07:00 I wake up to find that Lois is not in the bed - she wasn't well last night and at some stage during the night she crept out and crawled into our daughter Sarah's old double bed, so she could read without disturbing me. She got back to sleep and seems to be a lot better today, thank goodness.
09:00 We tumble out of the shower in time to take delivery of next week's groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village.
Budgens convenience store (on the left)
We suddenly realise we forgot to order cheese - damn! And Waghorne's, the butchers, who also sell cheese, won't be delivering now till Wednesday = damn (again) ! How will we survive without cheese for nearly 5 days?
11:00 We have our morning coffee and look at our smartphones. Our daughter Sarah, who lives just outside Perth, Australia with Francis and their 7--year-old twins, Lily and Jessie, has put a picture up on Facebook of the twins - last week at school, pupils were encouraged to come in dressed as a favourite fictional character.
Jessie - who is she meant to be ???? Some fairy or other, we hazard a guess!
...and Lily - ditto !!!
Lois and I don't keep up with children's fictional characters so we have no idea who they are dressed as - oh dear, we're completely past it these days, no doubt about that! But how cute they look - Gawd bless 'em!!!
Sarah has also posted a picture of two kangaroos she saw earlier today in their backyard. The family has lived in Australia for 5 years now, but it still seems a strange idea for us, that she lives somewhere where this kind of thing is an everyday routine experience.
a couple of kangaroos in our daughter Sarah's backyard - how weird!!!!
16:00 We have a cup of Earl Grey tea and a piece of cake on the sofa, and Lois reads me bits out of "The Week" - one of our Saturday afternoon rituals.
Lois reads me out articles from "The Week", our Saturday afternoon ritual
The "bad boy" image of rock group "The Who" has taken a bit of knock from lead singer Roger Daltrey's new book, apparently. One of the group's claims to fame was guitarist Pete Townsend's nightly smashing of his guitar at the end of concerts.
Pete Townsend of The Who, smashing up his guitar on stage
In his book, however, Daltrey reveals that the guitar-smashing was all just for show. The group realised that as long as he didn't break the neck of the guitar it could be glued back together after the concert. And they always smashed up the same guitar, it seems, while keeping a pristine set of un-smashed guitars for use as their primary instruments.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
18:00 We have dinner, and look forward to tonight's moving of the clocks back one hour, which will make it a bit lighter in the mornings.
Someone on Lois's whatsapp group has published a useful guide about how to make the changes needed:
That's a useful guide, no doubt about that, but somebody in Lois's whatsapp group has asked why there are no instructions included for reprogramming your dog, who of course will expect to be fed on British Summer Time for a few days or weeks, despite what the clocks say.
And that goes for cats too, of course. Lois and I don't have any pets now but we remember how our last cat, the late lamented Minx, used to kick up a racket for several mornings at the hour that she thought was our getting-up time, and it was quite a painful process trying to explain to her why she had to wait another hour - what madness!!!!
I remember in the old days I used to go round the house on the night before the change altering all the clocks before going to bed. I can't be doing with that kind of nonsense now - I must finally be becoming a bit more laid back, for some reason.
The main thing for us to watch out for is the time in Perth, Australia. They don't alter their clocks at all in Western Australia, so our regular Sunday morning zoom call with Sarah, which is at 9:30 am in summer, changes to 8:30 am in winter - yikes! No lying abed for us tomorrow, no doubt about that. No peace for the wicked haha!!!!
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the latest instalment of "The Bone Detectives", where a team of anatomical experts look at some dug-up skeletons.
Lois and I have got a bit fed up with this series, but Saturday night TV is a wasteland for us, so we've stuck with it so far. Maybe this is the last in the series, we're not sure.
Once again the blurb in the Radio Times is misleading - Tori Herridge and her team don't excavate anything, as per usual. They just arrange to have skeletons brought into their lab from excavations carried out some time ago, and then invite various experts in to answer their questions.
Tonight they look at some skeletons from the early 19th century found in an old graveyard near the centre of Bristol, quite near to the hospital, the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI). It turns out that many of the skeletons found have had cuts and other manual incisions etc done to their bones, also amputations, but these measures were all taken after the person's death, so not part of any treatment.
Although in some cases the cuts and amputations could have been due to an autopsy having to be done, in most cases it seems that the skeletons had been used to train budding surgeons at the BRI, which was also a teaching hospital: you can in many cases see the teacher's expert marks on one side of a bone, for instance, and a student's ham-fisted cuts on the other side.
The early 19th century was a time of big advances in techniques of surgery. Medical students were being trained in their droves - there were 700 of them being trained every year in London alone.
It seems that people who died at the BRI were very likely to have their skeletons being used for training students, before they were sent for burial. However even this was not producing skeletons in sufficient numbers to meet the demand. Significantly, anatomy trainers at the hospital had possession of the keys to local churchyards, which suggests a little illicit grave-robbing was also going on.
My god, what madness!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment