Thursday 30 August 2012

Boiling up rabbit's eyes


I went down to make some coffee this morning, and turned the radio on as I always do, tuned to National Radio 4.  Complete silence.  So I switched from digital to FM, which usually works. Complete silence.  The display read, "Station not available'.

If a British nuclear submarine surfaces after a couple of months under the Polar Icecap, and wants to find out if London has been nuked as a result of WW3 breaking out, they try to tune in to BBC Radio 4.  If they fail to pick up it's signal, the captain assumes full responsibility for the defence of the realm, and is quite within his rights to launch all his arsenal of ICBMs on the country of his choice, it being safe to assume that life is no longer worth living without Radio 4, and they have no families to go home to anyway.

I have other checks that I can fall back on before deciding if life is worth living or not, and the first one is to look out of the window, which I did.  Strangely, the first person I saw was a famous character actor whose name I have forgotten (but you would know his face from a thousand films), crossing the road with a cup of coffee in his hand.  He did not behave as though London had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb, but since this has never happened before, how do I know how he would behave?

If I had seem him grab the nearest young woman, pull her to the pavement and make wild, untrammelled love to her, I might have assumed that the world was about to end, but - if I remembered correctly - I believe this particular actor is gay, so may not have behaved like that anyway.

He is also about 70+ years old, so a nice cup of coffee may be more important to him than sex at his time of life.  It is so very difficult to tell at this time, partly because every other person in the world seems to walk down the street carrying a paper cup of Starbucks, and all those coffee outlets would not make the money that they do if all their customers regarded one cup of coffee as the last they would ever have in their lives.  I had to make other checks.

So I went back to the kitchen and made myself some coffee, which I drank in the privacy of our compact but adorable apartment, then sent a text to a friend which read,  "Can you get the radio?".  That was about an hour ago, and he has not replied, so there is still a small chance that London has been nuked after all, and all of us in the provinces are taking the news (or lack of it) with typically 'the show must go on' - type, stiff upper-lips.  Maybe I have been watching too much Dam Busters.

After the second coffee, I remembered that I could listen out for R4 on the net, which is what I did when I turned this machine on.  There it was.  Panic over.  I can now report that - as I write - London has not been destroyed by a nuclear missile.

It's a good thing that I did not prematurely rush down into the street with bleary eyes, grab the nearest 25 year-old woman and sexually molest her.  I've got that to look forward to.

16 comments:

  1. I can report that in S W France Radios 4, and 4 extra, are up and running (via satellite).

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    1. That's great news, Cro. You have saved me from having to go on the register of sexual offenders.

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  2. If the young woman was a barmaid and it was 7pm in the evening...the outcome could have been very different!

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    1. If I had my own weapons of mass destruction, I would probably engineer just that situation, but I would probably leave it until midnight. This is why I'm always out of the pub by 7.

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  3. Yes, loved your post, giggled in several spots as a matter of fact, but what's up with the boiled rabbit eyes?

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  4. A light of fancy induced by rabbit eye fumes? Rabbit eye indigestion? Rabid eye fancy?

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  5. If British subs really do that, I would have thought they'd tune into Radio 4 on Longwave so, panic over.

    Somebody better tell them when analogue switch off finally happens.

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    1. Good points. Maybe they will have broken an 'out of touch with the world' record when analogue gets switched off... worrying.

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  6. Have you been using the water from the rabbits eyes to make the coffee again?

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    1. That would explain why I have to use glasses to eat carrots... wouldn't it?

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  7. What's this about a cup of coffee being more interesting than making mad, passionate love when you reach seventy. Wait until you get there before you make such statements!!!! Beats coffee any day of the week.

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