Sunday August 30th - Monday August 31st 2020

Sunday August 30th 2020

Mine and Lois's two-person isolation due to lockdown is relieved for 2 days - it's the long-awaited visit of our daughter Alison, together with Ed and their 3 children: Josie (14 in a week's time), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10) from Haslemere, Surrey.

They arrive about 1 pm and we have a cheesy lunch on the patio, followed by a tent-erecting afternoon. 

a cheesy lunch on the patio

the children's tent goes up on our back lawn

Ali and Ed's tent goes up

some brief excitement - a drone hovers over the next-door house:

this is the first time Lois and I have seen one - yikes, scary!!!!

a sausage supper

21:00 It's an early bed for everybody. All that fresh air, which we're not used to - yikes! They're not supposed to come in our house too much, but they've got access to our kitchen and utility room, with sink and toilet. 

Lois and I feel quite exhausted. Usually, during the last 4-5 months of lockdown, it's just been the two of us on the sofa in the afternoon and again in the evening - with only each other to talk to, plus the TV. Today it's been all fresh air outside, no TV, and non-stop chatter - my god, what madness!!!! But really really nice, at the same time.

Sunday August 30th 2020

The morning after the night before. Next door's dog wakes everybody up at 6 am - my god!

next morning, and a rude awakening at 6 am - damn !!!!

Another day of fresh air, being mostly spent out in the open. And another shock for Lois and me as well this morning - an outing to the local park, crowded with people, as it's a public holiday and the last one before the schools open up again for the first time since the lockdown started. 

We go for a walk around the Boating Lake. Then on the way back to the car we stop at the Boathouse Ice-cream place - another big shock to the system, because we're eating a commercial establishment's food for the first time for 4-5 months. Scary!!!

yikes - now we're at the Boathouse ice-cream place in the park,

by the boating lake, eating somebody else's food - scary !!!!!

16:00 Time for the family to head off again, back to Haslemere, leaving Lois and me on our ownsome again - sob, sob!

We feel totally exhausted, although in a good way. It'll be early bed again for us tonight.

What madness!!!!! 

20:00 We settle down on the sofa and watch a bit of TV, the latest edition of University Challenge, the student quiz. Tonight’s contest is between St Andrews University and Darwin College, Cambridge.

We find  that we can answer about 1 question in every 5, and we also answer 7 questions that the students get wrong, so not too bad an evening for us.

1.      Edward Thomas’s poem “Addlestrop”, which recalls an era of rural tranquility before WWI, names two English counties in its final line. Give either of them.

Students:  Yorkshire

Colin and Lois: Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire

2.      Name this German city and the state for which it’s the capital.

Students:  Lubeck, Jutland

Colin and Lois: Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein

3.      “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice”, described as an “anarchist masterpiece”, is a work of 1793, by which author? Four years later he married a prominent feminist author, and in 1818, their only daughter published a novel, “Frankenstein”

Students: Shelley

Colin and Lois: William Godwin

4.      Including snowdrops and daffodils, which family of flowering plants is named after a Greek country girl in classical poetry? In “Lycidas”, Milton speaks of “sporting with her in the shade”.

Students:   Eurydice

Colin and Lois: Amaryllis

5.      The unscrupulous financier, Augustus Malmotte, is a principal character in which major work by Anthony Trollope, published in 1875?

Students: “The Wind in the Willows” (!)

Colin and Lois: “The Way We Live Now”

6.      In which English National Park are Miller’s Dale, Monsal Dale, and Longdendale located?

Students: Yorkshire

Colin and Lois: Peak District

7.      In which English National Park are Littondale, Langstrothdale and Niddeldale located?

Students:  Lake District

Colin and Lois: Yorkshire Dales

Good enough!

At the gong, it’s St Andrews 255, Darwin College Cambridge 90, Colin and Lois (65?)

21: 45 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!

Saturday August 29th 2020

07:00 Lois gets into bed with me. She spent last night in our other double bed in our daughter Sarah’s old room, having had a bad night the previous night. It helps her when she has sleep issues if she’s in Sarah’s bed, because she can put the light on and read a book without disturbing me.

Unfortunately she says she has had another bad night – she woke at 3.30am and couldn’t get back to sleep. According to our complicated 14 day “couple’s rota”, she is scheduled to go downstairs this morning, bring in the milk, swab the bottles down with disinfectant and then bring up two cups of tea for us to have in bed. Then we are supposed to go in the shower.

our suggested complex 2-week rota for couples

Lois is obviously tired out this morning, so I take pity on her and do the milk/tea chore for her: also we decide to postpone our shower till tomorrow. She will do my duties tomorrow – simples!!!

If only Brexit could be this easy haha!!!!

10:00 Budgens, the convenience store in the village, ring me. Yesterday we ordered next week’s groceries, to be delivered this morning. The store say, however, that they haven’t got any Shreddies, our grandchildren’s favourite breakfast cereal: this is a pity, because our daughter Alison, Ed and their 3 children are coming on Sunday and staying overnight, camping on our back lawn.

Budgens, the convenience store in the village

I panic and say yes to the “Coco Shreddies” which the store offers as a substitute, but after I put the phone down I wonder if I have made a mistake. Alison doesn’t like to encourage them to eat unhealthy foods. Damn! But it’s too late, the Coco Shreddies are on their way now.

Lois investigates the Coco pack when it arrives. Strangely she finds that the recommended portion size, 40g, although it contains 11g sugar, is only 148 calories. By contrast, regular Shreddies, although they contain less sugar – 5g – they are almost the same calorie-wise: 145 cals.

What’s happening here? What a crazy world we live in!!!!

Coco Shreddies – not as unhealthy as we feared, 
for some reason not completely clear

Now it makes sense! No wonder this cereal didn’t feature in the influential Onion News’s recent infographic about the new raft of kids’ sugared cereals, that famously have recently just come onto this crowded market!

11:00 I vacuum all over the house, in preparation for Ali’s family’s visit. They’re not coming into the house other than to use the sink and toilet in our utility room, but you never know – there might be some emergency that requires them to come into the house, so we’ve got to make sure the house isn’t in its usual “pigsty” state – yikes!

20:00 We listen to the radio, an interesting programme about  the craze for witch-hunting, that seized Europe for a couple of hundred years starting from around 1450.

What caused it? And what brought it to an end? Greg Jenner and his guests seem to think it was partly to due with the big change coming to Europe at the same time – the Protestant Reformation, which made a lot of people start reading their bibles and finding verses telling them how to punish various wrong-doers, including witches. 

There were a couple of influential books that came out: “Hammer of the Witches”, published in Germany in 1487, and King James I of England’s books on demonology, published in 1597.

It was a time when a few powerful women were coming to the fore – charismatic queens in England and in France for example,  a phenomenon which generated a lot of misogyny. It was also a time of bad weather and crop failures, associated with the so-called Little Ice Age, plus plagues: for all of these disasters, scapegoats had to be found – yikes!

So why not blame the weird women: the old and poor ones who, unlike the majority, don’t look round and chubby, and aren’t getting pregnant every two years; or the menopausal women who must be having intercourse with the devil or his substitutes, because men don’t want them any more!

And what about that nasty woman down the road that was mean to me the other day? She’s probably a witch. Also any woman with moles or birthmarks, which, people say, are “teats” for the devil to suck on.

The craze ended in tandem with better judicial rules of proof being introduced into court proceedings – people realized that there wasn’t usually much evidence against these so-called “witches”. And the witch-hunting craze eventually died a death.

My god what a crazy world we live in !!!!

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzz!!!!

Friday August 28th 2020

A nasty soggy day all day – damn! I email all the members of our U3A Danish group with details of our next Skype meeting in 2 weeks’ time, and that’s about the only thing I achieve all day. We wonder whether the ground will be too wet for our daughter Alison and her family to camp here in our back garden on Sunday night – what madness!

Lois and I think, however, that the children will enjoy the experience – it can be hugely uplifting. A similar life-affirming camping experience for 3 escaped prisoners in the US was recently highlighted by the world’s press, after the story broke via Onion News, the influential American news web-site.

CLEARVILLE, PA—Acknowledging that getting the chance to relax in nature was its own reward, a group of longtime friends camping out in the woods confirmed Wednesday that they were just happy to escape the daily grind of federal prison.

“It sounds like the simplest thing in the world, but it’s unbelievably nice to sit by the lake and think your own thoughts for an afternoon without the rigid structure of penitentiary life,” said convict Jesse Howell, who like his friends claimed that sitting against a tree feeling the breeze in his hair was a nice change from the rat race of roll call, meals, and 15 minutes in the yard.

“My pals and I have been planning a trip like this for five to seven years, so it’s nice to finally kick back and bask in the beauty of the natural world. Just look at all these stars—you can’t even see them back at The House, what with the light pollution and the 12 inches of reinforced concrete.”

A heart-warming story, and one that Lois and I will be sure to share with the family if they begin to talk about maybe “chickening out” of the expedition, due to the damp conditions!

10:30 Lois orders next week’s groceries from the Budgens convenience store in the village, to be delivered tomorrow. And she makes 3 birthday cards – most of the birthday cards we have sent since the lockdown started have been home-made ones.

The Budgens convenience store in the village.

I have a nap in the afternoon and at 4 pm Lois and I settle down on the sofa to hear an interesting radio programme, “The Last Word”.  We try to listen to this programme every week to see if anybody has died recently or not. Usually it’s about 4 or 5 people only, so not too bad!

The adventurer Philip Horniblow has died unfortunately, aged 92. He was variously described as a mountaineer, soldier, spy and doctor.

He took part in 3 expeditions to climb Mt Everest. On one of these expeditions medical man Horniblow was asked by hang-gliding enthusiast Nigel Gifford to be on hand for his attempt to hang-glide from the mountain, in case of any medical emergency arising during his attempt.

Although Horniblow was by now 80 years old, he agreed to be Gifford’s medical back-up. However he requested that Gifford “either bring him back alive or with a valid death certificate”. My god, what madness!!!

One day Horniblow met Gifford up on the mountain at 8 am. He said, “I’ve just had a little stroke, but it’s all right, I’ve cured it with whisky and water!”

Shortly afterwards, at 9.30 am, a 7-year-old Sherpa boy was brought along to see Horniblow, who examined the boy and confirmed that the lad was suffering from a burst appendix. At 12 noon in hazardous conditions, while nursing this semi-conscious child, Horniblow flew to Katmandhu, and at the same time briefed the local hospital by radio from the helicopter. At 2 pm he handed the boy over to the paramedics on the tarmac at Katmandhu AIrport, and at 7 pm the hospital confirmed that the boy had been operated on successfully.

You might think that all that was probably enough for one day for the 80-year-old Horniblow. But on meeting up with Gifford in the evening, his first words were, “Where are we going out for dinner?”.

Philip Horniblow (1928-2020)

My god, they don’t make them like that any more, that’s for sure!

20:00 We ring our daughter Alison, and to our delight we find out that the family are still gung-ho about coming to see us on Sunday and camping on our back lawn on Sunday night, going home to Haslemere on the Monday, which is a public holiday here – hurrah!

20:30 We watch a bit of TV, the first night of the 2020 Proms Concert season, staged in the Royal Albert Hall, London, as usual, but without an audience, and with socially distanced musicians.

 the socially distanced BBC Symphony Orchestra scene

It’s nice to see again some of the musicians we’ve grown to love over the years, especially “lovely hair woman” (will it, won’t it, get caught in her strings tonight?) and the flautist with the big moustache – not that we’re shallow or anything!

“lovely hair woman”

“big moustache guy”

21:30 We catch the first half hour of an interesting documentary on Channel 5, looking back at the old sitcom series, “Are You Being Served”, set in an old-fashioned London department store – a series which ended 30 years ago. The original idea for the sitcom came from the actress Joanna Lumley, who played “Patsy” in “Absolutely Fabulous”.

Lois and I had thought that this series was quintessentially British, but when we lived in the US between 1982 and 1985, we discovered that this sitcom had also been shown over there. And later when we visited our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, we found out that the show had been very popular over there, and a follow up series had been made and filmed there, set in Melbourne I think, after the sitcom had finished in the UK – with John Inman imported from the UK to recreate his “Mr Humphreys” role over there.

My god what a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

The original pilot for the series was rejected by the BBC, and only revived when there were big gaps in the schedules in 1972 after a serious terrorist incident in Munich meant that the BBC couldn’t show pictures from the Olympic Games. 

The BBC became desperate for something to show, and they ransacked their archives and so the series was born – it then went on to run for 13 years. What madness!!!!

a scene from the original pilot, which was at first rejected by the BBC

 22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzz!!!!!

Thursday August 27th 2020

A quiet lockdown sort of a day. The morning’s activity is dusting the downstairs rooms – our daughter Alison, plus Ed and their 3 children, are visiting us on Sunday from Haslemere and are staying overnight in two tents in our back garden. The plan is that they treat it as a camping trip – more exciting for the kids and safer for us, but we want the house to look respectable in case of some unforeseen emergency that leads them to have to come inside – what madness!!! But fair enough, on reflection.

Ed, Josie (turning 14 next week), Rosalind (12), Isaac (10) and Alison

on a pub outing two weeks ago. They spent 6 years in Copenhagen

from 2012 to 2018

14:00 I have a short afternoon nap and take a look at the media on my smartphone. I see that this year’s version of the ITV reality show “I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here” (which in Denmark is called “Robinson Crusoe”, I believe) will take place not in the jungles of New South Wales as it always has been, but instead in the vicinity of Abergele in North Wales.

ITV's "tropical jungle"  reality show will take place in North Wales

this year instead of New South Wales, Australia, because of lockdown.

What madness !!!!

What madness! I hope they keep the exact location secret. It’ll spoil things a bit if Abergele locals turn up at the site and start taking selfies with the contestants. Also we don’t have much in the way of poisonous snakes or insects in Britain – don’t the organizers know that?

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

14:30 We start our local U3A Danish group’s fortnightly meeting on Skype. Scilla, our Old Norse expert, cannot take part until her son sorts her out with a better hearing-aid, which hopefully will happen before our next meeting on September 10^th. Jeanette, our only genuine Danish member admits that she already has a hearing aid in both ears, although they must be quite discreet, we think. We’ve certainly never noticed them. And Jeanette and her partner, like Lois and me, always watch TV with the subtitles switched on. Like us, she’s noticed that actors today tend to mumble a lot.

And Joy says that she and Dave are always asking each other to repeat what the other has said, just like Lois and I do.

These are the kind of problems that tend to get discussed in a seniors’ group – oh dear!

The group is currently reading a Danish crime novel, “The Further You Fall” by Anna Grue. An Estonian cleaning lady and former prostitute  has been found garrotted (spelling?) in the kitchens of a Danish advertising agency, and now her roomie, another prostitute, this one from Nigeria, has just been found dead on a beach – a local teenager, Benedikte was walking her dog in the area and the dog found the body, unfortunately taking a bite or two out of it before he could be dragged away. Yikes – unpleasant!!!!!

Still, we old people like a bit of sleaze with our language studies, no doubt about that!!!!!

Anna Grue’s crime novel, “The Further You Fall”,

which is our U3A Danish group’s current project.

20:00 We settle down in the living-room to watch some TV, an oddity from the 1990’s: the actress Joanna Lumley (then 48), "Patsy" in "Absolutely Fabulous", takes an Army Survival Course with the Irish Guards, and then gets flown to a remote island off the coast of Madagascar, to spend nine days there being a Girl Friday, building a hammock and frame, fending for herself, building a fire, foraging for food etc.

Except that she isn’t exactly alone during the day, because a film crew is following her at a distance, but they leave her there alone at night and retreat to their boat anchored offshore.

First we see Joanna in England, in full make-up and hair-do, being driven on her way to train with the Irish Guards. But it’s a not a surprise later to see her, all "natural" without her make-up, when she’s living on the island - but still talking her usual "Patsy" way!

Joanna, in full makeup and hair-do, being driven to her survival training course

in England, with the Irish Guards

Joanna (right) erecting her hammock frame in front of her film crew

It’s surprisingly rainy a lot of the days on the island, so Joanna mostly sleeps in a cave, but as the floor of the cave is hard, she makes some makeshift shoes, what she calls her "36A sandals", out of the insoles of her boots, and the cups of her bra. Simples!

She has ensured that she has a couple of treats with her for times when she needs a lift. She was served whisky on the plane flying down from England, and she kept it in a washed out honey-jar (also served on the flight). And after she has settled herself on the island, one of her film crew takes pity and leaves her a cigarette – my goodness, luxury!

I suppose nine days is not too long, and although she says at the end that she hasn’t missed civilization you’ve got to wonder whether she really could do a longer stint. I don’t think Lois and I would last five minutes – oh dear! Still we are 74, so fair enough, we think.

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!