Sunday January 11th 2026 "Is YOUR phone the most valuable thing in YOUR house?"

Yes, Friends, is YOUR phone, or your laptop maybe the most valuable thing in YOUR house?

It's comforting to know that even laptops have a "shelf life", as today's Onion News makes clear!!! 

Kudos, Shepard !!!

And how reassuring to know that laptops, like people, are "only human", and eventuallly they reach that stage when they can be treated a little more "cavalierly" - is that a word? [No! - Ed].

My wife Lois and I, here in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, certainly feel that we've definitely reached that comfortable stage of life. We're both a bit "dog-eared" perhaps, and can, without worrying unduly, lightly toss each other around in the house, although only onto soft surfaces, "like a couch or something" to quote Shepard - see the Onion story above (!). 

me and my wife Lois - at 79, both a bit "dog-eared" now,

to put it mildly !!!!

We also feel we can leave each other unattended for a few minutes while we pop to the toilet, so that's all good (!).

New laptops can be expensive, however, and easy to damage if you're not careful, as we learn this morning from our Sunday morning weekly "catch-up" zoom call with our daughter Sarah, 9000 miles away in Perth, Australia.

our weekly Sunday morning "catch-up" call with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia

Sarah and husband Francis have been forking out a lot of money recently, because their 12-year-old twins Lily and Jessica are preparing to start secondary school at the start of February. It's a private Anglican school, and so there's not just the cost of the school uniforms, but also the cost of text-books, stationery etc. 

And Sarah tells us today that they've also had to buy the girls each a so-called "MacBook", or some-such nonsense, whatever that is when it's at home!

our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica showcase for us their shiny-new

"MacBooks" , whatever those are when they're at home !!!!

The twins have been warned by their parents to take good care of these so-called "MacBooks", and not to damage them before term starts in February, on pain of the loss of several years' pocket money, to put it mildly!!!

It's hot in Perth, as usual. And I tell the twins that when Lois and I are talking to them on zoom, I try to sit as close to our laptop screen as possible, with a dab of sun-cream on my face, hoping to "catch a little tan" from the sun coming in through their windows, which raises a little giggle from the twins, as well as a sympathetic sigh - poor old Granny and Poppa, back in cold, wet England !!!!

flashback to November: our twin granddaughters enjoying a morning at the pool

with dad Francis, before cooling down with ice-creams on the patio: awwwww!!!!

Phew, what a scorcher !!!!!

Certainly there's no sun going to be coming through mine and Lois's windows here in Liphook, Hampshire today, that's for sure!!!! A big storm has been forecast and we're going to stay indoors again, and Lois will take part in her church in Petersfield's weekly Sunday Morning Meeting online, like last Sunday, when we were about to be "snowed in". As it turns out today's storm is delayed, and doesn't arrive till the afternoon, so we could have taken the 10-mile drive south to Petersfield without problems.  But then, that's the British weather for you, isn't it - unlike the Australian weather, it's totally unpredictable, seemingly (!).

What a crazy country we live in !!!!!

And I don't think Lois and I got much than a very superficial indirect tan from our zoom call to Perth this morning, but whatever brownness we got, we try to "top it up" this evening, with a Sky Arts Channel retrospective on Sean Connery's James Bond films, many of which were set in the Caribbean and other hot places.

And in a few seconds it's "Bye bye bikini top" for another Bond actress - oh dear, what madness !!! 

Bond's "way with women" is not without its critics, however, as this documentary makes clear.

The films, however, portray all this as being okay, partly by making them light-hearted, and humorous, even.

So it's refreshing, later this evening, to see a medal for a real-life, and perhaps more wholesome, British agent, on tonight's edition of the Antiques Roadshow.

Step forward Mary the Pigeon!

During World War I, more than 16 million animals were put into service, from horses to dogs, but it wasn't till World War II that their service was officially recognised. And in 1943, the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) inaugurated a medal to honour animal bravery.

And tonight, two women bring along a medal handed down to them by their grandfather, and have it examined by the programme's military memorabilia expert Mark Smith

Mary was originally a racing pigeon, but when war came, Mary, along with the other pigeons from Grandad's pigeon loft, was enlisted in the "Pigeon Service", to be airlifted and dropped behind enemy lines in France on numerous occasions. 

And whenever the French Resistance had collected vital intelligence on the occupying Germans, they used Mary and her fellow pigeons to carry the information safely to Grandad's loft, and Grandad used to pass the messages on to the authorities in London.

Mary went on several missions, and was on more than occasion, shot at by the occupying Germans, or attacked by the hawks that the Germans used to train, specifically to intercept them.  

Eventually Mary was wounded once too often, and had to be retired from service, but she lived out a happy, and well-earned, retirement in old Grandad's loft, which was nice.

Although admiring Mary's persistence, Lois and I think that another medal should probably have gone to Grandad himself. A humble boot-maker, and used to sewing things, it was Grandad who sewed up Mary's wounds, and even made her a neat leather collar to keep Mary's neck up while she recuperated, bless him!.

The biggest surprise for the two women on the show tonight, however, is to learn that Mary's extremely rare PDSA medal is actually worth £30,000 in today's market.

And for Lois and me, a heart-warming end to our day, that's for sure.

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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

Saturday January 10th 2026 "What does YOUR old dad do on his mobile phone?! Mystery solved in today's papers maybe!!!"

Yes, Friends, have YOU ever watched your old dad fiddling with his phone, and wondering what he could possibly be doing with it?

Well, the mystery was solved for one local family, according to today's Onion News for East Hampshire. Just feast your eyes on this front page shocker!!!

Poor old Dad Branson !!!!!

But it's a truism, I think, that the older we get, the more difficult it can become to flirt, whether it's on our phones or in person. My wife Lois and I should know - we're both 79, would you believe, although here in semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, we only flirt with each other, so we wouldn't know where to start with anybody else, to be frank !

my wife Lois and me - some recent pictures

The Onion story about poor old Dad Branson, however, brings a peculiarly sardonic, and archaic, smile to our faces later today, when we turn to Lois's copy of "The Week" magazine and read about another "old codger" who, unexpectedly, was a past master (or should I say "past mistress" !!!!) at the gentle art of flirting. 

Step forward, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, no less!

Poor Maggie!!!!!

Reading this unexpected flood of saucy "geriatric" stories definitely puts Lois and me in a romantic frame of mind, and despite the chilly weather we opt to go for an intimate morning walk over the "hallowed turf" of local soccer heroes Liphook United, currently languishing near the bottom of the prestigious East Hampshire Premier League. 

There's almost nobody else around at the ground, so with "Jack Frost nipping at our bits" and all "dressed up like Inuits", to quote my own "woke-alized" version of "The Christmas Song" (!), Lois and I share some intimate moments admiring the beauty of the trees and of the birdsong on this chilly Saturday morning (!).

And then later, after statutory "naptime", what could be more romantic at around 4pm than doing the Radio Times quizzes together, over a cup of tea and some leftover Christmas biscuits! 

What is it people say? 

"The couple that quizzes together fizzes together", isn't it? Perhaps we should be told!!!!

And, now, thoroughly warmed up, we score a creditable 7 out of 10 on the prestigious Mastermind questions. See how many of these "doozies" YOU know!!!!

20:00 Back in the 1970's people certainly knew how to flirt, no question about that! And during a delightful rerun of a 50-year-old episode of "The Good Old Days" on BBC4 tonight, popular pint-size Scottish comedian Ronnie Corbett reminds us about those far-off times with one of his cheeky, slightly off-colour honeymoon jokes, which is nice!

You must know this one! It's the couple's wedding night, and the groom goes into the hotel bar for a drink, while the bride gets into bed in their room. She'd only been in bed for three minutes when a train goes past on the nearby railway line, and the vibrations almost shake her out of the bed.

The bride rings for the hotel manager to complain about the noise and vibration, but when he arrives in the room, he's mystified by her story. So she asks him when the next train is due, and he tells her that it will pass by in 3 minutes time.

You've probably guessed what happens next! Am I right? Or am I right!

Yes, the husband comes up from the bar, of course, and he sees the manager on the bed with his bride, needless to say!

Tremendous fun, isn't it!

[If you say so! - Ed]

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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

Friday January 9th 2025 "Can an up-to-date Danish Lego set defeat Donald Trump? I wonder....!"

Yes, Friends, as you may have heard (!), Donald Trump has got his beady eye on the Danish province of Greenland at the moment. And the furore is causing a certain fluttering among a particular group of "old codgers" here in Liphook, in this quiet, semi-leafy corner of East Hampshire UK, to put it mildly !!!!

My wife Lois and I, "for our sins" (!), lead the local U3A online "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group, and Jeanette, one of our group members and the only member to be of genuine Danish extraction, has been sketching some ideas for countering Trump's designs on Greenland with help from Denmark's biggest exporter: step forward Lego toy building bricks, no less !!!!

me and my wife Lois, leading one of our online meetings of the

local U3A "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group

"Denmark is ready!", says Jeanette defiantly, in this dramatic post to our group-members today!

(left) Danish-born "old codger" Jeanette and (right) her dramatic post today

to members of our local East Hampshire "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group

Luckily, my wife Lois is a subscriber to the topical "The Week" magazine, which "plopped" through our letterbox today with its digest of news from home and abroad from the last week. And having skimmed the contents I'm exclusively able to send back this witty rejoinder to Jeanette, which is nice!

And certainly Donald Trump is all over the latest issue of "The Week" which fell into mine and Lois's hot little hands today - no doubt about that!

But how to explain the Trump phenomenon? The magazine is going with the "comedian model", I notice, following the analysis popularised by US journalist Michael Wolff, according to this editorial by "The Week"'s deputy editor, Theo Tait:

By contrast, Lois and I, although obviously no experts (to put it mildly!), tend to go with the "CEO" model for Trump. To us he acts like a CEO doing "deals" with foreign powers just like he might with a business rival, and brooking no dissent in his organisation. Perhaps "Dodgy CEO" model might be a better description, because Trump's past performance as a CEO has included plenty of financial losses and business failures etc, or so we've read.

Trump reminds Lois a lot of her experience working for Czech publishing billionaire Robert Maxwell, back in the late 1960's / early 1970's in Maxwell's "prestige" documentation department, at Headington Hall, Oxford. 

Maxwell famously ruled his companies by terror, changing company policies and working practices on a whim, and, likely as not, reversing those policies the day after. What madness !!!! And we were reminded of the Maxwell era by a recent BBC documentary a few months ago. 

(bottom left) Robert Maxwell with wife and family back in the day, and (bottom right) Lois

escaping Maxwell's clutches for 3 weeks in order to visit me during my study year in Japan

Later, I famously saved Lois from "a fate worse than death", by marrying her in August 1972, which, as a happy by-product, also got her out of a business trip with Maxwell to a book fair in Germany: the great man had invited Lois to accompany him as his "special assistant", and we all know what that would have meant!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

Trump may be treating the US as a business, but how good are Trump's 'business' decisions? We listened yesterday to a fascinating BBC Radio 4 analysis of his take-over of Venezuela, designed (we think!) to open the country up to American oil companies and, at the same time, to halt, or hamper, the export of drugs to the US.

Lois and I didn't know that Venezuelan oil is apparently "tar-rich", considered "dirty" because it contains high concentrations of carbon. It's quite expensive to extract, needing specialised equipment to drill and process etc. Will America's oil companies be willing to spend out the necessary investment funds to modernise Venezuela's extraction methods?

Also we didn't know that, as far as drugs are concerned, Venezuela's world-wide drug exports are  mostly of cocaine, and not the dreaded fentanyl, which is feared for its potency and extreme unpredictability - remind you of anybody haha!!!!

20:00 Trump is something of a right-wing populist, by all accounts, and later today, Lois and I watch a fascinating documentary on the PBS America channel about two countries in Europe where right-wing populists have swept into power: Hungary and Italy.

Hungary is a country that Lois and I visited several times in the 1990's and 2000's, so we're particularly interested in what goes on there. It's been governed for a number of years by Viktor Orban's populist Fidesz Party, and it's interesting tonight to see something of Viktor's methods.

flashback to 1994 and my first visit to Hungary, made as communism was dying on its feet. 

The lively advert on the left was a cheeky poster promoting Orban's new Fidesz Party. 

with the slogan "Ha unod a banánt, válaszd a narancsot" (if you're tired of bananas,

why not try an orange!): orange being, even today, the symbol of Fidesz,

and the joke being a typical example of Hungarian women's prison humour.

What madness !!!!!

Orban's policy has to be to keep democracy notionally in place, but to destroy the checks and balances in the country's constitution, in particular weakening the courts etc as much as he can, adding extra seats which he then packs with his own supporters. 

Orban doesn't cancel elections, allowing them to go ahead, while changing the rules as much as possible to favour his own party. 

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

Nor does Orban gag the minority anti-government press, but he puts them under constant financial and psychological pressure, and in the case of index.hu, for example getting one of his billionaire friends to take it over. Fortunately the editor and the website's 80 journalists there all resigned en masse in protest at the sale, setting up a new website telex.hu, and continuing to challenge Orban's methods and policies. "Ne hallgassunk!" is the new website's slogan - "We will not keep silent!".

Here was the BBC's July 2020 report on the walk-out, dubbed by the journalists, interviewed in tonight's PBS programme, as "a sublime moment":

Fascinating stuff, isn't it!

Come back, "boring" Sir Keir Starmer, all is forgiven haha!!!!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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