Saturday October 10th 2020

 Another quiet lockdown day – where has it gone? We tumble out of the shower and get ourselves downstairs in time to receive next week’s grocery deliveries from the nice volunteer driver from Budgens, the convenience store in the village. We put all the stuff away, and then start to shiver – the first really cold day of the autumn, so we give in and put the central heating on at midday – my god! We warm up the bed for the afternoon and after a couple of hours come down and do more crosswords. Oh dear!!!!

A weird book review from Tina Nguyen of Politico’s White House staff comes in from Steve, our brother-in-law in Pennsylvania, USA. Steve asks if it signals the reoccurrence of the so-called "Stockholm syndrome", but the jury's still out on that one!

Tina Nguyen

“William Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine. Albert Camus drew inspiration from the cholera epidemic to write The Plague.

“And in 2020, romance novelist M.J. Edwards has added a new entry to the literary canon: Kissing the Coronavirus, available on Kindle for $0.99. This baffling erotic novella was brought to my attention by Quartz health and science reporter Katherine Ellen Foley , who found it through the most 2020 way possible: a viral post from a novelty account on TikTok that reviews dinosaur erotica. (Every word of that is true.) It follows the lust of lonely, sex-starved researcher Dr. Alexa Ashingtonford, who has been locked in a lab with a coronavirus sample for so long that she’s starting to develop feelings for it.

“A PG-13 excerpt:

… Alexa knew she had to replicate the results against the original sample. Any excuse to hold that powerful beast in her hands once again — she didn’t need to be asked twice.

Alexa took the creamy, bubbling Covid-19 sample from the workbench, holding it close to her quivering breasts as she returned to the samplometer. She ran the sample and it came out exactly as she had hoped.

It’s this kind of thing that makes Lois and me realise we are more and more out of sync with the world these days. What’s the matter with us? It’s obviously us that’s wrong – not everybody else. But where exactly did we go wrong?????!

As usual, Lois comes up with a $64,000 question about the affair between the researcher and the coronavirus sample – what on earth will the children look like????

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

20:00 A thin night on the telly but we watch the latest edition of "The Bone Detectives".

Unfortunately it's also a rather thin episode in the series. The team "investigate" a skeleton found buried in the nave of a ruined Augustan priory near Runcorn, Cheshire. The skeleton dates from around 1400 AD.

Lois and I suspect that many of the results shown in the programme may well not be particularly new, but, setting that aside, there is apparently some evidence of the skeleton's identity - the person buried was probably a local knight, William Dutton. 

The Duttons were a rich local family who were benefactors of the priory. And William is known to have travelled to Palestine on one of the Crusades and brought back "a piece of the True Cross". He donated the relic to the priory, and as a reward he got a burial in the nave when he died. The relic would have been incorporated in the rood screen that separated the non-clergy in the congregation from the altar area. 

The idea was that when Dutton woke up on Judgment Day and looked towards the East, he'd see the rood screen with its bit of the True Cross, and he'd know for sure he had a ticket to paradise - simples!

At that time thousands of pieces of "The True Cross" were flooding into the country as knights came back from their travels, which was good news for churches, monasteries and priories! In order to have status and to attract pilgrims etc you needed to have at least one genuine relic on display, no doubt about that!

What a crazy world they lived in in those days!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!