Thursday January 1st 2026 "Those 'green' Swedes eh!!! Always 'thinking outside the fuse box' (!), aren't they !!!"

Yes, Friends, those green Swedes, eh!!! Always 'thinking outside the fuse box', to think up greener and greener ways to source electricity, aren't they! And Onion News has more on this story - check it out!

Kudos, Sweden! 

And surely a lesson in how to be 'greener than thou'  [Swedish: grönare än du] if ever there was one! If implemented worldwide, this scheme could slash electricity costs for over 99.9% of the world's countries, so worth looking into for the UK, wouldn't you say, Sir Keir? After all, B&Q are selling longer and longer extension leads these days - it's not exactly rocket science is it !!!!

This one's a "snip", at only £20 !!!!

[That's enough whimsy! - Ed]

All right, if you insist! But the Onion News story from Sweden brings a special kind of smirk this morning to the perky, smirky, first-day-of-the-year smiles of me and my wife Lois, here at our home in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire. 

my wife Lois and me - a recent picture

You see, we're currently interested in all news coming out of Sweden at the moment, because our eldest daughter Alison and her family - husband Edward and their 3 teenage offspring Josie (19), Rosalind (17) and Isaac (15) are currently enjoying a new year's week holiday at a Swedish ski resort, and pictures are beginning to flood in, or should I say 'skate in' !!!! [No! - Ed]

Alison's family has been there since Sunday, and I have to say that most of the pictures we've seen so far have been of the inside of the hotel coffee lounge and the view through the windows (!) - kudos Alison, who, Lois and I know, is not exactly the world's biggest fan of skiing, to put it mildly!!!

Incidentally Lois and I have subjected to some exhaustive fact-checking that first picture above - the one of our granddaughter Rosalind, who appears to be actually outside the hotel, I can exclusively reveal that it definitely wasn't taken against a large snowy picture in the hotel lobby, for example. So it seems somebody has been outside the hotel long enough to take a photograph of the 'excursion', so fair play to Rosalind haha!!!

Lois and I can't talk - we're staying indoors today as well, even here in Liphook. But we're just following orders! 

You see, Lois says that so-called 'elderly' and 'vulnerable' people have been advised to stay indoors today, by some government body or other, so we're just being good citizens haha!

(left) the view from our front windows this morning, and 

(right) some weather 'facts and figures' - brrrr !!!!!

For once, however, Lois and I have got a lot of important work to do in the house, so the chilly weather's working in our favour, which is nice ! 

There are loads of Christmas left-overs to eat up, for starters (and for the other courses!!!!). 

Plus we've got to somehow "get to grips" with our shiny new electric toothbrushes: and not just physically! Sadly, like all electric gadgets today, they have arrived with a huge one-page sheet of microscopic instructions, in, like, a billion languages - more probably! And also a tiny leaflet with some mysterious, meaningless little pictures and no writing at all - what madness !!!!

We're forcedin the end to try to find some guidance on YouTube, but for now, let's just say that our much-heralded move away from manual toothbrushing has been postponed indefinitely, or at least till the spring at the earliest, when we'll feel more like it, hopefully!

flashback to earlier this morning: we try to get to grips with how to use our shiny new

'his and hers' electric toothbrushes, but decide to postpone the move away

from manual toothbrushes till at least the spring, possibly till summer - but we'll see!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

[Is that all you two 'noggins' have done today, Colin? - Ed]

Well, no, absolutely not !!!  We've also been on a kind of nostalgia trip, watching ITV's coverage of the New Year's Day racing from Cheltenham, the town where we lived for almost exactly 50 years after our marriage in 1972, finally on Halloween 2022 shutting our door on our house there, which was less than a mile away from the town's iconic racecourse, so a place we often used to go for our daily walks back in the day. 

Awwww!!!

(top) pictures from ITV's coverage of the New Year's Day racing at Cheltenham,

and (below) flashback to New Year's Day 2017: Lois and me going for an early morning

New Year's Day walk, as the racecourse was gearing up for the iconic annual meeting 

Awwwww (again) !!!!! Happy days!!!!!

20:00 And at the end of another somewhat stressful day (!), Lois and I are glad to sink down on the couch and watch tonight's edition of the current festive daily series of our favourite TV quiz, Only Connect, presented by Victoria Coren-Mitchell, the quiz that tests lateral thinking.

What Lois and I find so fascinating about this show is the little bits of background that presenter Victoria gives us revealing some of the mechanics of how these shows are put together. Not all of the teams who apply to come on the show are in the requisite 3-person format, we learn, which is interesting.

For years, Lois and I have been itching to appear on the show, but we've failed to find a third person to make up a regular 3-person Only Connect team with us. Could we maybe apply as a 'duo' and have somebody random  assigned to us to make us a threesome?

 

Oh dear - perhaps we'll stick to just watching, then!

But fascinating stuff, isn't it!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzz!!!!!!

Wednesday December 31st 2025 "Met any 'bog crones' lately? Yes, they're yet another 'endangered species', apparently!"

Those 'bog crones' - some days you see them all over the place, but you can never find one when you really want one, have you noticed! 

Remember this "think-piece" in the popular "What scientists are saying" column of the local Onion News for East Hampshire, just a few short months ago?

Poor bog crones !!!!!

And quite an eye-opener, wasn't it! And memories of that story bring a hint of a smile to the faces of me and my wife Lois this morning, as we linger in bed this morning in our home in leafy Liphook, Hampshire, unwilling to face the frosty, foggy world outside our bedroom window - surely today is a day for bog crones to come out of hiding, if ever there was one!!!!

Brrr!!!!

No chance of going out today on this New Year's Eve 2025, with all that mist, fog and ice about - that's for sure! And we'll just have to have our own party, just the two of us: so we're determined to "party like it's 2025" !!!!

[Well, it is 2025, last time I looked, so arguably a good time to do that! - Ed]

Yes, difficult to believe, but it's only 26 years since Lois and I went out to "party like it's 1999", at the Clocktower pub, in our then home town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. 

Imagine that - both of us "youngsters", of only 54 years of age, with 6 more years of working life ahead of us, would you believe, with Lois looking too glamorous, and me looking too "dapper", for our own good, to put it mildly!!!

flashback to New Year's Eve 1999: Lois and I, looking glamorous and dapper,

see the new millennium in, at the Clocktower pub, Cheltenham, sampling

the pub's perky £25 "party pack" and bopping to sounds of the pub's perky resident singer

Happy days !!!!!

Well, today's not going to be able to live up to that landmark evening, but we can still have fun: 

more work on our Jane Austen-related Christmas Jigsaw, an afternoon in bed for statutory "nap-time" [You lazy pair of buggers! - Ed], and, later, we take an active part in the belated debuting of this year's Christmas Cake with a glass of some shiny new Christmas port to follow - what's not to like!!!!

It turns into quite a physical day for us, and a bit low on the mental stimulation side. 

We had planned to do some Latin homework, as you do (!), because we're both members of local man Joe's U3A "Intermediate Latin for Old Codgers" group, and our first meeting of 2026 has been scheduled for Monday: however, we get a message today that poor Joe is currently in hospital, with back problems, so that Monday meeting's going to have to be postponed. 

So, just like a couple of feckless teenagers, Lois and I decide we'll hold off and leave our Latin homework for another day - what madness!!!!

flashback to last September: Lois and I queue up behind a bunch of 

other "old codgers" outside Haslemere Town Hall, hopiing to join

local man Joe's "Intermediate Latin for Old Codgers" class

20:00 By the time evening falls, with the pair of us now anxious to give our much-neglected brains a bit of a "workout" before getting back into bed again (!), we tune into tonight's edition of Only Connect, our favourite TV quiz, presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell, the quiz which tests "lateral thinking".

And, interestingly for us, a couple who've spent a fog-bound day here "in each other's pockets" (!), tonight's programme is all about "threesomes", which will be a novelty, to put it mildly!!!

Can YOU work out the connection between these 4, seemingly unrelated, "things" ?

Well, it turns out that they all feature three consecutive "tittles", a punctuation term which Lois and I have never heard of, but which apparently refers to the dots above the letters 'i' and 'j'.

The horse that won the 1970 Triple Crown was Nijinsky, the country with Suva as its capital is Fiji, the host city for the 2022 Winter Olympics was Beijing, and the US variant spelling of "high jinks" is just "hijinks". See? Simples !!!!

How about this one? It's a real "doozy" !!!!

Yes, right again! These all refer to when there's a perfectly good "threesome" going on, but an interloper of sorts arrives, making it more of a foursome.

Time is the fourth dimension, which annoyingly 'arrived' when we'd already got a perfectly good 3-dimensional spatial system. "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" is the fourth book in what author Douglas Adams dubbed "the increasingly inaccurately described" 'Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy'.  Plasma is the fourth state of matter, after solid, liquid and gas.

And of course D'Artagnan was the somewhat awkward "Fourth Musketeer" in Alexander Dumas' classic French novel The Three Musketeers", made up of Athos, Porthos and Aramis.

fast forward to 1992: author Douglas Adams showcases 

the fifth volume in his Hitchhiker's Guide "trilogy"

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

Finally, in the show's much-feared 'music round', the teams hear 4 popular songs. But what's the connection here?

Well, as you've probably guessed, these are all about love triangles. "Au fond du temple saint" comes from Bizet's opera "The Pearl Fishers"; "Taste" is a song by Sabrina Carpenter, and "Jolene" a song by Dolly Parton.

"I Know Him So Well" is sung in the musical "Chess" by Barbara Dickson and Elaine Page, a musical based loosely on American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer's win against the Russian grandmaster Boris Spasskiy in the world chess finals in Iceland in 1972. 

And of course, "I Know Him So Well" is about yet another love triangle.

Enough said, I think!!!!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz !!!!!!