What an awful day! I don't achieve anything very much, it feels like.
08:30 Lois and I have to skip our usual shower, because Mark the gardener can only come at 8.30am today for his 2-hour stint - too early, Mark!!!! But he brings some turf to put in the little bed outside our front door to make it a bit smaller, and he's planning what the best plants would be to put in it, so it'll probably be all worthwhile in the end.
the flower-bed outside our front door, before Mark comes today...
...and what it looks like after he's been and laid his turf.
He's also got various plants left over from previous jobs, so he very nicely offers to give us those free - he'll put them in various places around the front and back gardens.
... Lois showcases the spot where Mark's going to put some Michaelmas daisies in, for example.
10:30 Mark goes. I've been holding off from trying to charge up our car battery, which seemed to be completely flat last night, because of not wanting to trail leads and cables round where Mark is working. But now he's gone I decide not to do that anyway, and instead to call a breakdown guy instead - I've got a feeling the battery really needs replacing. It's probably the original one that came with the car in 2012, and I need an opinion on that.
flashback to the last time I charged up the battery - seems like yesterday, but it's actually last May: happy times!!!
11.00 - 13:30 Apart from having lunch I don't do anything useful for 2 and a half hours, because I'm expecting the breakdown guy to arrive at any moment. As it happens, something keeps holding him up - he's only 10 minutes away but he's having a problem with the car before mine on his list - damn!
12:30 I look at the local news media on my smartphone. It seems that Cheltenham has been rated "best place to be in a lockdown". I tell Lois about this, and it makes us feel good, I have to say: nobody likes lockdown, but we couldn't be doing better than living where we do, that's for sure!
13:30 The breakdown guy starts the car but when he goes, I have to sit and run the engine for at least 30 minutes, he says. He confirms that the battery has definitely seen better days - I'll have to try and get it replaced this week if I can.
14:30 I go to bed for a short nap - zzzzzzz!!!!! Then I do the exercises that Connor, my physiotherapist, has given me, as this is a so-called "non-walk day".
20:00 We sit on the sofa and watch a bit of TV, a French documentary about the night the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris caught fire.
This is Lois's choice, but I'm glad we decide to see it. There are stunning pictures of the fire, which started during an early evening mass, together with amazing pictures of the astounded Parisians and tourists, who were thronging the streets, standing around looking at it and capturing it on their phones, hardly able to believe their eyes.
There is no narrator, and the programme is a string of very emotional and moving accounts by individual fire fighters and church officials of the tortuous and heart-stopping efforts needed to access and fight the fire, and eventually to bring it under control by the end of the night.
Lois and I think such a documentary, about a comparable fire in the UK, would never have been made by British TV: and it's hard to imagine our British fire-fighters getting emotional and lyrical in this way, but I'm sure the Notre Dame has a special meaning for Parisians, no doubt leading them to react differently.
A huge effort was put into retrieving from the path of the fire all the Cathedral's alleged "holy relics", Jesus's "crown of thorns", bits of his cross etc, although as Lois says they're hardly likely to be genuine, although they still mean a lot to a lot of people - oh dear! Nobody was quite sure of the location of the relevant safe containing the relics, where the keys were among the hundreds of keys in the cupboards, what the combination of the locks was etc. When people are hardly expecting a massive fire, it's the sort of thing that often happens to important information - they suddenly find they can't get hold of it in a hurry.
the early stages when the fire first becomes apparent
The Paris Fire Department chief makes his preliminary assessment:
The Paris Fire Department chief makes his preliminary assessment
Soon, the burning spire collapses, falling into the nave, and setting fire to everything inside the nave.
the burning spire falls into the nave, setting fire to the inside of the cathedral
For one of the fire-fighters, a young woman, it's her first ever fire. She joined the service a few months earlier, but so far had only had to deal with false alarms. I suppose "baptism of fire" is the right way to describe this night for her - my god!
21:30 We continue to watch a bit of TV, looking for something a bit lighter to go to bed on - oh dear! We see the first half-hour of the first part of comedian Paul Merton's series on his comic heroes.
It's nice tonight to see Paul re-telling Max Miller's "milkman joke".
Husband: "I went home the other night. I said to the wife, I hear that the milkman has made love to every woman in this street bar one. And she says, "I bet it's that stuck-up cow at number 54!"
The old ones are always the best ones haha!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment