10:00 The nurse at our doctor’s surgery rings me to book me in for
an appointment next month: this is for my annual review, including blood test
and blood pressure check. I have to wear a mask and gloves, and check in at a
window outside the surgery’s main entrance. Then I go back and wait in the car.
When the nurse is ready for me, someone will come out to the car and take my
temperature. Then I can go in and presumably not have to wait in the waiting room. My
god, what a crazy world we live in !!!
Lois gets going with making a New Zealand Weet-bix Slice, but the
baking stage doesn’t go too well. The recipe has advised a baking time that was
obviously too long. The crust of it is a real tooth-breaker – my god! But the
rest of the cake isn’t too bad and Lois decides to make a chocolate coating for it. If the
crust is discarded the rest of the cake tastes very nice, but next time she’ll reduce the baking
time or go for an alternative recipe. What madness!
Lois's kiwi-style "Weet-bix Slice" - a bit of a tooth-breaker
as it turns out, due to a faulty recipe - oh dear!
13:00 Mark comes round to do gardening work. He has discovered we have a bumblebee nest in one of our compost tubs right at the far end of our enormous back garden - yikes! But apparently this is good news for any garden, because it means that this year we will have our own locally employed pollinators: bumblebees are not aggressive, and their nests are only used once, for a single summer, and then discarded. How economical they are, our cute little furry friends!
Later in the day I showcase the
compost tub with the
built-in residential bumblebee
nest (not shown).
The bees are all inside having their tea, presumably.
13:30 After lunch, I go to bed for a gigantic afternoon nap.
Meanwhile Lois sits down with the laptop and takes part in one of her sect’s “zoom”
seminars for Iranians. Many Iranian Christians have come to England in the last
few year, and they are particularly attracted to either Lois’s sect or the
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the reason being that these two sects don’t embrace the
doctrine of the Trinity – God in three persons, blessed Trinity etc etc, a
doctrine which forms no part of Iranian Christian tradition apparently. The zoom
session uses a Farsi interpreter from Lois’s sect, so the seminar-leader’s lecture
is given sentence by sentence, first in English, and then in Farsi, so it’s
quite time-consuming.
15:30 I get out of bed and come down for mine and Lois’s usual Earl
Grey tea and slice of cake. After that I talk on the phone to Gill, my sister
in Cambridge. Like us in the lockdown Gill and her husband Peter aren’t doing
much and don’t go out much – oh dear!
They have 3 grown-up daughters. Zoe, the eldest, works in cancer
research at Manchester University. She is now going into the labs 2 weeks out
of every 3, and works from home the other week. The youngest, Lucy, who is a
qualified solicitor, has to go into the law firm’s offices 2 days every week,
which is awkward and very tiring for her: she is severely handicapped and also
broke her arm just below the shoulder a few weeks ago. Maria and her partner
Tom are both in the finance world and both can work full-time from home more
than happily.
flashback to May 2015: Gill and Peter's 30th
wedding anniversary:
(from left to right) Tom and Maria (who will
be married in a few months), Chris and Zoe, Lucy,
Gill, Gill's best friend Jill, Jill's husband,
and Peter (in the wheelchair)
16:00 Meanwhile our neighbour Frances drops round to chat to Lois.
She has been away in Eastbourne for a few days, and Lois and I have been
watering her plants, in the garden and greenhouse. Frances says that unfortunately
the milkman misunderstood Frances’s instructions and left milk and eggs outside
her front door early this morning (about 4 am) and they have been standing
there all day. Oh dear (again)!
Although it wasn’t part of our brief to check Frances’s doorstep
each morning, Lois and I still feel a little bit guilty. It seems that some unfortunate incident like this always seems to happen when we are left in charge of Frances’s
house. Damn! Our reputation is in tatters again - oh dear.
20:00 We spend the evening watching TV, the final part of Bettany
Hughes’ archaeological travelogue of the Aegean following the route of Odysseus
coming home to Ithaca from the Trojan War.
Tonight we visit Corfu and Ithaca. It’s surprising that Corfu is
not as Greek as the rest of Greece, and historically had close connections with
Venice. Then in 1815 the island was made a British protectorate and it adopted
many British ways and tastes, including cricket and ginger beer. What madness!
Bettany talks to a local aristocrat outside the former British Residency. He says that the people of the island retain
very warm feelings towards the UK. Well, it’s nice to know that some people on
the continent feel like that – the “Corfits” must be the only continentals in
that category, I should imagine! Oh dear!
While Bettany is filming on the island, she finds out that there happens to be a cricket match taking place between the local "Corfit" team and a team of unfit visiting British authors, including Sebastian Faulks. And she has he picture taken with "the squad" - my god, what a crazy world we live in!!!!
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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