Yes, Friends, if it's not too personal question, do YOU have a secret beard a-growing and a-flowing somewhere on YOUR face? That whacky "beard look" is gaining ground, to judge from today's Onion News, which has two so-called "beard stories" on page 94 alone, which is kind of a record, I think!!!
my wife Lois and me - the most recent pictures
Let me put my cards on the table at this point, however! Neither of us has a beard, although - "woke" as we both undoubtedly are - we have no objection to people that do have either a beard, or the appearance of a beard, which is nice! Both the bearded and the non-bearded are welcome in our house, a policy which sends out a clear message of hope to the world, we, at least, both fervently believe (!).
[Get on with it! - Ed]
Beards are very much on our lips this morning (although not physically!), as Lois and I relax after the Sunday Morning Meeting today, in the calm atmosphere of Lois's church in a village hall just outside nearby Petersfield, Hampshire.
(left) the village hall outside Petersfield, Hampshire, with (right) Lois and me
in attendance at a recent typical Sunday Morning Meeting
Last August, Grahame took a party of church members to see the ruins of nearby Roman town Silchester, Hampshire, kitting each of us out with enormous maps of the area, which proved too large to be practical, especially in the county's stiff winds, which was a pity!
flashback to August 2025: Grahame (in the blue shirt) showing us and other
church-members around the ruins of Roman Silchester: (left) Grahame's pre-walk talk,
where he gives us each a huge map of the town - nice idea but (centre, right)
the maps prove to be too large to be practical on the walk itself
and get swiftly abandoned, which is a pity!
And after this morning's meeting, Roman specialist Grahame entertains Lois and me with some of his archaeology 'banter', telling us all about the BBC's efforts to "scale down" the buxomness of presenter Bettany Hughes, whom he often sees at work during his visits to Oxford's Bodleian Library.
For good measure, Grahame adds some miscellany about Emperor Hadrian who ruled the Roman Empire between 117 and 138 AD. During his reign, Hadrian made a visit to Britain in 122 AD, to check that his famous "Wall", which he'd ordered to be built across northern England to keep out the barbarians to the north, had been correctly installed by contractors, unlike Donald Trump's reflecting pool, as we, and others, have been reading all about in the media recently (no names, no packdrill !!!!).
Hadrian was the first ever Roman Emperor to sport a beard, Grahame tells us, but the practice "caught on", and almost all emperors after Hadrian were careful to grow one, which almost became a "badge of office", which is interesting. And later today, we check on Google to see if this was just another of Grahame's "little stories" (!), but we find out that it's true, as Mr Google confirms in his reply to our tentative query.
12:00 The meeting finishes and Lois and I drive home to Liphook for a hurried lunch, because at 1:30 pm we're due to talk on our weekly Sunday "catch-up" call on whatsapp, with our daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia, and with Sarah's husband Francis and their 13-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.
Yes, today, it's "all go" again, for Lois and me! No wonder that neighbours have dubbed us "Liphook's busiest-looking retired couple" - and we've earned that accolade "in spades" over the last month or two, that's for sure!
Today we catch Sarah and family just finishing off a meal of Cornish pasties prepared by dad Francis.
after a hasty lunch, Lois and I finally get to settle down on the couch
for our weekly Sunday "catch-up" whatsapp call with our daughter Sarah
who lives in Perth, Australia with husband Francis and twins Lily and Jessica
Sarah doesn't get a lot of time at weekends for meal-preparation. We call her "Sarah Two-Jobs", because while doing her accountancy job in Perth, she somehow also finds the time to keep doing her old accountancy job in Evesham UK, working online during evenings and weekends.
"Sarah Two-Jobs", (left) second from right with colleagues at the accountancy
firm she works for in Evesham UK, and (right) the picture we took when Lois and I
picked Sarah up from her Perth office, during our visit to Australia in 2018
What madness, isn't it !!!!
And as usual today, our little "Australian family" is highly amused when we tell them the latest news from "the mother country", and all the crazy world that they left behind them, a couple of years ago, when they moved to Perth, no question about that!
They can hardly believe it when we tell them about Friday evening's "shenanigans" here in the UK, when Louise Haigh, Andy Burnham's First Secretary of State, suddenly resurrected the musty-dusty old official "government emergency warning system", totally without warning (no pun intended!!!!): a system devised in the COVID era but not used for the last 6 years.
The idea, in this case, was to warn of the dangers of inadvertently starting wildfires during the current UK heat wave, but caused general panic, with drivers swerving across lanes on motorways and all kinds of "malarkey", which wasn't the objective, to put it mildly!!!!!
Even Lois and I got caught off-guard by the alerts, would you believe! We were doing the washing-up in the kitchen on Friday evening when our phones started to make some incredibly threatening "Dr Who / Tardis" - "alien invasion"-style noises.
Luckily Lois and I were able to read the messages on our phones and quickly realised that it was just about the risk of wildfires, but when we sat down to watch topically news round-up weekly show "The One Show" on BBC1, it was clear that the alarms were going on in the studio and presenters Alex Jones and Roman Kemp were totally mystified, although tried to carry on as if nothing was happening, which was probably the correct response, professionally - but your comments welcome!
flashback to Friday evening: the Government's emergency
alarm system suddenly jumping into action, surprising
The One Show's presenters, Alex Jones and Roman Kemp
And apparently people living in the border areas between England and Wales got the warning message in both English and Welsh, some only getting the Welsh version, due to a technical 'snafu' - presumably causing worry, amongst non-Welsh speakers, that the much-feared "Welsh take-over of England" (!) had begun.
But what a crazy country we live in !!!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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