Doofus or dufus - an inept or stupid person.
So I repeat. What kind of doofus am I? I'm getting to the end of a novel by Linwood Barclay. It's entitled "The Twenty Three." Much of it seems incomprehensible to me. There are sub plots that make no sense at all and characters mentioned who have no development. And then I read the cover. It's part three of a small town American trilogy and I must presume all the incomprehensible bits were plots in the previous two novels.
Only question now is should I read the other two in order or backwards? Life is so full of these questions.
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I sat next to a dear lady who paid me a compliment at the end as we had coffee. Now you know me. I take all the compliments I can get and sometimes accept compliments meant for others.
In the past I have been aware on a number of occasions of others passing off my work as their own and taking the plaudits. I'm sure we have all come across this. Let me know if you have.
So as we drank coffee the lady said: "I'm so glad I sat next to you as you've got a lovely singing voice and mine is so awful."
That voice belonged to my friend John who sat on my right. He overheard this conversation and so there was no way I could pass his singing voice off as my own, as I probably wanted to.
So I came clean and explained that my singing voice is somewhere between a cat sliding down a banister on a razor blade and Bob Dylan.
"Oh but I like Bob Dylan," she said.
"So do I", I replied but not many people would claim that he can sing. Same with Tom Waits. I enjoy him as well but his singing voice is horrendous. Rod Stewart and any number of others are in the same apple cart.
Had John not been there would I have passed his voice off as my own? Well who knows. The thing is he pleaded with me to appear in today's blog and who am I to let a mate down?
Yesterday I went with John to Dereham for a meeting of our Le Paradis Commemoration Group and we made really good progress in sorting out our coming book. We have a printer who can handle it and now all I need is a couple of days I can set aside to finally update and edit it.
I know that we will sell hundreds if not thousands of copies of the book and it will give me great delight to laugh in the face of all the publishers that turned it down and particularly the one that accepted the idea, said they were excited by the project and then changed their mind before we could deliver it.
Before going to Dereham I helped out at the twice weekly forget me not cafe in the village. For this cafe, I wrote an easy quiz about the 1960s. It was designed to prompt memories and it certainly did. It left me thinking though.
The first question was in four parts - Who won the 1966 World Cup? Who were their opponents in the final? Where was the final played and who scored a hat-trick in the final?
Interestingly nobody got the question completely correct. Every pair (we got people to answer the questions in pairs) put Germany as the opponents in the final. Of course it was West Germany as Germany was still split into East and West. I wonder if most people have now forgotten that and the Berlin Wall etc.
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On Monday we spent six hours running the bar at our cricket club. Scarcely anyone paid with plastic, we no longer take cash. No they paid with their mobile phones. I saw an app the other day where I can link my cards to my phone. Once again I need to get down with the kids.