say what I do there.
Y: Sounds different. Do you work for a charity?
BB: Not really. It’s 75% government work, and if I didn’t go there it wouldn’t matter and if I didn’t come back from there, it wouldn’t matter either.

You now realise that you shouldn’t have got into this conversation, but you’re hooked…

Y: So are you an aid worker?
BB: Not really. I work partly for the government and partly not. But I can’t really talk about it, although it’s not secret as such.

Sean Connery

Y: Are you a spy?
BB: No…
Y: So what do you do?
BB: I can’t tell you.
Y: Why? Would you have to kill me if you did?
BB: No…
Y: So why can’t you tell me?
BB: Because I can’t tell you.

The conversation will continue in a similar way for several. minutes until you get completely bored and take your (empty) glass back to the bar where the lovely barmaid and regulars are standing grinning broadly!
You leave, nodding briefly to Mr BB, wondering if he’s the unrecognised James Bond of Derby.

This post will self-destruct after ten seconds, so read it quickly!

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