Wednesday March 10th 2021

10:30 Lois pops round to our near neighbour Frances, to give her a sympathy card and a small gift. Poor Frances became a widow on March 15th last year. Her husband Stephen (70) became ill on Valentine's Day, February 14th, and he had asked her to drive him to hospital - and he never came home again, poor Stephen. 

It sort of coincided a bit with my own illness: I had a "nasty turn" when I fainted out of the blue on February 6th, and I went into hospital on March 29th, but thankfully I emerged 4 days later, which was fortunate. Yikes - life is a fragile plant haha!!!

flashback to March 2020 - me with cake

Frances tells Lois that her Volvo Estate's battery was discovered to be flat at the start of the week, and somebody she knows is replacing it today. Our own battery gave out last summer: it's difficult to keep cars working really well when we're not supposed to make any unnecessary journeys due to the lockdowns. I had to replace all our 4 tyres at the same time: on the plus side, neither the battery nor the tyres had been replaced since the car came off the production line in 2012, so fair enough, I mustn't grumble!

10:45 Partly with the well-being of our own Honda car in mind, Lois and I drive over to Churchdown (about 9 miles away, and I can get the car up to 50 mph on stretches of the route, which is fun - and a bit scary haha!).

the 9-mile route to Churchdown

The purpose of the journey is to hand over a bottle of home-made sherry and a jar of home-made marmalade to Ursula, one of Lois's fellow sect-members. Lois went to the door, while I stayed about 12 feet away on the driveway, poised to take a souvenir photo of the occasion. Lockdown rules eased slightly on March 8th.

we visit Lois's friend Ursula and give her a home-made bottle of sherry

and a home-made 1 lb jar of marmalade 

- lockdowns always look better when you've got sherry and marmalade haha!

14:00 Lois does some cake-making: a cream-covered cake with lemon flavouring, she calls it.

Lois makes a lemon-flavoured cream-covered cake: yum yum!

15:30 Tomorrow is our local U3A Danish group's fortnightly meeting on Skype, and I want to ring the group's Old Norse expert, Scilla, to see if she's okay. She's currently staying with her son Tom in Frome, Somerset. 

She's having IT problems again - damn! She say her copy of the Danish crime novel that the group is reading seems to have got corrupted somehow: it's in very small font and it's also in red, for some reason - what madness! And I know that the group's only genuine Danish member is also having problems: she says she can't get the text out of a ridiculously small font: what a crazy world we live in!!!

There are sadly always lots of problems that emerge before every group meeting. They all go back to the fact that Lois and I are trying to run this group remotely, but unfortunately few of the group's elderly members are even "remotely" IT-literate. Oh dear!

16:00 I suddenly realise that I didn't send my friend "Magyar" Mike his Hungarian vocabulary test yesterday. I usually send him one every week on Tuesdays and I completely forgot: and now it's Wednesday - oh dear! 

flashback to 1998: my friend "Magyar" Mike (right) in happier times,

in a restaurant in Szentendre, Hungary

I blame "lockdown amnesia", but that's not a very satisfactory term for it. Luckily Steve, our American brother-in-law comes to my rescue with a list of the new words and expressions from the last 12 months: 

Coronaversary, quarantinis, reactogenicity, sheet pan meal, Room Rater, pandemic puppies, coronasomnia, nose bridge wire, KN95, essential workers, covidiots, contactless delivery, asynchronous learning, Blursday, hanitizer, fomites, r-nought, Mask up, superspreaders, shot-enfreude, You're muted

I have to admit I don't know what some of these words mean, although I can take a good guess. But of course the word I'm looking for right now is "Blursday" - defined as "humorous word for any day of the week that feels not much different from the one before". 

That's the solution - it's Wednesday, I thought it was Tuesday, but they were actually both just "Blursday" haha!

17:00 The Met Office says there's going to be a big storm tonight, so we wander outside to "tie down" (figuratively speaking) anything that's liable to get blown around. What a crazy world we live in !!!!

Oh dear !!!!

19:00 We settle down on the couch and watch a retrospective on the career of the late comedienne Caroline Aherne.

Lois and I particularly liked Caroline's persona as everybody's sweet old granny, "Mrs Merton", who for some unfathomable reason had been given her own TV chat-show. And as "Mrs Merton", she became known for the surprisingly pointed, not to say rude, questions to her celebrity guests, although she mainly seemed to invite onto her show, "celebrities who were good sports", which is just as well. My god! Her questions!!!

She is perhaps best known for her interview of Debbie McGee, the charming wife-slash-assistant to overrated TV magician Paul Daniels. It's nostalgic to see clips of this interview again tonight.

Well done, Debbie. Lois and I do love a good sport !!! A pity that "Mrs Merton" isn't still alive - she could have had a crack at interviewing Piers Morgan for example. Bit of a shame, that haha!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch and watch a few young stand-up comics making more lockdown jokes.

21:15 Lois emerge from her Bible Class and we decide to choose something gentle to go to bed on, Sunday's edition of the Antiques Roadshow, where members of the public bring along various treasures from their attics and show them to experts to be discussed and valued.

The most surprising exhibit tonight is a 1930's quasi-proto-computer game called "Spectator Golf" which worked on primitive 1930's electronics, and sold at the time for about £65. 

To play the game, you whacked a golf ball attached to a piece of string. The machine would record the direction of the shot, its elevation and the distance of the shot. 

The golfer, just like he would do on a normal golf-course, would then select the right club for the distance, for his second shot, and so on.

It's apparently very rare to come across any of these old machines today. The programme's expert, Gordon Foster, knows of only three: one at the golfing museum at St. Andrews golf course in Scotland, and two in a golfing museum in Tasmania, Australia. He values this example at between £5000 and £10000.

I don't know - what a crazy world they lived in, back then in the 1930's !!!!

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