Danskcolin: Wednesday July 29 2020

08:00 The guys re-paving mine and Lois’s neighbour Nikki’s driveway arrive and get on with the job – they’ve gone by 3 pm, and it looks good. Nikki is very pleased. The boss of the firm gives us a written quote for doing our driveway, and I think we’ll probably go for it.

Nikki’s driveway as it was first thing this morning

The finished result – hurrah!

10:00 Today is a typical slow lockdown day for Lois and me, because the highlight is just some dusting we need to do in advance of our daughter Alison and her family’s planned visit on Sunday. Oh dear!

Lois and I don’t know how close we can get to Ali and family – are we allowed to hug them, for example? Can they come inside the house? The government’s guidelines change from week to week, and we get confused: we’re just a pair of old crows after all. Luckily, Ali’s parents-in-law visited them last weekend, so we decide to ring Ali soon and find out how they handled it. "Simples" !

14:00 The weather is slowly warming up. Hard to believe because we had a high of only 66F/19C yesterday, and we sat there last night watching TV with the gas fire on – nevertheless the weather girl is predicting 86F/30C for Friday – what crazy weather we get in this country!!!!

the weather forecast: what madness!!!! It's up and down like a yo-yo !!!

20:00 We spend the evening watching some TV: part 5 of presenter Dan Jones’s interesting series on Roman Roads.

Tonight he’s “walking” along Ermin Way, which runs from Silchester in Hampshire (?) through Cirencester and Gloucester into the Forest of Dean, so it passes relatively near to our house. It says “walking Roman Roads” in the title, but Lois and I suspect they just film little short segments of Dan walking, and then do the actual route for real by car – call us a pair of old cynics if you want!

Ermin Way, not to be confused with Ermine Street

Ermin Way is not to be confused with Ermine Street, which runs from London to York via Lincoln. We can’t blame the Romans for this confusing pair of titles – the names are what the English decided to call them later on. What madness!

After the excitement of last week’s episode where we saw Dan interviewing historian Dr Jane Draycott in a massage parlour getting a massage, tonight’s episode has little to offer on the excitement front, other than bad sight of the week: Dan getting fitted for a toga, whilst assuring us that he had some underwear on underneath – the Romans didn’t bother with underwear under their togas apparently – sounds all right in Italy but surely not good enough in winter in freezing Britain.

What would John Knightley have said in Jane Austen's "Emma"?

Yes, that's right - "The folly of it !!!!

You were only allowed to wear a toga if you were a free Roman citizen – so if you were going through customs, it was a bit like having a wearable passport.

flashback to last week's episode about the Fosse Way - historian

Dr Jane Draycott being interviewed in a massage parlour - what madness!

We see the remains of the amphitheatre at Silchester, which was renovated several times in Roman times. Historians think the local Romans smartened the amphitheatre up every time an Emperor was visiting, so they could entertain the great man with the local British poor man’s version of the grand gladiatorial combats in the Coliseum. Oh dear!

Historians don’t think the Emperor would have been terribly impressed - and Lois and I would go further - we sense that he would have started having nightmares about it several days in advance.

Poor Hadrian!!!!!