Before we left for the warm-water pool this morning, I quickly reprogrammed the telephone answering machine, "Hi! We're actually at home right now, screening our calls. Leave a message and if we pick up, you're important to us. If we don't pick up ... well, can you say 'hint'? [beep]"
The warm-water pool was absolutely packed with a bunch of geriatric women trying to lose weight or gain fitness (or attention from the one lone male participant in the group) by doing strange things with their polystyrene "noodles" and dumbbells under the shrill instruction of their loud "Gruppenführer", a large woman of indeterminable age, who had commandeered most of the pool, consigning the rest of us to just one narrow lane. The long hot shower afterwards made up for what should have been a relaxing morning in the pool, and energised us enough to drive "down the road" to have a beautiful lunch of silverside in white sauce at the Moroya Bowling Club and a bit of a rummage through the local Vinnies op-shop. And look what turned up: Bob Connolly's trilogy "First Contact /Joe Leahy's Neighbours / Black Harvest" on three DVDs.
I already have Bob Connolly's book and watched "First Contact" on television, and previews of all three documentaries are on Youtube here, here, and here, together with a follow-up documentary ...
... so should I spend $30 on what's unarguably a collector's item but which I probably wouldn't watch more than once? I passed it up for a beautiful edition of Paul Theroux's "Figures in a Landscape" and a now almost half-a-century-old copy of Phillip Adams' "Uncensored Adams".
If the DVDs are still there on our next visit to Moruya in a weeks' time, they're obviously meant for me and I shall lash out the thirty dollars.
We came home to peaceful "Riverbend" with no pesky messages on the telephone answering machine. Clearly, the new recording is working!
P.S. I don't want you to go away from here not having learnt anything today, so here we go: When we answer the phone, we typically say 'Hello'. But what is Hello? It may surprise many to learn that 'Hello' is not just a greeting, it's rather the name of a specific person. 'Hello' was in fact the name of Alexander Graham Bell's fiancée, Margaret Hello. Bell, the inventor of the telephone, used 'Hello' as the first word during the initial test of his invention. This simple utterance quickly became the standard opening for phone calls worldwide, enduring as the greeting we use to this day when picking up the phone. And if you believe this, you believe anything ... I just wanted to coax along your atrophied brain cells; go and google it for yourself!
