07:15 Lois and I tumble out of bed so as to be up and dressed in
time for the paving guys, who are coming at 8 am to pave our paths and
driveway. My god – what madness, to think how few in number the days are when we can stay in bed,
even though we’ve now been retired for 13 years – what madness (again) !!!!!
They stay around till about 2 pm, breaking up the concrete with a
pneumatic drill and then laying the substrata for the bricks, which will be
arriving tomorrow. Our nerves are a bit on edge, not just from the noise, but
from wondering if the vibrations from the drill will cause the house to
collapse, but that doesn’t happen, which is good.
But it’s hard to relax. We spend the morning being on hand to make
any decisions that need to be made, pretty much deciding to go with what they
suggest – we agree the colour of the bricks, and authorize the extra expense of
paving over the waterworks drain with a removable lid covered by the same type
of bricks – that kind of thing.
I haven't a clue really!
11:00 I read a bit more of John of Trevisa’s remarks made in the
14th century about the state of the English language at that time. Lynda’s
U3A Middle English group is holding its monthly meeting on zoom on Friday, and
John of Trevisa’s writings are the group’s current project. As a southerner, John
is pretty scathing about the speech of northerners.
Or, in modern English:
“All the
language of the Northumbrians, and especially at York, is so sharp, tiresome and
abrasive, and not clearly articulated, that we southern men may hardly
understand that language. I believe that this is because they are near to
strange men and aliens that speak strangely, and also because the kings of
England always live far away from that part of the country, and if they go to
the north country, they [only] go in great force.”
What a crazy world they lived in in those times!
It makes me a bit relieved to know that the two group members,
Barbara and Anthony, who not only come from Yorkshire but are proud of it too –
and why shouldn’t they be – are going to be away on Friday, and will not be
around to hear John’s scathing comments about their dialect. Poor Barbara and
Anthony!!!!
14:00 The paving guys finish for the day because it’s started
raining.
our path and driveway, now all ready for the
bricks coming tomorrow
After a nap Lois and I take some apples from our “faller”
collection over to our friends Mari-Ann and Alf’s house – it gives the car a
bit of a run because you can do 40 mph on the Shurdington Road and Up Hatherley
Road.
21:00 Lois’s class finishes. We watch the first part of a weird
Swedish film, “The Square”, about a pretentious art gallery director in
Stockholm. Like all continental films it’s incredibly slow-paced, to put it
mildly.
We always like Swedish films because you never know what to expect
from Swedish characters: they’re completely crazy, and we love them! The film’s
main character, Christian, the gallery director, when he’s not speaking
confidently to the arty media or making a pompous speech at some public event,
is shown to be a man with a lot of frailties, fears and human weaknesses.
We see Christian fall victim to a distraction street robbery where
he loses his mobile phone. But he doesn’t seem to go to the police. He can tell
from his stolen phone’s signal that the thief lives in a certain apartment
block, and so he hatches a crazy plot to send all 100 plus residents of the
block a threatening letter: in the letter he writes to each resident that he
knows they took his phone and he knows where they live, and he threatens them
with vengeance unless they return his phone.
Perhaps not surprisingly he then starts to get mobile phone after
mobile phone sent to him – from frightened residents who want to get him off
their backs. What madness!!!!
After a trendy party one evening at the art gallery, Christian
ends up in a woman journalist’s bed. The couple have sex and afterwards there’s
a weird tussle between them about who gets to throw away the condom they have
used. The director is suspicious about why the woman wants to get hold of the
condom, and the couple embark on a nerve-wracking tug of war over it, testing
the condom’s elasticity almost to breaking point. In the end it’s the woman who
wins the battle of wills, and she’s the one that finally gets to throw it into
her bathroom waste bin.
What a crazy country!!!!!
Whatever’s going to happen next, we wonder. But it’s getting late.
We decide to watch the rest of the film another night.
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment