Monday August 3rd 2020

10:00 I ring Scilla, who’s currently staying with her son Tom in Frome, Somerset, as she hasn’t been well. I check on her progress, but I don’t think she’ll be back in Cheltenham for a while.

Scilla is not only a member of mine and Lois’s U3A Danish group, but also the leader of the local U3A Old Norse group, of which Lois and I are both members – both groups’ activities have been disrupted by the lockdown, but we’re hoping to have a Danish meeting on the 13^th. 

It’s a particular shame about the Old Norse group having a hiatus, because – spoiler alert - we all know that one of our current saga’s main characters, Gunnar, who slapped his wife, Hallgerd, is about to meet a grisly end, so it’s frustrating not to be able to get on and wallow in the gory details – damn!

Gunnar certainly lives to regret slapping Hallgerd, to put it mildly. She get her revenge by refusing to let him re-string his bow with her long locks – this leaves him defenceless and results in his death: so well played, Hallgerd – kudos !!!!

Hallgerd gets her revenge on Gunnar for slapping her.

She won’t let him re-string his bow from her long locks, and Gunnar, defenceless,

has to succumb to his enemies – poor Gunnar!!!!

11:00 We ring the landscaping firm that paved our neighbour Nikki’s driveway and ask them to do ours too. The firm’s owner will visit us soon with a choice of colours and will give us a date they will do the work on.

Later, at the end of afternoon nap time we drive over to our friends Alf and Mari-Ann’s house, partly to give our car battery some use, but also to check back on what colour they selected for their new driveway last year.

Part of Alf and Mari-Ann’s new driveway - nice!  

And....

....and another part....

Golly, who would have thought we would get so interested in yardscaping, an obsession that we have not previously admired in friends and neighbours. But that’s what lockdown does for you – it forces you to take up other people’s hobbies, because you’ve become fed up with your own: what madness!!!

Lois relaxes on the edge of Alf and Mari-Ann’s tempting

double hammock – 

We admire Alf and Mari-Ann's tempting new double hammock. We haven’t got one of these as of now, but maybe we should think about it if the lockdown continues: we could sleep in it on one of those warm nights we get in the UK once every 5 years or so.

Could hammocking be yet another new hobby for us perhaps?

Is there a magazine for hammock-lovers? If not, we think there should be - there is one that carries articles for yardscaping-lovers after all !

19:30 Lois goes in the dining-room to take part in her sect’s weekly bible seminar on zoom, but comes back in the living-room an hour later and we watch a bit of TV: University Challenge, where we pit our wits against 2 teams of 4 students. Tonight the two teams represent Imperial College, London, and Strathclyde University in Scotland.

Lois and I can answer some of the questions in the quiz – but only about 1 in 5, I would guess – oh dear! There are a lot of science questions, and science is pretty much a closed book to us.

One question, however, revolves around the US state of South Dakota, and it stumps the Strathclyde team completely.

Lois and I know this one, and I don’t think there can be many people in our generation who would not know it, if nothing else from the Doris Day song “Take me back to the Black Hills, the Black Hills of Dakota, and the beautiful Indian country that I love”, which was always being played on the radio when we were children, after the film came out. 

We would never have dreamed of answering "The Catskills", which are hundreds of miles away - what madness!

We speculate whether the song (and the film?) are perhaps now frowned on a bit, because of their non-PC reference to “Indians”.  But that's something we’re not too sure about – the jury’s still out on that one.

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzz!!!!!