Monday November 30th 2020

According to the schedule that my physiotherapist, Connor, laid out for me, today is a "walk day" for me, but I'm reluctant to go out while I'm waiting for my shiny new mobile phone to be delivered by Yodel, as it "requires a signature". I don't necessarily take that phrase literally - it's been a few months since we've been asked to sign anything, but I don't want to take the chance. 

a typical hard working Yodel delivery guy

So Lois goes out on her own for a walk on the local football field, while I sit at home watching the progress of the delivery man via the Yodel delivery company app, as the guy slowly makes his way through the Linden Avenue estate. I feel really sorry for the guy - he's got 174 deliveries to make today, and I'm about number 27 or thereabouts. And I bet he's an East European, they usually are.

Poor delivery guy !!!!!

11:30 Lois comes back and the delivery guy arrives shortly afterwards - as predicted, he's from Eastern Europe. We put the parcel "in quarantine", as normal, and then I go out for my own walk, alone, on the football field. What madness !!!!

I go out on my lonely walk - poor me !!!!

There's nobody much around - just a young couple with 2 small children on the little kiddies' playground. It's not very nice weather and it's getting towards lunchtime anyway, so no surprise there that it's so quiet.

Poor me !!!!!

At least walking on my own gives me a chance to wrestle with my "inner demons" (!). [Don't kid yourself, you're really not that interesting! - Ed]

A few years ago I read an interesting article in Onion News that suggested these "inner demons" are very much part of human DNA, and they've been around for tens of thousands of years.

CANTABRIA, SPAIN—An archaeological team from the University of Cambridge announced Wednesday the discovery of cave paintings in northern Spain that suggest prehistoric humans battled a variety of inner demons, nagging fears, and insecurities that plagued them as they struggled with life’s demands in the Palaeolithic era.

According to lead researcher Alan Reddy, the images found on the limestone walls and ceiling of the cave trace back to 14,000 B.C. and seem to indicate that early hunter-gatherers were often anxious about their ability to kill game animals, reeled from the challenges of raising a family, and “generally had a really hard time keeping it together.”

“While these pictographs are crude in terms of their rendering of human anatomy, they have a vivid expressive quality that led our team to surmise that Ice Age humans had an awful lot of personal stuff going on,” said Reddy, showing reporters a photo of a rudimentary figure painted in smeared charcoal that appeared to be on its knees weeping into its hands.

“Although we don’t want to read too much into these images at this point, it’s hard not to deduce that our prehistoric ancestors were often desperately lonely and felt like they had no one else to turn to.”

Fascinating stuff !!

14:00 Lynda, the leader of the local U3A "Middle English" group has sent out her instructions to the group members ahead of the group's monthly "zoom" meeting, taking place this coming Friday. As I feared, we're going to be looking at a lot of possibly obscure 14th century poems from the so-called "Harley Lyrics"- yikes!

Lynda has allocated various passages to individual group members for them to read out at the meeting in a cod "Middle English" accent, before translating into Modern English. Unfortunately I've been given an extract from "Advice to Women". I glance through it to see if it's got any rude bits in it, so that I can prepare some appropriate euphemisms - I've been caught out by that before. 

There's one bit that I've got to read that sounds as if it might be a bit rude.

I take a second look, and it turns out it's something relatively harmless, like "Women, beware  of the trickster ["swyke"], that fair and freely comes to flatter ["fyke"]." That's a relief then!

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the sofa and watch the third episode of the new Icelandic crime series, "The Valhalla Murders".

I really wish they wouldn't feature detectives in these series that have personal problems in their private lives - it's complicated enough to me trying to keep track of the crime-solving, without having to remember who the difficult people are in the detectives' lives and families! My god!!!!

Anyway, three people who used to be staff at a boys' home a couple of decades ago somewhere out in the sticks, that were obviously cruel to the boys, have been stabbed to death by a serial killer, who leaves his "signature" on their faces - yuck!

All three victims were sent a photo 2-3 weeks before the murders, showing the 3 staff members and about a dozen of the boys in their care. Another staff member, Gummi, was the person who took the photo, but will he be the next victim of the serial killer? Perhaps, but perhaps not, because he was apparently the only member of staff who was kind to the boys. That complicates things, to put it mildly! Or is Gummi the serial killer himself? The jury's still out on that one - not literally, it hasn't come to court yet haha!

the photo sent to each of the 3 murder victims 2-3 weeks before their deaths,

complete with spooky biblical quotation - nasty !!!

Gummi (crazy name, crazy guy!) is the only ex-staff member who hasn't been killed yet - yikes!!!

Well, at least I'm trying to keep up with the plot haha!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Seminar and we watch out two favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking, and University Challenge, the student quiz.

In University Challenge, we get a lot of answers right, but then so do the students, damn them! 

There are only 4 questions where we get the answer and they don't. As usual we score particularly well on UK geography, because young people don't know anything about that: they tend to rely on their GPS apps and phones - what a crazy world we live in !!!

A question on UK place-names ending in the suffix -bourne pretty much stumps them: we get Melbourne and Ashbourne, both in Derbyshire, and Fishbourne in W.Sussex, none of which the students recognise from their descriptions. What madness !!!!

22:00 We go smugly to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!