Saturday March 20th 2021

09:00 Oh dear - a dreary morning: cloudy and damp. Grocery deliveries from Budgens in the village, which we've got to swab down with disinfectant. Then Lois goes for a walk while I do some of the exercises that Connor, my NHS physiotherapist, has scheduled for me.

14:00 After lunch I remember that tomorrow is census day. This sets me into a minor panic, when I think I'd better complete the form today (online), in case a lot of people are swamping the government website tomorrow, making it slow. So I sit down there on the sofa with the laptop while Lois watches TV.

The census turns out to be really easy, except for me having to put down what my job was before I retired, and what the organisation I was working for was actually doing. I have real trouble trying to remember how we are supposed to answer questions like that - what madness!!!  Last time we did a census it was obviously only 2011 and I'd only been retired for 5 years, so it was all still fresh in my mind. I just wish I'd had a more straightforward job - damn!!!!

census 2021 - some typical questions

James Marriott in the Times newspaper said that filling out his form he was confronted by the dispiriting realisation that his life, which from the inside has always struck him as fascinating, original and thrilling, makes for a decidedly boring series of data points.

He doubts whether Prof. Sir Ian Diamond, the national statistician,, will experience feelings of titillation or even curiosity  as another white, heterosexual, gainfully employed man called James slides across his desk. "But we are almost all boring, statistically speaking. To be average is to be human, and there's much wisdom to be found in accepting this fact. This is how we live: as blindly and as inevitably as migrating birds".

Oh dear, that's a somewhat bleak vision!

15:00 Meanwhile Lois is watching an old Judy Garland film on TV: Meet Me in St Louis. Her verdict at the end is that it's warm and schmaltzy but really quite a boring film for a 2 hour investment or whatever: three good songs, but the other songs are nothing to write home about - oh dear, that's a pity! 

The film critic in the Radio Times, Andrew Collins, says that the stand-out performance in the film was not Garland's "Esther Smith" but Mary Astor, who played Esther's mother, Mrs Smith. "Best ketchup we ever made, Katie!", announced Mrs Smith to the housekeeper, who declares, "You can always put spice in, but ya can't take it out!" - certainly true, and worth remembering!

Mary Astor as Mrs Smith (left) and Marjorie Main (right) as housekeeper Katie,

who came complete with standard Hollywood housekeeper hair-do

Lois has been hearing about Mary Astor in a recent radio series about film actresses and female directors who challenged the power of the studios. Astor was a tough cookie, no doubt about that. She was a big star in the silent movie era, but struggled initially to get roles after the arrival of talkies, because her voice was said to be too masculine. What madness!

The studio tried to side-line Astor after the actress's adulterous affair with a playwright, but she challenged the so-called "morality clause" in her contract and managed to ride out the scandal. 

Mary Astor, strutting her stuff as Mrs Smith in Meet Me In St Louis

16:00 We relax with a cup of Earl Grey tea and a hot-cross-bun. Lois reads me bits out of her copy of "The Week", which gives a digest of the week's news from home and abroad. It arrives every Friday, but we leave it for 24 hours in our unofficial "quarantine" are on the floor of the entrance hall, just in case somebody in the distribution chain has COVID - what a crazy world we live in !!!

Lois and I have often noticed a strange fact about life: which is, that when you hear about something or other FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME EVER [Loving the Trump-style capitals! - Ed], then you hear about it again a couple of days later.

We run the local U3A Danish group, the only such group in the whole of the UK, and at the moment the meetings are running on Skype. One of our members, Jeanette, the only genuine Danish member of the group, appears on screen with 3 heads and looks as if she's sitting behind some rather elegant Venetian blinds.

Jeanette assumed there was something wrong with her webcam, so she's bought a new one that seem to work fine. However, Steve, our American brother-in-law, has enlightened us as to Jeanette's real problem, which is not with her camera, but with her filters. I was completely unaware of these filters, needless to say.

Then today Lois reads in "The Week" that a vicar giving a sermon on zoom found that he'd morphed into one of the Blues Brothers. Rev. Vaughan Roberts began a sermon at St Mary's Church in Warwick as usual, but soon appeared in a black fedora and sunglasses after his wife applied a filter by mistake.

Realising her error she "sidled around to me looking horrified", Roberts said. 

She advised him to finish the sermon from a seated position, because the filter only appeared when he was standing at the altar. "It could have been worse, " said Roberts. "At least it wasn't Rambo or the Godfather". My god, what a crazy world we live in! But it gives me an irresistible desire to play with filters, just for fun, mind haha!

20:00 We settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, the latest programme in Melvyn Bragg's series "In Our Time", where Melvyn invites a group of academics to discuss a topic of scientific, historical or cultural interest.

Euripides' play "The Bacchae" was first performed in Athens in 405 BC during the spring festival of Dionysus, the wine god. The first performance took place a year or two after the playwright himself had died, so he never saw it on stage. The outdoor theatre was teeming with spectators - the theatre was thought to hold up to 15,000. They would have come from all over the Athenian Empire, stretching from Asia Minor, through the Aegean and as far west as Sicily. They would overwhelmingly have been men, with perhaps a sprinkling of priestesses.

The theatre was on the south-west slope of the Acropolis, and the audience area was, in 405BC, in the form of wooden benches - the stonework came later. The audience were looking out, they could actually see in the distance to the right, the glittering waters at the city's port at Piraeus and the harbour area. Behind them they would have had the great temples and statues of the gods. To the left they can see the countryside of the surrounding province of Attica. This first performance would have taken place on a bright sunny spring morning in April.

I read this play in the original language when I was a school, in the 1960's. 

As the play starts, we learn that the god Dionysus has driven the women of Thebes, nicknamed the Maenads, into an ecstatic frenzy, sending them dancing and hunting on Mount Cithaeron. The King of Thebes, Pentheus scolds them harshly and effectively bans Dionysian worship, ordering his soldiers to arrest anyone else found engaging in the rites. He sees the women’s divinely-caused insanity merely as drunken cavorting and an illicit attempt to escape the mores and legal codes regulating Theban society.

A herdsman then brings sensational reports from Mount Cithaeron that the Maenads are behaving especially strangely and performing incredible feats and miracles, and that the Theban soldiers are unable to harm them with their weapons, while the women appear able to defeat them with only sticks.

Pentheus is now even more eager to see the ecstatic women, and Dionysus (wishing to humiliate and punish him) convinces the king to dress as a Maenad to avoid detection, and go to the rites himself.

Another messenger then reports how the god helped Pentheus up to the top of a tree for a better view of the Maenads, but then alerted the women to the snooper in their midst. Driven wild by this intrusion, the women tore the trapped Pentheus down from the tree, and ripped his body apart, piece by piece.

The ecstatic Maenads rip King Pentheus’s body apart – yikes!!!!

Later, Pentheus’s own mother, Agave, who has also joined the Maenads, rips her son’s head off his body, under the illusion that he’s a mountain lion – yikes!

I remember that when we read the play at school, it was at the height of Beatlemania. And our Greek teacher, Mr Robson, said he thought that the Beatles’ female fans would do the same to their idols – i.e. rip them apart piece by piece -  if they ever managed to get hold of them. My god, what madness!!!! But his theory was never proved one way or the other, fortunately, so perhaps he was exaggerating a bit - who knows!

typical female fans at the time of the height of Beatlemania - yikes!

21:00 We switch off the radio and watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in Kate Humble's new series about some of Britain's coastal walks.

The climax of the programme is the 199 steps which Kate climbs to see the stunning ruins of Whitby Abbey, high above the town. 

Lois and I had forgotten that it was here, some time in the 7th century that the so-called "Whitby Synod" of elders fixed the scheme for calculating the dates of Easter each year, a scheme still followed today.

the ruins of Whitby Abbey (right), high above the Yorkshire coast and the North Sea

What clever elders! And they did it all without the help of computers too. Perhaps on the back of an envelope? But the scheme has stood the test of time, that's for sure. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun if Easter was the same dates every year now, would it haha!

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