09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower, but it's not my turn to clean up today, which is nice! But poor Lois !!!!!
Connor, my NHS physiotherapist, scheduled a walk for me today, but it's snowing lightly outside - and in anticipation of this I did a walk yesterday instead of the scheduled exercises, so I can stay inside this morning and do the exercises today instead - much nicer!! Hopefully Connor will never find out that I did this switch: I've just got to "tough it out" and, if necessary, refuse to answer questions at our next telephone therapy-session, on the grounds that it may incriminate me. I'll have a lawyer on hand as well. So we'll see - fingers crossed!!!
The snow - the first this winter - is very light and is periodically sleet rather than snow, but Lois takes a few pictures anyway.
there's a "dusting" of light snow on our utility room roof and back garden...
... and a bit more on our shiny new raised bed planters
... and also a light covering of snow high up on the tops of the hills
While I'm doing my exercises, Lois also does a thorough check of the back garden, and finds out that a couple of branches must have been broken off our greengage tree on Saturday night during Storm Bella.
a couple of big branches were broken off our greengage tree during Storm Bella - damn!!!
flashback to Saturday - Storm Bella approaching from the Atlantic - yikes!!!!
11:00 Our neighbour Bob rings the door-bell. He says that one of the fence posts between our house and his has been damaged and needs reinforcing. Luckily Bob, who's a retired builder, offers to do the job for us himself, which is nice.
I tell Bob that a fence has also been half torn down at another house in the neighbourhood. What madness!!!
Storm Bella also half tore down a fence on a nearby house
- what madness these storms are !!!!
16:00 We have a cup of Tea Pig Extra-strong Earl Grey tea with a piece of Christmas cake on the sofa. Lois says that members of her sect are holding a "Guess the baby" competition, and she asks me to find her a picture of herself as a baby or toddler. I come up with this one, taken in 1948, when Lois and her parents lived out in the Oxfordshire countryside, near Great Haseley - she's sitting here on a bale of hay: what a cute little toddler she was!
flashback to 1948 - Lois, aged about 2, sitting on a bale of hay in a field
near the village of Great Haseley, Oxfordshire
And here's one of me at a similar sort of age, also in 1948, with my parents and my baby sister Kathy. What a long time ago that was - my god!!!
flashback to 1948: at our house just outside Dover, with our father in his army uniform....
and here with our mother, in her late 1940's style hair-do
Happy days!!!
(included for comparison) us today on one of our secret holly-snatching "missions"
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I had half-expected they might be taking a week off this week, but no, the programme of sessions continues as normal.
I settle down on the sofa and listen to the radio for a bit, the latest programme in the "Last Word" series. I try to hear this programme every week, so I can see if anybody has died recently or not - it's only 4 people this week, so not too bad.
Maurice Healey has died, unfortunately, at 86 years of age. He was a great champion of the consumer and of consumer rights, and a long-time editor of "Which", the consumer's magazine.
Maurice Healey, who has died aged 86
He campaigned for many years against the Sunday Trading laws of England and Wales, laws which he castigated as "nonsensical" - he pointed out, for example, that it was legal to buy a magazine on a Sunday but not a book - that meant you could buy Playboy magazine, but not the Bible. Gift shops in cathedrals, meanwhile, could sell anything they wanted, 7 days a week.
Regulations differed in detail from local area to local area, which meant that you could cross into a neighbouring county and buy things you couldn't buy nearer to home - what madness!!!
His campaign was eventually successful with Parliament's passing of the Sunday Trading Bill in 1994.
21:00 Lois emerges from her seminar and we watch our two favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking, and University Challenge, the student quiz.
Tonight's University Challenge is in the special Christmas series, which features not current students but "distinguished alumni", past graduates of the institutions concerned, none of whom either of us has ever heard of, needless to say!
Tonight's questions don't suit us as well as some we've seen recently. There seem to be a lot of popular culture questions. We are normally completely hopeless on anything to do with popular culture - films, music, novels, celebrities, sports - later than about 1989, for instance.
Nevertheless we find we can answer 7 questions correctly that the contestants strike out on, so not too bad an evening for us. We even get a couple of sports questions right.
1. In October 2020, the Richmond Tigers beat the Geelong Cats in the Grand Final of which sport?
"Distinguished alumni": cricket
Colin and Lois: Australian-rules football
2. Also in October 2020, which team won the Rugby Union Six Nations Tournament, whose final matches had been postponed from March?
"Distinguished alumni": Wales
Colin and Lois: England
3. Named after a German chemist, what is the term for the condenser consisting of a straight glass tube surrounded by a glass jacket through which water is pumped for cooling?
"Distinguished alumni": [pass]
Colin and Lois: Bunsen
4. Comet, black telescope, lionhead, veiltail and shubunkin are common breeds of which fresh water aquarium fish, also known binomially as "carassius auratus"?
"Distinguished alumni": koi carp (Durham), tuna (Downing) [Say what???!!! - Ed]
Colin and Lois: goldfish
5. Who was the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa? He was killed in police custody in 1977.
"Distinguished alumni": [pass]
Colin and Lois: Steve Biko
6. What is the common name for the bird species "passer domesticus"? - The RSPB describes the species as the ultimate avian opportunist.
"Distinguished alumni": [pass]
Colin and Lois: house sparrow
7.Tony Garnett, the film and TV producer who died in 2020, was in 1965 working on which hard-hitting BBC play set in South London? Directed by Ken Loach, it was adapted from a series of short stories by Nell Dunn.
"Distinguished alumni": Cathy Come Home
Colin and Lois: Up The Junction
Not our best evening, but good enough to go smugly to bed on, nonetheless.
Aren't we just terrible!!!! [Yes - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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