Wednesday October 7th 2020

Lois has a look at one of her 4 potato tubs – earlier this year she planted a potato in each of them: not a seed potato, just an ordinary potato from one of the bags we bought in the village. She was surprised to find that the first tub, at any rate, has more than proved itself. How bountiful nature can be haha!!!!!

Lois reaps the harvest of her first potato tub today – yum yum!

We are both tired today after yesterday’s excitement, and Lois is definitely under the weather. We drive over to our friend Mari-Ann’s house: she’s working from home today, and she shows us round her garden. Mari-Ann seems to have a mouse problem because several bits of the outside electric wiring that Alf has installed have been chewed through. The couple’s two cats each killed a mouse last night, however, so the mice are now in retreat, we would imagine. What madness!!!!

Flashback to August: we visit Mari-Ann and Alf and try out their tempting garden hammock

So mice have for the moment put an end to Mari-Ann's and Alf's fantasies about eating out on their patio and pretending they're at some Mediterranean resort.

By coincidence, yesterday I spoke on the phone to Gill, my sister who lives in Cambridge. She and Peter ordered a patio heater recently which arrived a couple of days ago, but they’ve sent it back: it wasn’t wheeled, like the promotional material implied. They have two patios, so they need one on wheels, so that they can move it back and forth.

Gill says a lot of people have been buying up patio heaters, and it’s quite hard to get hold of them. Their current popularity is based on the fact that they enable people to socialize with friends while staying outside the house. In this way people can abide by the lockdown restrictions without freezing to death in the British autumn – my god!!!

flashback to May 2015: Gill and Peter's 30th wedding anniversary: (from left to right) Tom and the couple’s daughter Maria, Chris with Zoe, another daughter and Lucy, their third daughter, Gill, Gill's best friend Jill, Jill's husband, and finally Peter (in the wheelchair)

Lois and I have never been very keen on patio heaters. They have them in the garden of one of our local pubs, the Royal Oak, but we still always used to feel cold there, back in the days when we used to go to pubs, that is – brrrrrrr!!!!!!

The Royal Oak pub 

A garden table at the pub, complete with inadequate patio heaters

One of the many things Lois and I have in common is that we like to be warm, my god!!!!!!

We used to think there must be something wrong with us, so we were heartened to read about some long-suffering patio-dining-sufferers in Chicago, whose plight hit the world headlines, just a few years ago, and funnily enough, just around this sort of time of year. 

CHICAGO—Steeling themselves against the occasional breeze and the cold of the wrought iron table and chairs against their skin, a group of determined restaurant-goers reportedly braved the slightly chilly temperature Thursday and dined on the outdoor patio of a local gastropub.

 “It’s pretty nice out,” said 29-year-old Erin LaVelle, who, despite occasionally shivering beneath her light jacket, was unflinching in her commitment to forego an indoor table and stick it out in the nippy 56-degree weather. “It’s so nice to eat outside. I love this time of year.”

 At press time, the strong-willed group of friends was courageously enduring a perilously brisk period during which a cloud was passing in front of the sun.

Lois and I were hoping that these Chicago diners’ obvious distress and the astonishing wave of sympathy they garnered from around the world would persuade the planet's eating establishments to do something about solving this very pervasive and long-standing problem. So far, however, we have seen little sign that they have the will to take effective action.

Where are their priorities? What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa and watch one of the talks from the Cheltenham Literary Festival: “Maidens Myths and Monsters” by the Punjabi-born writer Nikita Gill.

The blurb for the talk goes as follows:

"Olympus is falling. The time of the Gods is almost over. There is one more story left to tell. For millennia Hera sat atop Olympus watching and waiting while her family fought, her husband philandered, monsters were made, wars left their mark and stories were unwritten. Hera had been treated as a punch line to Zeus jokes for too long but hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Star of our 2019 Lit Crawl and Instagram’s most followed poet in the UK Nikita Gill brings her powerful Great Goddesses one-woman-show to the Cheltenham stage."

Nikita Gill is certainly a very confident (perhaps too confident for our liking!), bubbly and articulate speaker, very full of herself and eager to talk about herself and her motivations. But for some reason this talk doesn’t set Lois and me alight, to put it mildly. 

Nikita keeps saying what a lot there is we can learn from ancient myths, but Lois and I dispute that!

We can see that there’s a lot of mileage, particularly in today’s climate, for looking at old stories from the woman-in-the-story’s point of view, the “untold story”, and tonight we hear about Hera, Zeus’s wife’s “take” on what happened in the old myths. But when it comes down to it, who really cares what Hera thinks? And who really cares what Zeus thinks, come to that. The stories are just about a bunch of immortal supernatural beings who live on Mt Olympus and fly around the world doing “this and that”, mostly “that” – they weren’t real people like us, you know!!!!!  What madness!!!!

Call us hardened old cynics if you like!  [I will, and not for the first time – Ed]

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzz!!!!!!