Now if you had gone up on Ilkley Moor with your dripping butties, you would have non of that there temptation to contend with 
Quote Gumbud: “sweetie pie has PM’d me saying she is finding it difficult to follow a theme here - strange - I always thought this thread was one of the original theme parks?”
Sure hadn’t we got the Boat/ship theme last week? and a nice little opera theme for opera fans currently running, very useful tips on how not to cement yourself into a corner when flooring a patio by Spitty, then we had stars of the silver screen with a few shorts on farting inserted, all human life is here without a doubt.;-)
I have learned something on this link.
I never knew they even excited back then.
Cheddar Man got excited about one.
“The good die young” is a long standing lie dreamed up by some ancient Roman military commander as consolation to the relatives of all the young men killed in the Roman empire expansion campaign, or so a fella from Longford was telling me.
We have a few thyme pubs here in the city, one down by the Liffey and now gone was called “The Flowing Tide” very appropriate as the ships used to come and go on the Liffey when the tide was right.
It had bells and anchors all over the place, ropes for opening and closing the windows, pictures of famous ships hung on the walls, tables made from barrels and the head barman (he was bald) wore a captains hat. Sometimes if you went into the toilet when he came out you might find a captains log.:shock:
Then we had another pub that was called ‘Doyle’s” for a few hundred years when a new owner who was a fan of Sherlock Holmes took over and thymed it “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s”. he had microscopes and magnifying glasses of every description behind the bar on shelves, deer stalker hats and capes, not to mention all the old photos hanging up, he even had a Moriarty room.
A pleasure garden to me would have two pubs that never closed (just in case one got barred from one) and cigarette trees all lined along the main pathway, who knows there might be a pleasure garden in heaven to suit everyones taste.
“heaven” is a pleasure garden supreme - the biggest and most lasting theme park in the whole wide universe!!
I’m in heaven ; oh it’s heaven
and so happy that I can hardly speak
when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek [applies to persons of all genre - just choose which cheeks you prefer]
there are very few journalists these days that excite like Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn - they have lighting sharp vision and analysis that can remind us so frighteningly of the inhumanity of man [always men] towards the rest of us man ;woman and child.
this is one of Patrick Cockburns who writes for the Independent
Giving opinions on Oxfam, Haiti or anything these days is far too risky so I have ‘uncoupled’ myself from suchlike. (if Gwyneth Paltrow and now Donna Air can use that uncouple word so can I)
Since some money grabbing boardroom clever clogs latched on that women like men in Kilts therefore we must also love tartan, niche pubs have been the scourge of the drinker who just wants a bitter shandy without getting bitter over the price now charged for being surrounded by various multicoloured outlandish clan plaids.
I am in awe of those rebels who build their own back garden pubs where they can go, sit with family and friends, drink a decent brew and and play flip the beer mat for a penny a win all to their hearts content. And who knows, if they have been good, the wife may even throw in scampi in the basket as a treat.
that’s why cockburn and fisk are leading the pack !
Cockburn? he sounds a Portly figure.
Heaven, most people want to go there after they slip free from their mortal coil. No one has come back from heaven there so there is no first hand knowledge. Straight from the horses mouth, so to speak.
Obituaries and newspaper notices are full of romantic, and soppy verses about the deceased and personal tributes to them. It’s a comfort to refer to a last resting place where death is no more and safety and contentment reign for ever and ever.
Arriving in heaven must be rather like waking up from an operation & not knowing where you are for a period. Others will arrive at the same time, though departed years apart in our worldly terms.
There is an interesting chapter in A History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters, by Julian Barnes
The phrase ‘novel of ideas’ has become something of a last resort for critics. Writers don’t like it much either, and you can see why. It might contain a muted compliment on the grounds of intellectual clout, but it also implies precisely the kind of aridity which Julian Barnes’s new novel - with its strained jokiness, its reader-friendly efforts to counter seriousness of purpose with stylistic informality - labours to avoid. A History of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters, while hardly a ground-breaking piece of experimentalism, succeeds to the extent that it is both intelligent and reasonably accessible.
We ave 10 short stories, widely disparate in location and historical period but with recurring points of contact. It begins on Noah’s Ark: a michievous woodworm explains how he managed to sneak on board without being spotted by the drunken patriarch. Boats and woodworm crop up frequently in the subsequent stories, and in two of the better ones, The Mountain and Project Ararat, the myth of the flood becomes the wellspring of two more obsessive and personal journeys.
Finally I intended to write about heaven as perhaps our , or one of our topics for the week. As is usual I was carried away with enthusiasm for the above book which says in the final chapter ½
In 1989, in the closing pages of his novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Julian Barnes imagined what heaven might be like. Before his amiable narrator sussed that an eternity of happiness – the perfect breakfast sausage, the return of his favourite corduroy trousers, endless exceptional golf scorecards and an audience with Judy Garland – might eventually pall, he experienced something really worth getting excited about. “They’re a good team,” he wrote of Leicester City, “a very good team sometimes, yet they never seem to win the big ones.” In heaven though, not only did Leicester win the FA Cup, but their entire team was selected to play for England, whereupon they sailed to World Cup victory.
All excerpts from the GRAUNIAD
I Remember It Well
Maurice Chevalier, Hermione Gingold
We met at nine, we met at eight, I was on time, no, you were late
Ah, yes, I remember it well
We dined with friends, we dined alone, a tenor sang, a baritone
Ah, yes, I remember it well
That dazzling April moon, there was none that night
And the month was June, that’s right, that’s right
It warms my heart to know that you remember still the way you do
Ah, yes, I remember it well
How often I’ve thought of that Friday, Monday night
When we had our last rendezvous
And somehow I foolishly wondered if you might
By some chance be thinking of it too?
That carriage ride, you walked me home
You lost a glove, aha, it was a comb
AAh they don’t write songs like that anymore Jem
I really don’t know where I will end up after I have ended my earthly career because I can only go by what it seems like at the moment which is once you are dead, you are dead and you can’t get deader than dead can you.
Song lyrics are great for getting a message across to a dear one although I am still not sure that Fred Astaires lyrics in A Fine Romance would have won my heart when he sang
We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes
But you’re as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes
Mashed Potato doesn’t quite push the romance buttons does it 
Hi Solo
or as sexist as Ms Maugham when she warbled my anthem ,
"When people ask of me
what would you like to be,
now that you’re not a kid any more?
I know just what to say,
I answer right a away.
There’s just one thing
I’ve been wishing for.
I wanna be Bobby’s girl,
I wanna be Bobby’s girl.
That’s the most important thing to me.
And if I was Bobby’s girl;
if I was Bobby’s girl,
what a faithful, thankful girl I’d be.
Well I never, glancing at the clock, I have been slaving away over a hot pc for 2 hours.
Will anyone read any or all of it (GBY Solo)? Will my grammar improve, Will Mrs May or Mr Corbyn be with us still at the year end.
And what happened to HORACE BACHELOR??
I have had a bit of catching up to do, as you do when you haven’t caught up for a while and want to catch up.
Opera. Well I just don’t like it. It’s as simple as that.
As for going to the flicks to see a good song and dance filum, these days it seems so much more of a chore than a treat.
As for theme parks, did you know that the first ever baby incubators were at Coney Island theme park? They were too expensive for hospitals in those days, so people paid to see tiny babies in a bubble at the fair, which produced enough funds to pay for the babies’ care, and profits were used to buy more incubators.
I need new glasses, or need to pay more attention when reading.
I thought solo’s comment about a bar in the back garden ended with the suggestion that the wife might throw in scampi in a basket as a threat. 
Tune in again next week at the same time to find out what happens in the new and exciting episode of … Life.
I think Marvin may have had the right idea about that.
Life, loath it or ignore it. You can’t like it.
Well I do suppose it’s time to talk about the unpalatable – the mortal and the immortal. There are of course those amongst us who feel and even perhaps know they are immortal and those others who will say “tush” we are all mortal and when we cease this mortal coil that’s it that’s the end.
No shuffling in the back row Jem and RJ; this is a serious topic. So as we among us who have reached or drawing near the three score years and ten will attest – we KNOW our time draws near too. We see those stars and celebrities and close friends and others ‘drop off the perch’ – some sooner than we expected.
However no matter how long I ponder on this topic I KNOW my time will come BUT I FEEL immortal. And there is the difference between scientific knowledge perhaps and spiritual enlightenment ?
So each day as I groan and moan my way through the aches and pains I KNOW its coming but I don’t BELIEVE there is an end. Thank you ; I thank you erhm ahem I thank you!!
Catching up Fruity, I remember a fella saying to me in the local one evening “Where were you this morning when I seen you going to work, when I caught up on you you were gone” Never did figure that one out.
Good piece of writing there about priorities Gummy. Ah yes, Paddy Cockburn from Cork, a Corkman for your life as they used to say, in a jocular vein of course, “He’d live in your ear and let the other one out in flats” :-)
But what can we poor individuals do but sit back and watch guilty organisations perform cover up after cover up, no backbone in any of them anymore to stand up and say “It was my fault” It all depresses me and makes me sick.
Roll on heaven, I’m looking forward to getting away from the greedy grabbers on this planet.
O’ man river,
Dat ol’ man river,
He mus’know sumpin’
But don’t say nuthin’
He jes’ keeps rollin’
He keeps on rollin’ along.
PR 1927
Well done fellow posters, this latest flurry of literary and psychodedadeda has struck a rich vein.
I wrote a poem Gummy. About being 70, Ii came across it in an envelope containing 2 photographs of me at school aged 5 & 8. Looking at me and my ragamuffin chums I couldn’t help wondering how many of them were dead now. Or peering into my half FULL glass, well you know the rest of that cliché
Aged 5 or 8, I doubt very much my life expectancy was ever a consideration.
In passing I have over my life time been close to death several times , through illness, drowning, by fire and road accident.
I am 70 this year.
I hadn’t planned on being so tired and weary, or be so restricted in simple tasks at 70. That said I enjoy life and my family.
Even so I am ready for the end any time sooner or later, or as Sir Winston said this is “The end of the beginning”
My dear Granny Maud told me at 96, she didn’t care whether she went UP or DOWN after passing on cos “I’m bound to know people in both places”
JOHN 14 v2 says
My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?
That’s all very well but it means I am gonna be DOWNSIZING again after my death.
THREE SCORE AND TEN
When it’s all said and dusted and done
Your three score and ten has finally run
Will you leave this Earth a better place?
Have you finished the run you meant to race?
Or is your life beset
With many a regret
Much to do yet
Before we forget
When it’s all said and dusted and done
I enjoyed my life, some of it was fun
Did you broaden your outlook meet every race
Or avoid the discomfort, etched in every face
Have you any last request
Now you’re no longer a guest
Heading for the eternal rest
Were you the worst or the best
© RJ 2014