The Night Mail

[MrWolf]

6 minutes ago, Tim Dubya said:

 

I used to have a right laugh with mine, although he was actually a psychiatrist / psychotherapist.  Dr Ralph Goldstein, highly recommended and no BS involved, incredible joke book, but then he had worked in the NHS for most of his career.  I told him some jokes that might have got me on a different course of medication (the dribbling kind) had he not shared my sense of humour.  

 

These were also proper psychiatrists, not failed social workers in Jesus shoes. The LMHT said that we were well outside of their remit and the so called professionals at first said we were "too high functioning", then the next excuse was that we weren't under a social worker. 

When mine turned up, she was about twelve. Actually 21, straight out of university. I was nice to her, but I'm afraid that she couldn't relate to my "lived experience". Another buzz word I really hate.

 

 

[Flanged Wheel]

All this talk of social workers and psychiatrists seems an excuse for a little Leonard Bernstein…

 

 

I really wanted to hate this new version but it was just so well-made. And this song was, for me, the stand out moment of the film.

[Tony_S]

6 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

Bad taste is dancing on someone's grave before the mourners have gone home!

I haven’t been to a burial. My uncle Eric came very very close to the oven of a crematorium. He worked for the West Midlands Gas board and was called out for an oven repair at the Crematorium. He assumed it was the attached house there but was told it was the actual crematorium. The igniters on the oven had failed. Uncle didn’t cope well with death so having to fix something while there was a coffin there was not something he felt happy with. He didn’t hang around to watch the results of his repair job. I believe he went home for the rest of the day. 

Edited August 22, 2023 by Tony_S

[PhilJ W]

A cake shop with trains.

https://www.visitessex.com/whats-on/ghost-train-little-braxted-railway-p1816101

[Dave Hunt]

7 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

We have to be very careful when we are critical of other individuals and the comments they can make, which on occasion, can appear rather weird or just uncaring.

 

Even in this enlightened age, the elephant in the room is mental health.  

 

Apart from a few comments about 'black dog' it tends not to be discussed, but depression and fears, both real and perceived, cause a lot of anguish not just to individuals, but whole families and in rare cases even the wider community.

 

One of the buzz words is 'Coping Strategy' and that is exactly why some of these weird and wonderful comments are born.

 

The humour in the RAF following a fatal accident in my day was quite 'black' and could have been seen by outsiders as uncaring or inappropriate but was probably part of what HH has referred to as a 'coping strategy'. If a Squadron lost a colleague or more it was usual for a gathering to be held in the mess bar that evening and although the mood would be somewhat sombre there would also be some jocularity with tales of funny situations the missing man or men had been involved in. 

 

Dave

[J. S. Bach]

Happened in the US Navy also. I kind of thought that the humor was to help offset the memories of the loss.

[MrWolf]

I think that is the case in the armed forces, emergency services and other high trauma risk occupations the world over.

A friend's experience of a mortar bombardment was of some poor lad screaming that he'd lost his leg who actually laughed despite the pain when someone shouted back "No you haven't, it's over here!"

 

 

 

Edited August 22, 2023 by MrWolf

[DaveF]

When I was learning to drive in Harrogate in 1966 our next door neighbour was an ex RAF WW2 fighter pilot.  He had an "interesting" sense of humour, even now I wouldn't want to repeat some of his jokes about his experiences.

 

He also liked his whisky.

 

When I first started driving he took me to a disused airfield and showed me how to drive his Jaguar Mk2 at high speed.  He then let me drive it to make sure I could handle it when driving it fast.  He did not think it all dangerous - I suppose to him it was a lot safer than being a pilot in the war.

 

After I passed my test he sometimes lent me the car if he wasn't needing it.

 

David

Edited August 22, 2023 by DaveF

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[MrWolf]

1 hour ago, DaveF said:

When I was learning to drive in Harrogate in 1966 our next door neighbour was an ex RAF WW2 fighter pilot.  He had an "interesting" sense of humour, even now I wouldn't want to repeat some of his jokes about his experiences.

 

He also liked his whisky.

 

When I first started driving he took me to a disused airfield and showed me how to drive his Jaguar Mk2 at high speed.  He then let me drive it to make sure I could handle it when driving it fast.  He did not think it all dangerous - I suppose to him it was a lot safer than being a pilot in the war.

 

After I passed my test he sometimes lent me the car if he wasn't needing it.

 

David

 

I had to be very selective to find something that was publishable or make any sense.

 

I also did my first driving lesson on a disused airfield, Melton Mowbray. Nothing as interesting as a MKII Jag though. Peugeot  sensible 5 door 205 GRD.

 

 

[AndyID]

Great! It's still raining. Nothing heavy but at least it's getting a chance to soak into the ground rather than just run off or quickly evaporate.

 

Interesting situation in the 'hood. We are on a community well (excellent untreated water) and one member had a plumber install an outdoor "frost-free" faucet (an outdoor spigot than won't freeze) on their property. Unfortunately the plumber used the Internet to determine the property lines and installed it on the water association's property (despite the warnings on the website that you must not do that).

 

After a lot of mucking about and an expensive survey the water association got tough. The concern being that if they just let it go, in the future, someone might claim ownership of the actual water well. Not good!

 

Things escalated quite quickly. The member in question was backed into a corner so I volunteered to excavate the trench to relocate the frost-free, for nothing. (It would not have taken me long to do that.) That did the trick and now the member has decided to just get the guy who screwed it up to fix it. The member also gave us quite a few pounds of home-grown tomatoes 🙂

[AndyID]

Visited the (new) dentist today to have some fillings replaced. Very pleased with the result too. Though I say it myself, despite my senior years, I am once again suave and debonair.

 

She was very careful to ensure I felt no pain.  While she was injecting the anesthetic into my upper gum she held my top lip and shook it quite vigorously. I asked her if that was to distribute the anesthetic more effectively but she told me it was not. Apparently it's just to distract the nervous system so it attenuates the effect of jab from the needle 😆

 

I mentioned this to Lorna and she was not at all surprised. Apparently an old nursing trick was to pinch young babies on one thigh to distract them before they received an injection in the other thigh.

 

 

[iL Dottore]

8 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

The humour in the RAF following a fatal accident in my day was quite 'black' and could have been seen by outsiders as uncaring or inappropriate but was probably part of what HH has referred to as a 'coping strategy'…..

 

8 hours ago, J. S. Bach said:

Happened in the US Navy also. I kind of thought that the humor was to help offset the memories of the loss.

 

7 hours ago, MrWolf said:

I think that is the case in the armed forces, emergency services and other high trauma risk occupations the world over.….

It’s certainly the case in medicine. It is definitely a coping mechanism inasmuch as if you reacted like a civvy in a lot of situations you’d (a) get emotionally affected and (b) get nothing done. Neither of which does the patient any good.

 

Much medical “black humour” does require the appropriate background for it to be funny, but there is one book - written under a pseudonym by an American physician - which does make medical black humour a bit more accessible to the layman. The book is called The House of God and reading it has become pretty much a right of passage for doctors. All my colleagues and practically all the hospital consultants I’ve worked with have read it - no matter whether British, Spanish, Australian, Swiss, German, American etc….

 

In the book you are introduced to such acronyms as GOMER and LOL in NAD, processes like “buff and turf” and learn that there’s no body cavity that can’t be reached by an 18 gauge needle and a strong right arm (plus - new at the time of writing but now pretty much universal - The Electric GOMER Bed). I think the book has such a universal appeal across the medical community because the underneath the black humour and the sardonic writing, it is very, very true to life.

 

It seems that - worldwide - the medical profession creates many “unofficial” acronyms and assessment scales: for example (and just about suitable for a family forum) in the UK you have NFN, in Switzerland you have the “scumbag index” (obtained by multiplying the number of tattoos a patient has by the number of their missing teeth) and so on….

 

I too have a number of “black humour” anecdotes - probably the only repeatable one involves a junior doctor, a nurse, a BP cuff and a spectacularly endowed young female patient…..

 

Translations: GOMER = Get Out of My Emergency Room; LOL in NAD = Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress; NFN = Normal For Norfolk (apparently, the increasingly censorious NHS management has started [ahem] “instructing” medics not to use NFN and other “unapproved” terms and acronyms as it “might cause offence”).

[iL Dottore]

Whilst on the subject of expressions (or phrases) that “may not be suitable for mixed company”; one of my all-time favourites is one used to express approval and recognition of quality: “The Dog’s Bo****ks” (also “The Mutt’s Nuts”, “The Dog’s Danglies” or “The Canine’s Gonads”).

 

Why Rover’s Unmentionables denotes quality and A Dog’s Dinner (or, more often, “a right dog’s dinner”j denotes a complete (useless?) mess, I can’t begin to fathom…

 

But that’s the beauty of English - it’s so good at creating memorable word pictures - encapsulating whole concepts in a pithy phrase….

 

Edited August 23, 2023 by iL Dottore
Rephrasing

[jamie92208]

9 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

 

The humour in the RAF following a fatal accident in my day was quite 'black' and could have been seen by outsiders as uncaring or inappropriate but was probably part of what HH has referred to as a 'coping strategy'. If a Squadron lost a colleague or more it was usual for a gathering to be held in the mess bar that evening and although the mood would be somewhat sombre there would also be some jocularity with tales of funny situations the missing man or men had been involved in. 

 

Dave

I can concur.  Black humour is essential as a coping mechanism in providing a safe environment to process something pretty horrible.  Like Dave's mention of the aftermath of accidents it was the same with us after such things as fatal road accidents.  One could possibly be mentioned.  After a fatal road accident where the motorist had hit a cow it was duly commented on that not only was the car a write off but so was the cow. 

 

At one ti e such humour was clamped down on as being none PC.  That did cause a lot of problems and possibly lead to cases of PTSD.  Things were relaxed after that. 

 

Jamie

[Happy Hippo]

2 hours ago, AndyID said:

Visited the (new) dentist today to have some fillings replaced. Very pleased with the result too. Though I say it myself, despite my senior years, I am once again suave and debonair.

 

She was very careful to ensure I felt no pain.  While she was injecting the anesthetic into my upper gum she held my top lip and shook it quite vigorously. I asked her if that was to distribute the anesthetic more effectively but she told me it was not. Apparently it's just to distract the nervous system so it attenuates the effect of jab from the needle 😆

 

I mentioned this to Lorna and she was not at all surprised. Apparently an old nursing trick was to pinch young babies on one thigh to distract them before they received an injection in the other thigh.

 

 

That would account for why my head is first clamped in a vice when they want to stick a needle in my posterior!

[Happy Hippo]

26 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Whilst on the subject of expressions (or phrases) that “may not be suitable for mixed company”; one of my all-time favourites is one used to express approval and recognition of quality: “The Dog’s Bo****ks” (also “The Mutt’s Nuts”, “The Dog’s Danglies” or “The Canine’s Gonads”).

 

Why Rover’s Unmentionables denotes quality and A Dog’s Dinner (or, more often, “a right dog’s dinner”j denotes a complete (useless?) mess, I can’t begin to fathom…

 

But that’s the beauty of English - it’s so good at creating memorable word pictures - encapsulating whole concepts in a pithy phrase….

 

That reminds me of the man who was in a pub, and saw the landlord's dog licking it's own knutsac.

 

'I wish I could do that' said the man to the Landlord.

 

The Landlord replied:  ' Give him a couple of crisps and he'll let you!'

[Dave Hunt]

The above for some reason reminded me of the joke:

Two blokes in a bar. At the next table is a scruffy looking, quite ugly bloke who is surrounded by good looking girls. One bloke says to the other, “I can’t understand how he gets all the girls interested in him. All he does is sit in the corner licking his eyebrows.”

 

Dave

[Joseph_Pestell]

10 hours ago, MrWolf said:

 

I had to be very selective to find something that was publishable or make any sense.

 

I also did my first driving lesson on a disused airfield, Melton Mowbray. Nothing as interesting as a MKII Jag though. Peugeot  sensible 5 door 205 GRD.

 

 

 

I, too, was lucky enough to start as a learner off road. In my case, it was not an airfield but the floor of a large unused reservoir, just by one of the Crystal Palace TV masts. And a dull Ford Escort Mk1.

 

But prior to moving into the reservoir, the driving school had used part of the racetrack in Crystal Palace Park. Some students were allowed to do some laps of the track in a Capri 3.1L!

[PhilJ W]

5 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

I too have a number of “black humour” anecdotes - probably the only repeatable one involves a junior doctor, a nurse, a BP cuff and a spectacularly endowed young female patient…..

Can you repeat it please?

[DaveF]

In my post yesterday evening about driving a Mk2 Jaguar belonging to my neighbour it has occured to me that I should mention I was used to travelling in fast cars - Mum and Dad at various times before I started driving owned Jaguar MkIX and Mk2s so I was used to being in cars being driven fast.  In those days before the 70mph speed limits we often travelled on the A1 at well over 100mph when there wasn't too much traffic.

 

Shorlty before I learnt to drive Dad had decided to give up on fast cars and boought a Morris 1100.

 

I have to admit that when I used to drive abroad on holidays in the early 90s I had a Citroen BX.  That would happily go along German autobahns (the unrestricted ones) at around 110mph.

 

The only time I have been unhappy when being driven fast was in a Bristol owned by family friends - 100 mph on single carriageway roads did not seem very sensible to me but neither of them ever had an accident.

 

David

[jamie92208]

5 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

The above for some reason reminded me of the joke:

Two blokes in a bar. At the next table is a scruffy looking, quite ugly bloke who is surrounded by good looking girls. One bloke says to the other, “I can’t understand how he gets all the girls interested in him. All he does is sit in the corner licking his eyebrows.”

 

Dave

That reminds me of once when my brother was a fairly new first officer for BOAC. We were talent out to a nice restaurant in North Leeds by our great Uncle, John is somewhat vertically challenged and was in jeans and a shirt. On the next table were young couple where the gent was obviously trying to impress his date with his wealth and ambitions.  Our Uncle told us about going  across the pond on the Queen Mary.  My brother replied, "She looked OK the other day as we flew into LA l ast week, in a. much better state than the  Queen Elizabeth, which saw flying into Hong Kong  last month." the Young man had no chance with the young lady after that.  She only had eyes for the scruffy globetrotter. 

 

Jamie

Edited August 23, 2023 by jamie92208

[Dave Hunt]

I was once on a train when at the table across the aisle were two blokes trying to impress the two girls sitting opposite them. One of them told the girls that they were Phantom pilots but it was blindingly obvious to me that they hadn't ever been close to a Phantom. When the girls went off to the loo I leaned across and said, "I overheard you say that you fly F4s. Do you by any chance know a guy called Dave Hunt who is on them?" One of them replied that oh, yes they knew him alright so I said, "Oh, that's strange because I am Dave Hunt and I fly Phantoms and I've never seen you before in my life but don't worry, I shan't tell." At that they looked suitably sheepish and when the girls came back they were very guarded in their chat up lines.

 

Dave

[MrWolf]

49 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

That reminds me of once when my brother was a fairly new first officer for BOAC. We were talent out to a nice restaurant in North Leeds by our great Uncle, John is somewhat vertically challenged and was in jeans and a shirt. On the next table were young couple where the gent was obviously trying to impress his date with his wealth and ambition ns.  Our Uncle told us about going  across the pond on the Queen Mary.  My brother replied, "She looked OK the other day as we flew into LA l ast week,in a. much, better state than the  Queen Elizabeth, which saw flying into Hong  last month." the Young mshadnno chance with the you g lady after that.  She only had eyes for the scruffy globetrotter. 

 

Jamie

 

I had a similar experience, or rather, my father did at a wedding reception over twenty years ago. Everyone was suited and booted, so you couldn't tell what anyone did for a living.

Some chap had buttonholed father at the bar and was sawing on about his new company BMW, best car he'd ever had, all the bells and whistles, blah blah and of course, they got a good deal on it at a tidy £57,000 on the road. 

He went on to casually and somewhat condescendingly enquire as to whether my father's company provided him with transport?

Father went on to calmly describe his new Mercedes, V8, supercharged, tiptronic gears, air con, cruise control, etc, etc.

 

Because they were a major company and had bought four, it was an absolute steal at £92,000....

 

Mr BMW made his excuses and withdrew.

 

My father never got the chance to boast about the eighteen wheels including the box trailer...

 

 

 

Edited August 23, 2023 by MrWolf
Stupid autocorrect

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, DaveF said:

In my post yesterday evening about driving a Mk2 Jaguar belonging to my neighbour it has occured to me that I should mention I was used to travelling in fast cars - Mum and Dad at various times before I started driving owned Jaguar MkIX and Mk2s so I was used to being in cars being driven fast.  In those days before the 70mph speed limits we often travelled on the A1 at well over 100mph when there wasn't too much traffic.

 

Shorlty before I learnt to drive Dad had decided to give up on fast cars and boought a Morris 1100.

 

I have to admit that when I used to drive abroad on holidays in the early 90s I had a Citroen BX.  That would happily go along German autobahns (the unrestricted ones) at around 110mph.

 

The only time I have been unhappy when being driven fast was in a Bristol owned by family friends - 100 mph on single carriageway roads did not seem very sensible to me but neither of them ever had an accident.

 

David

Being happy or otherwise at being driven fast has everything to do with the driver.  Some years ago, I got a lift with a friend for about 100 miles down the M1; he spent about half the journey on hands-free phone calls and it was amazing how many cars we weren't overtaking despite rarely dipping below 90.  The guy did about 35,000 miles a year for work and I didn't at any point feel tense; while driving very quickly, he was keeping well clear of everyone else (he also stopped his calls when the road got busier) and obviously reading the road well ahead (something that as a motorcyclist, you learn to do or it doesn't end well).  Similarly, I have I felt very tense driving around urban areas with some friends at less than 30mph, because everything that happened in front of them seemed to be a surprise.