Friday March 19th 2021

09:30 Lois and I have spent far too long in the shower this morning again, and it was my turn to clean up afterwards - damn! What a bad start to the day - oh dear. Then we have to phone our grocery order through to Budgens, the convenience store in the village: we haven't actually been in a shop for a year now, because we're playing it super-safe as regards the virus. The store will deliver our groceries tomorrow morning, and we'll be swabbing everything down with disinfectant as usual: what a crazy world we live in !!!!!

Their delivery service for old codgers is run by volunteers - at Christmas we bought each of these volunteers a box of chocolates, and we're going to do the same for Easter. That's us all over: we're not just take take take haha!

Budgens, the convenience store in the village

10:00 For years Lois has complained about a "rotten egg" smell that she can smell every so often when we go out of the house. Compared to her I've got a much less effective sense of smell, and I always say, "Funny, I can't smell anything".

Now at last confirmation of the phenomenon has come from a local news website.

Samantha Remnick Winter is one of the residents in Bishops Cleeve who say the odour coming from the Wingmoor Farm waste site, in Stoke Road, is becoming unbearable.

 Samantha, 48, has lived in her house near the site for three years, but says the smell has got worse in the past 12 months.

 She said: "It was alright for the first year, then there were problems, then it was cleared up, then it started again just before lockdown."

 Samantha said that the stench was at its worst last summer, meaning she couldn't open her windows due to it.

 With lockdown measures meaning residents must spend most of their time at home, the smell has become nearly unavoidable.

I've got the better hearing, but Lois has got the better  "smelling" - no doubt about that!

11:00 Between us we run a U3A Danish group, the only one in the UK for some reason - how crazy! The group's next fortnightly meeting will be next Thursday (25th) and our only genuine Danish member, Jeanette, has been having difficulties with her camera. All the other members, including Lois and me, see her as a 3-headed monster who appears to be skulking behind some Venetian blinds - and Jeanette has assure us she's actually quite normal-looking still and that the Venetian blinds have no basis in reality: they're just an optical illusion, she says.

Jeanette, the group's only genuinely Danish member in happier times:

before she grew her additional two heads

This morning I do a test Skype session with Jeanette, because she and her partner have bought a new webcam. We do the test and find that both vision and audio quality are excellent, which is nice. Later Steve, my American brother-in-law emails me to explain that Jeanette's problems were caused not by her camera but by the filter, so I will pass that information on to her. 

Three-headed people have been hitting the headlines recently, as this viral story from Onion News shows, taken from the time of Donald Trump's impeachment, which seems a long time ago now doesn't it - like a different world!

WASHINGTON—Arguing that a protracted congressional trial wasn’t in the best interests of everyday floating nude Americans, melting giraffe congressman Fauna Anuaf reportedly warned Friday that focusing on the impeachment of President Donald Trump was distracting from the surreal issues.

 “When there are so many people in this country imprisoned inside two-dimensional towers or struggling with their legs turning into water, we cannot let ourselves get caught up in a biased proceeding that does nothing to address the surreal problems many Americans face,” said the melting giraffe congressman, adding that in his district, residents were worried about biomorphic trains materializing through their walls, orca whales trapped in bottles on an endless desert landscape, or being flayed on a fainting couch while three heads in bowler hats screamed that their body is a chorus of bodies diffusing under the heat of time itself, not some court proceeding….

 “The moment my constituents poured candle wax into the endless thermometer to elect me to Congress, I took their wailing approval as a solemn reminder to keep focused on the surreal issues. At every town hall back in my inverted ether, my constituents come to slice my eyeball, which I understand as a sign that impeachment doesn’t enjoy broad support. And we need to stop this partisan bickering—I didn’t swear an oath to be a Democrat or Republican; I swore an oath to a butterfly holding another butterfly as a murder weapon that I would incorporate all dreams into my own waking dream. So can we all just stop for a moment to listen to what the clock faces inside the eye sockets are murmuring and what the red says? Those are the surreal voices we should be tasting to.” 

It's a bit of a wake-up call too, isn't it, when we have to be reminded of serious, surreal issues by a giraffe who's on the way to melting - makes you think, doesn't it! Another few days and that giraffe might have turned into a pool of something horrible, and then it would have been too late!!!

11:30 Lois and I go for a walk on the local football field. I take a couple of selfies as part of my mission to teach Lois the basics of selfie photography - picture composition being one of the key features, often overlooked by conventional training courses, particularly the professional ones. 

Here, by way of example, are two of the classic selfies which I take today:

two of my classic selfies: I have included a young mum pushing a baby-buggy

for added interest: one of the pictures also features her dog, which is a nice touch!

16:00 We enjoy a cup of Earl Grey tea and some bread and jam on the couch. We listen a bit to the radio, the latest edition of "Last Word". We try and catch this programme most Fridays to see if anybody has died this week.

King Goodwill Zwelithini (crazy name, crazy guy!), King of the Zulus, has died, unfortunately, aged 72.

King Goodwill Zwelithini, King of the Zulus, who has died aged 72

The king had no truck with monogamy: he had 6 wives, 28 children and also 6 royal residences: all of these were maintained and looked after by money from the state, and he himself lived a lavish lifestyle.

It's interesting that in accordance with Zulu tradition, the king will be buried sitting down, and not inside a coffin. And he'll be covered in animal skins: probably the skin of a lion and/or a bull. 

It's considered unlucky for a king to be buried lying on his back, because the Zulus are quite a superstitious race, and believe that this style of burial would also mean the death of the king's people. And a coffin is a no-no, because it would mean that you would be trapping his spirit, and he wouldn't then be able to give advice to his successor, which would be a pity, to put it mildly! 

What a crazy world we live in !!!

19:00 Our daughter Alison, who, with Ed and their 3 children, has spent the last week unpacking their belongings in the rambling Victorian mansion they have just moved into in Headley, Hampshire, says she has found a stack of old newspapers in the house, dating from September and October 1939, the first two months of World War II. She has sent us a picture of one of them.

What an odd thing to leave behind! 

It must have been a scary time for the people reading that paper, whoever they were, but on the other hand France was obviously still in the war on our side, so it would not have been as scary as after France fell, a few months later. Also the Nazis hadn't started their big bombing campaigns over Britain, so the war would have seemed a bit far away from most people's everyday lives at that stage, I imagine.

20:00 We settle down to watch some TV. We decide to try Kate Humble for the second night running, as she does another of her coastal walks around Britain. Call us crazy if you like! [I don't think I'll bother - I've proved that to my satisfaction several times over! - Ed]

Her story is one of constant erosion of this coast. The town of Dunwich, which was once the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles, is now out to sea, and totally submerged, apart from a handful of houses and a pub. What madness!!!!

What a crazy planet we live on !!!!!

Flashback to Anglo-Saxon times: the Kingdom of the East Angles, who came from Angeln in Denmark. Over time the "North Folk" became "Norfolk" and the "South Folk" became "Suffolk" - simples!

Unfortunately they chose to build their capital at Dunwich, which must have made sense at the time - but not a good choice for a location in the longer term, as it turned out - my god!

Later, people got wise to this risk and tonight we even see a lighthouse that was built well away from the sea, in the middle of a town, for safety's sake - seems crazy, but it has a kind of a logic, doesn't it.

What madness!!!!  [That's enough madness for today. Just go to bed! - Ed]

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