As Sam Goldwyn observed ‘if they liked it once, they’ll love it twice’, so with little to entertain you with today, here’s a rerun – all the rage these days are reruns – of a previous blog entry about smut and double entendre

I’ve nothing much to say today (did someone say ‘as always?’ Quiet at the back), but earlier this evening I was chatting to a guy at La Pappardella in Earls Court, and we were talking about – or possibly I was talking about – seaside postcards (by Bamforth & Co and later Donald McGill), music hall humour and double entendre, and I said I would send him a link to one entry of this blog (posted on just under two years ago in Augist 2014).

It contains a recording by actor Arthur Bostrum who in the BBC’s sitcom ‘Allo, allo’ played an Englishman in wartime France pretending to be a French policeman but who, unfortunately, spoke French very badly. Don’t know what ‘double entendre’ is? Well, let me explain by way of a joke: a woman walks into a bar in Paris and orders a double entendre. ‘Certainly,’ says the barman, ‘I’ll give you one.’

Anyway, having nothing much to say today and given the current TV fascination with reruns and compilations and reruns of compilations and reruns of reruns, I thought why not, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. So without further ado click here to read my entry, or re-read my entry, celebrating smut. I love smut. The recording is in four parts. Just - well, I am sure you know the drill.

. . .

PS The character I was talking to, one Jim Harman, a man with quite some experience, now 77, who was in the RAF, then worked as a telecoms engineer for an oil company in Nigeria after previously working in Angola and Portugal and who splits his year between Old Blighty and Ausatralia, had a fascinating story to tell.

It seems that last Thursday he went for a check-up with a private dentist after root canal treatment when his dentist found that there was still some infection in the wound. He injected him with bleach but forgot to dilute the bleach. Because he was in such pain, the dentist injected him with anaesthetic which calmed it for a few hours, but then it got worse again.

After a day of agony, he returned to see his dentist who immediately sent him off to A&E at the local hospital where where he was found to have renal failure: the anaesthetic had shut down his kidneys, spread the remnants of the infeciton and his lymph system had been poisoned. After a day’s worth of treatment of steroids and a saline drip to clear his kidneys, he was told by the medics that they had found odd antibodies in his blood which had countered the infection which they couldn’t explain: had he at some point ever been bitten by a snake? Yes, he said, three times, in fact, over the years he spent in Africa. Ah, they said, that has saved your life. The antibodies helped to counteract the infection.

Well, reporting it now, it seems to me that some of the story doesn’t add up, but that might have been me not getting all the details. Anyway, that was his story.