08:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower and get ready to take
delivery of our groceries for next week from the nice man from Budgens, the
convenience store in the village. As always he is pleased to see again that we
are a very feeble pair of old crows, well deserving of a delivery beyond any
shadow of a doubt haha!
We check through the groceries while swabbing them down with
disinfectant. We see that the nice man has brought us a bunch of Magnum and
Cornetto ice-creams – Lisa in the shop wasn’t sure yesterday whether they would
have any left to sell to us today. We have ordered these with our grandchildren
in mind. Alison, Ed and their 3 children are visiting us tomorrow. With any
luck they won’t want all the ice creams and Lois and I can pig out on the
remainder tomorrow evening.
flashback to 1998: I stand beside an enormous
Magnum advert on a shelter
near Lake Balaton, Hungary: for reference I myself
am 5ft 10in high and 1ft 3in wide (?),
so the sheer size of this ad can be gauged
simply from that – what madness!
10:00 We spend the morning clearing up the patio – it’s a real
mess, with cardboard boxes from past deliveries, old Amazon cartons, gardening
accessories, broken plant pots, tools, gardening gloves, kneeling pads, and garden hosepipe. We sort it all out and get
enough chairs out of the shed for tomorrow’s meal – the family are bringing a
CookShop ready-meal with them to cook in our kitchen, and we’ll supply the veg.
Treacle tart is coming as well, for dessert – yum yum!
Lois and I will sit at a table for two, while Ali and family will
sit at the big table, so we can socially distance but chat at the same time, which
will be nice.
the patio after we have sorted it out: a table
for two for Lois and me,
and the big table for Ali, Ed and the children
Tonight Lois and I are going to watch the Football Association’s
big event of the year – the Cup Final, which is not typical viewing for us, to
put it mildly. But our grandson Isaac will be talking about nothing else
tomorrow – no doubt about that. The match is between two London teams, Arsenal
and Chelsea.
Isaac is a fan of a third London side – Spurs (Tottenham Hotspurs).
However we understand that if Chelsea beat Arsenal it will somehow make it
easier for Spurs in the upcoming European season – Lois and I have tried to
understand why this is, but so far we have failed miserably – oh dear!
17:30 We watch the game while we eat dinner, enjoying in
particular the fake crowd noises. Arsenal win by 2-1. Oh dear, poor Isaac! He
won’t want to talk about it tomorrow now.
20:00 We spend the evening watching TV, the second part of Miriam
Margoyles’s new series “Almost Australian”.
Tonight we see Miriam visiting a weekly day camp for aboriginal
children just outside Alice Springs. She’s recognised everywhere she goes,
particularly by children, because apparently she plays some character in the
Harry Potter films, a subject Lois and I know nothing about.
The aboriginal children at the camp want to know if she’s brought
Harry Potter with her, so she has to disappoint them there!
It’s funny how children living right out in the sticks in the most remote regions all over
the world still all know about a lot of the same things that children in a country like
England know – there’s a high-tech mobile phone internet movies and TV universal culture that they all embrace.
The camp is run by middle-aged and elderly aboriginal women who
are trying to teach the children the old native traditions and the old native language of the area.
Apparently there were over 250 native languages spoken in Australia at the time
the British first arrived over 200 years ago. Now only 13 are left.
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzz!!!!!
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