Monday September 14th 2020

The warmer weather is back – for 3 days only:  how crazy! It’s going to be 79F/26C today and tomorrow, and 77F/25C Wednesday: phew wottascorcha haha! I don’t achieve much today, apart from vacuuming all round the house, while Lois dusts.

Later our neighbour Frances brings us round one of her turnips and we give her a couple of cooking apples in “payment”. What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

16:00 After an afternoon nap we sit out on the patio with a cup of Earl Grey tea and two of Lois’s delicious muffins – yum yum!

We come in and have a look on the computer at Cheltenhamfestivals.com, for information about the Cheltenham Literary Festival, that is starting, partly online and partly socially distanced at the Town Hall, from the beginning of next month. We register as users.

But what a rubbish website! They really make you work hard to find out what each talk is about, and then you can bookmark it if you’re interested. They have made the mistake of signposting each talk mainly with pictures of the speakers and in many cases with precious little information about the content of the talk itself. So if you don’t recognize the faces of the speakers (which Lois and I don’t, in over 90% of the cases – yikes!), you’re not that much wiser, and so then you have to dig deeper. What madness!!!!

We make a preliminary stab at bookmarking some of the talks we might be interested in, but we’ll look again later: we’re pretty sure there may be others of interest hiding there somewhere.

A first pass through the dizzyingly massive programme nets us the following talks we might want to see online:

1.      Nuremberg Trials – [always a good ice-breaker! - Ed]

2.      What Next for America? David Aaronovitch and others. ("The Times Debate")

3.      Women in War, with Christina Lamb and others

4.      Aftereffects of COVID  - “Back to Big Brother?”, with James Ball and others

5.      Cromwell’s Protectorate, with Paul Lay and others

6.      Ian Hislop at 60

7.      Julius Caesar, Augustus and the end of the Republic – Mary Beard and others

8.      Tim Harford – How to make the world add up: thinking about numbers

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect’s weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settled down on the sofa in the living-room and watch the latest edition of University Challenge, the student quiz. Tonight’s contest is between Merton College, Oxford and Wolfson College, Cambridge.

A miserable evening’s performance from me. I reckon I can answer about 20% of the questions, as usual, but only one of my answers is not also worked out by the students – damn! The Merton College team in particular are quite brilliant tonight, I have to say.

Unusually, my sole triumph is to identify the name of a butterfly – not normally one of my strengths, to put it mildly.

If Lois had been here, we might have improved our score, but tonight her seminar goes on till nearly 9 pm so she only reappears as the programme is drawing to a close – damn (again)!

At the gong, we see that Merton have trounced Wolfson by 210 to 40. The Wolfson team were all postgraduates, I think. Some people believe that having more postgraduates gives a team an unfair advantage, but Lois and I think the opposite. The longer you continue in higher education, the narrower your range of knowledge gets and you become a little too specialized for a programme like this, we think.

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!