Tuesday, 12 January 2021

Tuesday January 12th 2021

16:00 We get news by telephone today that our local grocery store in the village, Budgens, is having to close for a week: they were contacted by NHS Track and Trace to say there had been some contact with a coronavirus-infected person - yikes! Public Health England have told them there's no other option - they have to close temporarily.

Budgens, the local convenience store in the village - hit by COVID: yikes!!!!
Is nowhere safe haha? !!!!

Still, it's nice to know they were put in the picture by the NHS, and also nice that they bothered to ring us up, but I suppose we are one of their regular customers. We put in an order by phone every Friday morning and they deliver the stuff on Saturday morning.

I look on the Sainsbury's supermarket website - the first delivery slot they have available is lunchtime next Monday, so we book the slot and then scurry around trying to make up an order, which we do in about 10 minutes. But we have to check out by about 7 pm. 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

17:00 The highlight of our day is to open (after the 24 hour "quarantine" period expires) the two late Christmas cards that our 7-year-old twin grandchildren in Australia, Lily and Jessica, have created for us. 

Sarah, our daughter, says that the girls really put their heart and soul into these cards. Awwwww!!!! God bless them!!!

the two Christmas cards our 7-year-old granddaughters in Australia created for us



How cute! Getting these cards has really made our week, to put it mildly!

flashback to 6 years ago this week - Lily and Jessie having dinner at our house,
together with their parents, our daughter Sarah and her husband Francis,
when they still lived in England - happy days !!!!!!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa  to watch a bit of TV, the second programme in Ben Fogle's new series, "New Lives in the Wild".


Tonight's programme is all about Denni, a former film-maker, who, allegedly, has left behind the glamour of  Hollywood to live out in the wilds, in the east of Iceland. He's currently living there in a converted farmhouse, with no neighbours for miles around, and where he makes a living by running riding holidays for tourists in the summer months.

Denni is a typical loner, we feel, and it's hard to imagine him ever having lived a glamorous life in Hollywood, as the Radio Times blurb implies that he did. It turns out he was making small-budget documentary films around the world during his previous existence, but at some stage he found the life unsatisfying and evidently decided to go back to his roots in Iceland.

I am always happy to see pictures of the Icelandic landscape, because it reminds me of the wonderful times Lois and I had (pre-lockdown) when Scilla was still running her U3 Old Norse group and we were reading about feuding farmers in the 11th century in the old Viking sagas. Happy days!!!

Lois and I are quite shallow people, and we're always interested first and foremost in the love life of the loners we meet in Ben Fogel's  programmes. 

It turns out that although Denni now lives alone, he has previously "been through" (as Lois puts it) at least 2 women: he has a daughter in Reykjavik of about 20 years of age by one woman, and, by his most recent woman he has got twin daughters of 7 years of age , the same age as our twin granddaughters in Australia. Awwwwww!!! The twins now live 4 hours away at a little place called Akureyri. 

During tonight's programme, the 20-year-old daughter arrives from Reykjavik, bringing the little 7-year-old twins over to see their father too.  

Denni's three daughters arrive on a visit





The astonishing thing is that the twins speak pretty fluent English - not just a few words and basic expressions. They fully understand presenter Ben's questions when he chats to them, and they reply to him in pretty faultless English.

Imagine kids in this country being able to do that in a foreign language at age seven!!! What's wrong with us here in the UK??!!! The rest of Europe is probably highly delighted we have left them behind, now that Brexit has finally happened, that's for sure!!!!






22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!



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