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!!!!