04:00 A bumpy start to the day when I wake up and decide to go out to the bathroom, but just catch my shoulder on the corner of the bedside cabinet as I roll out from under the covers - damn! I expect there'll be some bruising there in due course, but I'll keep you informed! Damn (again) !!!!
11:00 We sit down with a cup of coffee and a biscuit. I look at my smartphone - good and bad news: half the adults in our county have now had their first dose of coronavirus vaccine, which is reassuring. Gloucestershire is actually one of the best performing counties in the UK for speed of vaccinations.
On the other hand Boris says later today that the European continent's so-called "third wave" is bound to cross the channel at some point: that's a shame. I can just imagine the little viruses landing at Dover or somewhere similar and struggling, on their little legs, up the beaches, looking for victims.
12:00 My birthday is coming up shortly so we sit down at the computer and order a birthday meal from the local Cook Shop on the Bath Road.
our local branch of Cook Shop
Dessert: Belgian chocolate cake (serves 8), two layers of rich, moist chocolate sponge, sandwiched and coated in a dark chocolate icing -
What can I say other than - "Yum Yum" !!! And needless to say, we won't be eating all 8 slices of chocolate cake on "the day": we'll save the other 6 for the next 3 afternoons.
You do the math haha!!!
I've been retired now for 15 years, but I can still remember birthday cakes that people brought in to work. It was often a good opportunity for team-building not just within teams but also, maybe once in a decade, between teams or, maybe once in a career, even between floors, as this story from Onion News recorded back in 2014.
PITTSBURGH—In an unprecedented encounter with a culture
heretofore shrouded in mystery, Northco Logistics customer service specialist
Ryan Barlow reportedly established historic contact Wednesday with the people
who work on his office complex’s fourth floor.
“I met this guy Kevin who said
they’d been having the same problems with the air conditioner we’ve been
having,” said the 28-year-old explorer in reference to the peaceful words of
greeting he exchanged in the elevator with an inhabitant of QuestTech Learning
Solutions, a meeting that to this point had been considered far too perilous to
be undertaken. “He also said they had some leftover food and cake from his
co-worker’s birthday and that we could stop by if we wanted. He seemed very
friendly.”
Though admitting that no one had yet dared journey so far, the
intrepid adventurer then regaled his colleagues with the legend of the remote
and uncharted seventh floor, where there was rumoured to exist a vast open
layout and, according to lore, a ping-pong table.
That day must have been a career highlight for Ryan, an experience he'll never forget, I'm sure! And I hope he put it down in his annual report for job appraisal; I'm sure his boss would have been really impressed by his display of initiative, no doubt about that!
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom.
I feel pleased with myself because earlier today I sorted Lois out with a pair of old speakers that we used to use with our old laptop, and which have lain idle in a drawer for a year or two - out of sheer laziness I have never connected them with our shiny-new laptop. Lois often complains she can't hear people on zoom sessions, especially "when they drop their voices". I know what she means - and it's not just that we're getting old or anything like that haha!
20:00 I settle down on the couch and watch an interview on the Sky Arts channel with song-writer Jimmy Webb.
It's a strange coincidence that two Jimmy Webb songs played a part in the early days of mine and Lois's "courtship" (as it used to be called), which began in 1969.
We were both members of a group of young 20-somethings who spent a few days renting a house on the Isle of Wight, and this was where Lois first caught my eye. Somebody had brought a record-player and about a dozen singles, which were played a lot in the evenings, as there wasn't much to do on the Isle of Wight, and Glen Campbell's "Galveston", written by Jimmy Webb, was the song both Lois and I associate with that holiday.
flashback to 1969: I stand chatting with 2 of our friends,
as we wait to board the ferry back to the mainland
Later, on my first date with Lois, we were having a drink in a pub. I put a shilling in the jukebox and I got it to play another Jimmy Webb song, "Wichita Lineman", which was an odd choice in a way, because neither of us was particularly a Glen Campbell fan.
flashback to winter 1969-1970, and the early days
of our relationship, walking through an Oxfordshire village in the snow
I find tonight's interview with Jimmy quite fascinating - he and he in view the whole time, seated at a piano and we hear, but don't see, his (British) interviewer.
Jimmy had a strict upbringing: he was the son of a Baptist preacher, and Jimmy's early experiences with music were playing from the Baptist hymnal on the piano in his father's church in Oklahoma during services.
As a young songwriter he worked for Motown Records for a time, but perhaps a lot of his songs didn't fit with the Motown style - when they let him go, they kept ownership of most of what he had written, however, but luckily there were a couple of songs that they weren't interested in: including "By the Time I get to Phoenix" and what they called that 'silly balloon song', "Up Up and Away", so the company let him keep those. Both later became big hits, and "Up Up and Away" won a Grammy for Fifth Dimension.
Tonight we see Jimmy play his song "Wichita Lineman", which Lois and I were listening to in that pub in 1969.
At the time, I realise now, I didn't really know what "a lineman for the county" was, and I assumed he was some sort of official watching out for illegally-loaded lorries coming over the county boundary. I think now he's probably the guy you see on the top of a telegraph pole fixing a problem with the telephone wires, but I'm not 100% sure! Jimmy says tonight that the message of the song was "If you see an ordinary guy doing an ordinary job, don't assume that there's nothing going on inside his head" - which is a good thought to remember.
Later we see him sing "Galveston", which Lois and I used to hear in the evenings on the Isle of Wight.
Jimmy says the song is the homesick thoughts of a young soldier in the Vietnam War. He says it isn't an anti-war song as such, just the dreams of a young guy caught up in something and separated from the one he loves, and just wanting to make it through and get home.
Interestingly Jimmy says he can't write songs if there's anybody else in the room - he's a lousy co-writer, he says. I can relate to that kind of thing, I have to say. I can only really concentrate when I'm on my own - but maybe everybody's like that: the jury's still out on that one.
And he can't count the number of people who've said to him that the journey depicted in "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" is physically impossible. They storm into his dressing-room with slide rules, callipers and maps, and stopwatches and things, all hanging round their neck, and they say, "It's impossible. You never could have made the trip. You could never have made it to Albuquerque by the second day" - what madness!!!
He has to remind them that, "It's only a song". My god!
21:00 Lois emerges from her seminar, and we watch our favourite TV quiz, University Challenge, the student quiz.
Lois and I have a miserable time again tonight trying to steal a march on the students. We answer a lot of questions correctly, but unfortunately so do the students - oh dear! But we are at the semi-final stage now, so these two teams are two of the four best in the competition.
We get just one answer that both teams fail to come up with.
Question: what precise 3-word phrase appears in St Paul's letters in the King James Bible, and is in modern usage mostly used in the negative, meaning 'to have no patience with those one thinks are stupid'?
Students: (Warwick) "suffer no fools"
(Imperial) [pass]
Colin and Lois: "to suffer fools gladly"
Not much to show for a 30-minute quiz now is it - oh dear! I think our careers as "smartasses" is now over for the moment, at least till the next competition starts. Damn!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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