Danskcolin: Saturday February 6th 2021

07:30 Lois and I tumble out of bed. We've been feeling much relieved since we learned that our younger daughter Sarah and her family who live in Lower Chittering just outside Perth, Australia, had locked up their house, which was in the path of a bushfire, and gone to stay with friends.

We check the map on emergency.wa.gov.au website one last time and we see that their house is now outside even the low-risk green warning zone, which is good. The fire has now been officially contained. We text Sarah and she tells us that yes, the danger is past, and they are on their way home. It had already started raining, and the rain is projected to last well into tomorrow (Sunday), which can only help.

08:00 We're expecting two deliveries today - Waghorne's the butcher's, and Budgens, the local convenience store. Both shops are in the local village, and we like to support local small businesses - we're all heart haha! Waghorne's delivery arrives at 8 am and Budgens' delivery comes at 9:30 am, so we're kept busy swabbing everything down with disinfectant. We're not going to drop our guard just because we had our first dose of vaccine a week ago - you have to get up very early to catch us out haha (again)!

Waghornes (on the left), the local butcher's shop

Budgens, the local convenience store (on the right)

flashback to last Saturday: we get our first dose of astrazeneca vaccine

at one of the county fire-stations (Cheltenham East) -

the fire-engines are all parked outside in the cold.

Poor fire-engines !!!!!!

11:00 We go for a walk on the local football field - only two dog-walkers today, so it's a piece of cake to avoid them haha! I tell Lois they're calling this field the so-called "Prestbury Play Park" now - what madness !!!!

we go for a walk on the local football field:

only two dog-walkers today (not shown)

14:00 Our anxieties about Sarah being at an end, I go to bed for a nap. but Lois is made of sterner stuff, and she hurries into the kitchen to make some "chocolate fork cookies", following a recipe sent by Rosalind (12), one of our 3 grandchildren in Haslemere, Surrey.

Meanwhile I get up and order my Valentine's Day present to Lois from M&S.

Lois showcases her batches of "chocolate fork-cookies"

yum yum!

17:00 I check the Google Maps report on my movements for January. We haven't done much travelling, that's for sure. Boris will be proud of us haha!

Oh dear - not much is it !!!!!! Still, that's just the highlights, isn't it. When I've got a spare minute I'll drill down and see some of the nitty-gritty details haha!!! We're supposed to have visited 4 places although only 1 is named. I wonder what the other places were.

That's got me worried now !!!! Oh, wait a moment, we did visit the Fire Station twice, once for the vaccine, and previously on a "dry run". But that still leaves two visits unaccounted for - yikes, spooky!!

20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, an interesting documentary about the "modern historical" sitcoms of Perry and Croft.

Their most famous sitcom, "Dad's Army", which aired in the 1960's and 1970's, was centred on the activities of the LDV (Local Defence Volunteers), popularly known as the "Home Guard" in the sleepy fictional seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea during World War II. Home Guard platoons were formed from local male residents, too young, or (mostly) too old, to be in the services.

In the scene often described as the most famous in British sitcom history, Capt. Mainwaring's Home Guard Platoon somehow manage to get "captured" by a marauding Nazi submarine captain and his crew, with the Nazi captain threatening to take the names of any Home Guard platoon members who step out of line and give him problems.

What Lois and I didn't realise is that during WW2 the Nazis really did have such a list, consisting of names of UK residents that the they were intending to arrest after a successful invasion. The list included such names as Winston Churchill, the entertainer Noel Coward (for some reason), and also Sigmund Freud, who had taken refuge in Britain.

One of the show's favourite characters, Cpl Jones, the local butcher (played by Clive Dunn), is always boring his fellow-platoon members with his tales of action in the Sudan at the end of the century, including his oft-repeated tales of the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

Lois and I are fascinated tonight to see an old black-and-white film of the Scottish regiment the Seaforth Highlanders returning to Cairo after their part in the battle of Omdurman. A real window on a long-gone world and a long-forgotten war, that's for sure!

Back in 2014, Lois and I visited the Dad's Army Museum in Thetford, Norfolk: the town was also the birthplace of Tom Paine (1737-1809), who wrote "The Rights of Man". There's a statue to him in the town square, hopefully not a target for the historical-statue-haters, one might hope!