Friday July 24 2020

10:00 Lois phones in our grocery order to Budgens, the convenience store in the village. They will deliver tomorrow morning. Lisa in the shop tells Lois they are having difficulties getting hold of some breakfast cereals at the moment, so we’ll have to see tomorrow whether they have our favourites, Cheerios and Shredded Wheat, or not. How crazy!

Budgens – our local convenience store

10:30 Lois’s second cousin Colin phones to say that his mother Jean has died unfortunately – she was in her late 80’s. 

Lois then rings her cousin Brian and his wife Ruth in Bournemouth to tell them the sad news – Ruth can talk for England, so I know this will be a long call. I go upstairs and hop up on my exercise bike – I cycle 5 miles.

Ruth tells Lois that she and Brian are, like us, not really doing anything, not really going out hardly at all, and not seeing anybody. She has experienced something Lois and I have noticed, i.e. that when we do get to have a long conversation with anybody, it’s such an unusual event that we quickly get tired and feel exhausted well before the end of it – what madness!

Locals are keeping off the streets in Bournemouth, Ruth says. It's a seaside resort that people from London and other big cities can get to far too easily on motorways and other fast roads, bringing no end of nasty viruses with them, she suspects.

Ruth says she and Brian have been invited to their best friends’ Terry and Anne’s 60^th wedding anniversary, but they are reluctant to go. There will be a big crowd at the “do”, including a lot of Terry and Anne’s younger family members, who are not self-isolating of course, and Ruth thinks it may be too risky. Oh dear!

Ruth and Brian in happier times, at their own 60^th anniversary in Bournemouth last August.

(left to right) Terry, Brian, Ruth, Anne, and Lois

13:00 We have lunch – pilchard and cucumber sandwiches with mini-tomatoes and lettuce. We realise, a bit too late, that the shop has not sent us our usual regular Glenryck pilchards – they’ve sent the new “in hot chilli sauce” variant which, we are dimly aware, has been advertised on TV recently.

We decide to give it a try anyway, and we find to our surprise that it isn’t unbearably spicy – we think the fresh bread and the cucumber have the effect of cooling it down a little.

the empty tin sitting quietly on our draining board after the lunch

I showcase the new Glenryck "in chilli sauce" variant

But this “debacle” underlines, first and foremost, that it’s really important to listen carefully to TV commercials, especially when new products are being launched or debut'd.

A local man, Richard Heller, recently hit world headlines after admitting he had been unable to focus fully on a new product story or hear important parts of the dialogue, because his girlfriend had been speaking through “a hell of a lot of the Papa John commercial the previous Sunday night”. (Source: Onion News)

"As soon as the ad came on, she started raving about something she was reading online, and I completely missed what Peyton [Manning] said to Papa John," Heller said, explaining that his girlfriend's careless and persistent interruption of the 30-second spot prevented him from catching the full list of ingredients on the pizza chain's new Fritos Chili Cheese Pizza.

"I know Papa John said something about how it took him 30 years to put Fritos on a pizza, but I have no idea what happened next.” 

Heller added that although he could always rewind the DVR to find out how much the big specialty pizza cost, it would somehow not be quite the same.

We sympathise with Richard and vow to always listen more carefully to Glenryck commercials in the future, in case any more bold new ventures are being floated!

20:00 We spend the evening watching a bit of TV, the first part of veteran actress Miriam Margolyes’s new series “Almost Australian”.

We start with a brief glimpse of Miriam’s “koala face”, an obligatory part of any series on Australia.

Miriam's "koala face"

Tonight sees her travelling in New South Wales, trying to identify what the “Australian dream” is by talking to the people she meets, and to find out what it means today to be Australian. 

It’s evidently very much a “talking to people” series, rather than a “looking at places” kind of a series, and quite emotional at times. Miriam and her interviewees were often reduced to tears at various points.

Even Lois and I started to feel the tears welling up as Miriam talked to some plucky immigrants who have started to build a life for themselves, so thankful for being somewhere safe, where they don’t have to be afraid any more:  a bunch of Ka-ren Burmese minority refugees, also an Afghani orphan who had made it to Australia by boat as a teenager – unfortunately he’s only got a temporary 10-year visa which expires next year – his future is uncertain after that.

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzz!!!!