09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower. The doorbell rings - it's Bob, our next-door neighbour, with a brace of frozen partridges for us. I don't tell him we haven't eaten the last brace yet - or the frozen pheasant he brought us before Christmas. What madness! We are falling seriously behind with our game consumption, that's for sure.
Illogically - because we're not vegetarians - we tend to feel sorry for the birds he brings us, which we think he gets given by some hunting-and-shooting member of his family. We didn't ask for the birds to be shot, but now that they're dead, we think that if we eat them, at least they haven't died in vain.
later in the day Lois gets the 4 partridges out of the freezer to showcase them
and is momentarily shocked by how cold they are.
I run off before she can put her cold hands on my face haha!
It's turned a bit milder today, with a high temperature of 46F or about 8C: there's a bit of a wind, but it's coming from the normal direction today, i.e. from the south-west, so it's not too cold. There are not many people around - we think the schoolchildren are mostly at home this morning doing their online lessons.
Alison says the situation is not too bad at her school. She only has about 10 children to supervise, all from the youngest two grades. It's not like some schools, she says, where half the total pupils have been turning up. So that's a relief !
we go for a walk on the local football field
12:30 The postman brings some business letters and 3 late Christmas cards. We have a habit of putting our cards and letters in 24-hour "quarantine" on the floor of the hall, before opening them, just to be on the safe side, but it warms our hearts to see two of the late Christmas cards, which have Australian stamps and are addressed to "Granny and Poppa" in the "United Kingdom", and decorated with some of the twins' huge collection of hundreds of "stickers".
Lying in "quarantine" today on the floor of our hall, two late Christmas cards
from our 7-year-old twin granddaughters in Australia, gawd bless them!!!
This really makes our day. What could be better than to get such cards that our two 7-year-old grand-daughters have written our "names" on. Two little girls that we used to look after in our house 2 days a week when they were only 2-3 years old, who are now grown up enough to address an envelope to us? It warms the cockles of our hearts to put it mildly.
flashback to December 2014, and the era when we used to look
after our twin granddaughters in our house 2 days every week.
the twin as they are today - pictured with their parents, our daughter Sarah
and her husband Francis, last month at Lucky Bay, Western Australia
16:00 We ring our elder daughter, Alison, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, with Ed and their 3 children Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10). When we ring, she's out on a walk with Rosalind. Last week she started a part-time job as a Teaching Assistant at a local primary school, a job for which she has had no training.
We were concerned because there have been a lot of stories in the press about Teaching Assistants being overwhelmed by large numbers of children sent back to school by parents who should be keeping them at home.
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 couch to watch a bit of TV. When Lois isn't around I try to make sure I watch programmes that Lois wouldn't be interested in, but I'm finding more and more that I don't particularly want to watch them either, but I'm going to let that one slide. I'll just have to make the best of it!
I decide to watch the second episode of a new Channel 4 costume drama series, "The Great", about Catherine the Great of Russia, in her earlier years, when she was emperor to Peter III.
Another unsatisfying episode in my opinion. Most of the scenes are played out in the Palace or in the Palace grounds, so there are always lots of people about. People seem to be constantly on the move, so that all you get are brief snatches of things, a quick conversation, or a semi-public, rushed, act of violence or sex, after which the people taking part move on to somewhere else. What madness!!
Elle Fanning as Empress Catherine
Charity Wakefield as Georgina, the Emperor Peter's mistress
There are only hints of more serious, underlying themes. Empress Catherine hates her husband and wants to remove him by means of a coup and inaugurate a more enlightened society in Russia, but it's difficult for her to find allies in a situation where everybody in the palace is watching their own back.
There is obviously a general feeling going around that Russia needs to "modernize" and to become more like the rest of Europe, but viewers aren't treated to a decently deep and serious conversation about it. The Emperor himself has made an initial contribution to modernization by banning beards, which at the time were unfashionable in Europe generally. But all we see is him making an example of some wretched bearded bigwig from the provinces, who claims he wants to keep his beard to hide his less-than-perfect skin - he's afraid his wife won't want to have sex with him if she sees his pockmarks and pustules. My god!!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Seminar, and we watch one of our favourite TV quizzes, University Challenge, the student quiz.
Lois and I normally like to pit our wits against the students and try to get answers that the students fail to get, but we're out of luck tonight - oh dear! It's now the quarter-finals and only the best teams remain in the contest: tonight it's Magdalene College Cambridge playing Birkbeck College London.
We get a lot of answers right, but unfortunately so do the students - between them they amass twice as many points as the average total for any one contest. Oh dear, it looks as if Lois and I are going to be sitting on the side-lines for the rest of the series. Boo !!!!
21:45 We watch the latest episode of the second season of "Staged", whose first season was the surprise hit of the early lockdown, in which Michael Sheen and David Tennant played themselves as two bitchy locked-down actors talking with a director on zoom about preparing for a play, hopefully to be staged "when the theatres reopen".
In this second season, the plot revolves around a proposed "remake" of "Staged (first season)" for US television. Sheen and Tenant have their egos bruised when it's revealed that US TV doesn't want them to reprise their roles personally in the US version, "because they're not big enough names in the States".
Their projected replacements in the roles turn out to be Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Pegg and Frost however ask for a zoom meeting with Sheen and Tennant so that they can get a few tips: while Sheen and Tennant, for their part, approach the zoom meeting with the aim of giving bum steers and generally sabotaging the proposed remake.
My god it's getting complicated!!!
A further complication arises when it seems the US producers want Sheen and Tennant's real-life partners, who appeared as themselves in the first season, to play the parts of Pegg and Frost's partners. Initially the girls aren't keen, but we don't think they've completely shut the door to the idea. They know, however, that "the boys" won't be happy if they take the roles, to put it mildly! Oh dear!
At the end of the show, however, it looks like Pegg and Frost have themselves turned down the roles in any case, so we'll just have to wait for the next episode to get that confirmed.
Can this series get more complicated than it already is? We're not sure - the jury's still out on that one. Oh dear!
22:00 We go to bed, feeling confused - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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