Friday April 30th 2021

07:00 Lois and I have been retired for 15 years, but we still get a warm feeling when Friday arrives. We'd like to stay in bed too but unfortunately we can't. Ian the window-cleaner is coming at 9 am and, somewhat annoyingly, he always starts with our bedroom window and then he does the bathroom window second - and we don't want him to catch us in bed or in the shower - damn!

11:30 Otherwise it's a typical quiet lockdown sort of a day. We go for a walk over the local football field - what the parish council calls the "play park". But it's really cold - we're wearing scarves and our winter coats, and it's supposed to be May tomorrow - what madness! The place is pretty much deserted - we've noticed that people crowded into it and were playing sports like crazy people as soon as they were allowed to, when Boris eased the lockdown a bit. But now they seem to have got fed up with it again - there isn't a single old codger on the exercise equipment or on the tennis courts playing slow-motion tennis. How crazy !!!

we pass the deserted tennis courts - where are all the old codgers now (apart from us) ???

On the way round I post my postal vote for the local elections. It's quite a challenge to get the package right. You have to vote for a candidate for the Borough Council, another candidate for the County Council, and then you have to make a first and second choice for County Police Commissioner: 3 ballot papers in all. You put the ballot papers in envelope A and then sign the "postal voting statement" adding your date of birth and put that plus Envelope A into Envelope B, which then has to be posted. It's lucky I keep a clear head and don't get it all muddled up. I just wonder how many people get it wrong - it would be interesting to know! I think we should be told haha!

For some reason, we don't seem to have had any election literature from any major party except the Conservatives. What's happened to the Liberal Democrats - they're cutting things a bit fine: the election is on May 6th, only a week away - what madness!!!!

12:15 We come home and have a cup of coffee and a biscuit. I look at my smartphone. There seems to be good news on the COVID front again. Twenty two million people are now living in areas with no COVID deaths at all during April, including this area.

This welcome statistic won't stop Lois and me carrying out our usual precautions however. It's not that we're being over-cautious, it's just that we're 100% creatures of habit haha!!!

13:00 Lois gets a call from Andy, one of the elders of her church. He wants her to help "interview" a woman who wants to be baptised into the sect, making sure she knows about what beliefs she is signing up to and whether she is sincere etc. This will be a new experience for Lois - she hasn't done anything like that before. Yikes!

15:30 Out of bed again after the afternoon nap and then we give the car a run out to Bishops Cleeve and back - we haven't used it for a week. It's still starting very easily, and hopefully that's because when we had to replace the battery a few months back. 

And something very nostalgic: on the way back we get involved in traffic jams for the first time in over a year. I suppose it's a combination of its being school-run time and, on the other hand, people leaving work a bit early for the coming 3-day weekend. What madness! How dare they, these job-holding slackers, get in the way of 2 hard-working retirees like us!!!

Only joking!!! Or am I ????

16:00 I get out my smartphone and see again a charming text sent earlier on whatsapp from Lily and Jessie, our 7-year-old twin grandchildren in Perth Australia. 

We think there have been special events going on at their school, the Immaculate Heart College, in the last day or two: a so-called "assembly", which Lois and I think means a sort of prize-giving occasion in Australia, where certificates get doled out for this and that. There's also been a parents' afternoon this week, where teachers talk to parents about their children's progress. But we'll probably have to wait till our weekend zoom call to find out the details.

Here's the text the twins sent:

It's surely worth all the money in the world to be able to receive texts like this one from your grandchildren! Am I right? Or am I right? 

18:30 It's going to be another cold night down to at most 32F (0 C). Lois goes down the back garden to cover up her plants and seedlings with bubble wrap. She's so kind-hearted  - I wish I could be more like her haha !!!

20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, a programme in the Comedy Legends series. This one is all about Steve Martin.

Lois and I had never heard of Steve Martin until we moved to the States for 3 years in 1982. All the other Brits in the office were installing cable tv so we did the same: and we started seeing Martin in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" on either the Showtime of the HBO channel - I forget which.

Later we saw his stage act, including his marvellous banjo-playing, juggling, and making toy-animals-out-of-balloons skills. And I even wore a replica of one of his trademark arrow-through-the-head sets to one of the office lunchtime get-togethers. What a crazy guy I was in those days haha!

In tonight's programme we see a lot of his banjo-playing and a little bit of juggling, but no balloon creations, which is a pity. But we do see a few excerpts from "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", which is nice.

Here we see what must have been a nervous moment in his career, possibly his first ever screen kiss. Fortunately for Martin he was playing opposite the much more experienced Anglo-Australian actress Rachel Ward.

21:00 We continue to watch a bit of TV, the latest episode of the reality-documentary series about the troubled married life of two of Britain's most celebrated stand-up comedians, Jon Richardson and his wife Lucy Beaumont.

Even Jon Richardson's most ardent followers would not deny that he must be a rather fussy man to live with. And tonight we see evidence of that in droves, to put it mildly. We see him calling his wife Lucy into a certain room in their house (he doesn't know what the room's called) to give her a lecture on the proper usage of their coffee mugs, starting with what he grandly calls his "triumvirate of mugs" - my god!

Jon begins his sanctimonious lecturing of his wife Lucy

with another explanation of his so-called "triumvirate of mugs"

Jon turns his head round at this point, and realises that Lucy has quietly slipped away. My god!

Later Lucy bares her soul for the documentary team that's filming the couple's day-to-day life.

Oh dear (again) !!! 

Poor Lucy !!!!!

And it's a bit of a timely warning to me at the same time. I never lecture Lois, but I always like to hang certain mugs on certain hooks in the kitchen. I justify this by saying that it saves me time, because I can just grab the "right mug for the job" without looking, and considering how busy I am, this is a not insignificant aid to my getting through the onerous set of tasks on my to-do-list each day, to put it mildly haha!

recent photo demonstrating the correct positions for our four

"triumvirates of mugs" - the two triumvirates on the hooks 

and two triumvirates on the "mug-tree"

I also make sure to keep my favourite teaspoon, the large one that I call "trusty", on top of the microwave where it's easy to get at when I'm making coffee. Saves time again. Simple but effective haha!

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

Thursday April 29th 2021

10:00 This morning, while Lois goes for a walk, I'm busy with various duties connected with the U3A Danish Group that Lois and I run - the only such group in the UK, surprisingly enough. Poor Joy, one of our members, has suffered a bereavement - we've got her a sympathy card. 

And Scilla, the group's Old Norse expert says she needs my vocab lists put into a bigger font: I sympathise with her - my glasses are so far down my nose when I have to read something, that I'm thinking of having my nose lengthened by plastic surgery, to give my glasses what Hitler called lebensraum: and I should maybe have it done now, before I actually need it, as a precaution. I'm not sure: we'll have to see.

As it happens a lot of people on the internet are offering this type of nose job, so it'll just be a question of choosing the cheapest - simples!!!

Here are just two of the providers touting their wares on the web: 

12:00 We've booked a Sainsbury's delivery for the 1 pm to 2 pm slot, and our idea is to get our lunch over before that, but once again the guy comes early - at 12:45 pm, so we have to interrupt our lunch to take the stuff in: damn! This is getting to be a regular thing, that he comes early. Of course we're always pleased to see the guy so we don't complain, but we'll have to take this poor time-keeping into account when scheduling deliveries in future, that's for sure.

When the guy has gone, we finish out lunch and then start swabbing the items down and putting them away. Oh dear there's another "sprout"-style debacle. We thought we were ordering "1 kilo" of sweet potatoes, but they've just sent the one sweet potato.

What madness!!!!

we think we've ordered 1 kilo of sweet potatoes

but Sainsbury's just send one - what madness!!!

This isn't the first time we've made this error - which should have been immediately detectable if we'd just taken the trouble to check the amounts on the bill. Oh dear!

flashback to December: Sainsbury's send us a single sprout

but there's a happy ending - a 3p discount

happy ending: Sainsbury's give us a 3p refund

A similar debacle over a Tesco delivery of just one sprout later went viral on the Hungarian news:

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the second part of an interesting documentary series "Make-up: a Glamorous History", this programme being all about the Victorian era. The presenter is, once again, the Nigella Lawson lookalike, Lisa Eldridge.

It turns out that the Victorian era was a bit more sensible and less outrageous when it came to women's appearance (and men's) than the Georgian one was - now who would have guessed that haha!

The Queen herself set the tone, apparently. Now who would have guessed that (again) haha! Even in her official portrait of 1859, Victoria's clothes are grand, but her face appears to be unpainted.

Queen Victoria's official portrait of 1859:

the clothes are grand, but the face appears unpainted

Victorian women had to look thoroughly domesticated, the perfect middle-class mother, the perfect middle-class wife. At the same time, however, a lot of women began to realise that they didn't look that good with just their natural faces: so they came to the conclusion that they somehow needed to use make-up, although it had to be subtle, and if it was labelled "for health reasons", they could get away with it. So anything labelled "skin-care" was permitted, and although lipstick wasn't sold in respectable shops, "lip salves" based on natural products like grape, were okay. 

Proper, full-on make-up was inextricably linked to prostitutes and actresses: the two professions were regarded as being virtually interchangeable: what madness!! Both these sorts of women wore proper make-up, and sometimes an ulterior motive was also to disguise the effects of syphilis, which was rife at the time. 

Victoria society was obsessed with the problem of prostitution, and ideas about what to do about it. Women wearing make-up in public were liable to be arrested by police on suspicion of being sex-workers: they were then subjected to an intimate physical examination to find out if they had a venereal disease or not - my god! If they refused to be examined they could be jailed for up to a year - yikes!!!!

Another idea that was fashionable in the 19th century was that your looks somehow mirrored your soul, so to use make-up was seen as an effort to disguise your bad qualities. This attitude was linked with the false but fashionable science of phrenology, and also with a lot of anglo-centric racist and snobbish nonsense in general - oh dear!

Men were allowed to use a sort of mascara, not on their eyes haha, but on their beards, to disguise greyness. And Victorian men certainly liked their beards - it was a bit like today.

Lois and I have often wondered why so many Victorian men seemed to be bearded, and tonight's programme offers an answer. Apparently at the beginning of Victoria's reign most men were clean-shaven, but during the Crimean War against Russia (1853-1856), soldiers didn't have the facilities to shave, and so at the end of the war they tended to arrive back in Britain with great long beards - and as they were also respected war-heroes, beards came to be seen as a sign of manliness.

If a man had grey hair there were also a number of dyes available, although they frequently contained dangerous substances like silver nitrate. And if the dye inadvertently spread onto your skin, you would clean it away with - guess what - cyanide. My god - what madness !!!!

What a crazy world they lived in, in those times !!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!! 

Wednesday April 28th 2021

08:00 Things are happening on the Russian steppes! Not in real life, but in my book. I get the book out, "The Horse, the Wheel and Language" by David W. Anthony, the book I got last month for my birthday.

the Indo-European "homeland" where the people who spoke

the English language's ancestor language were living 7,500 years ago

Our linguistic ancestors, the Indo-Europeans, who were speaking the English language's distant ancestral language 7,500 years ago - the people who first thought of the word "man", that we still use today -  have finally started to wise up. It's 5,200 BC and they're beginning to think it might be a good idea to keep cattle and not just get their food from hunting, shooting, fishing, and foraging. They've noticed that their western neighbours, who have developed farming, generally have more food on their tables and are going to bed in a better mood.

a typical early farmer sitting down to a plate of meat

and getting ready to go to bed in a good mood

The move to farming from foraging happened around 5,200 BC - it started around the Dnieper River rapids, but eventually spread north and east to the rest of the "homeland" area. 

The Indo-European homeland on the Russian steppes was probably also the first place in the world that horses were domesticated and eaten, at around 4800 BC. But why? Why bother to domesticate horses when you've already got cows?

The answer seems to be that horses were cheaper and easier to feed in the winter. It turns out that horses can use their hooves to break through snow and find grass to munch on, and they can also break ice on the surface of ponds, rivers etc and get a refreshing drink of water.

horses can knock through snow with their hooves and get at the grass!

Who's a clever boy then haha!!!

Cows and sheep on the other hand have to be kept going through the winter by being given food by the farmers. Sheep can graze on winter grass through soft snow, but if the snow becomes encrusted with ice, then their noses will get raw and bloody, and after that they would rather stand and starve in the field than try to get at the grass beneath - what madness!!!!

Cattle are even worse - if it's been snowing and they can't see the grass any more, they don't know what to do. They just stand around looking puzzled, and so the farmers have to go to a lot of trouble to get them fodder and thus keep them alive in the winter.

What madness (again) !!!!!

So horses were the ideal choice - simples! Who knew that, eh? [I expect a lot of people did - Ed]

09:00 Over a cup of tea I tell Lois about the horse's discovery that there was often grass under a field of apparent snow. We're sure that early man noticed this about horses ability to find grass under snow.

We discuss how sophisticated so-called primitive people were, as revealed in a recent Onion News story that went viral a few years ago.

ARDÈCHE, FRANCE—Saying that the recently discovered figurative art sheds new light on prehistoric speculative conflict, archaeologists working at France’s Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave announced Friday the discovery of a 300-century-old painting of an adult European mammoth squaring off against five sabre-toothed tigers.

“This well-preserved and surprisingly detailed illustration shows us that ancient humans, people we refer to as cavemen, were capable of surprisingly sophisticated thought and probing insight, asking themselves mankind’s oldest philosophical question: Who would win in a fight?” said prominent palaeolithic art expert Dr. David Whitley, noting that it was only a small intellectual step from sabretooth-versus-mammoth to such fundamental human debates as Hercules versus Gilgamesh, double-size Muhammed Ali versus one-tenth-size Godzilla, and the 1996 Bulls versus the 2012 Heat.

“It’s a question that has shaped and moulded all of human history. Also, I don’t care what this cave painting says—the mammoth would totally prevail unless it got, like, stuck in a tar pit.” Whitley refused to comment on the discovery of a second, somewhat more realistic mural, which seems to ask the question of how many Cro-Magnons it would take to drive the Neanderthals extinct.

The morale is simple, we think. Never underestimate the so-called "primitive mind"!

10:00 Lois and I go for a walk. Lois is very knowledgeable about nature, so she often treats me to a "nature ramble" where she uses examples on our route to make me more aware, which is nice! Today she showcases what she is is a nice "flowering currant" - I must try and remember: there'll be a test next time we step out - yikes!

Lois showcases a "flowering currant" in the ancient hedgerow

that borders the local football field on the road side

It's heart-warming that we've been actually getting some light rain today, after a drought of a few weeks. We just wish it could be warmer, seeing that it's almost the end of April now. The high temperature today is predicted to be only 50F (10C) - brrrrr!!!!

We give in to our worst instincts and buy a couple of hot chocolate drinks at the Whiskers Coffee stand next to the Parish Council offices, just to warm up a bit. My god!!!!

Lois gets our hot chocolates from the Whiskers Coffee stand

next to the Parish Council offices

we warm up with a hot chocolate each 

on the parish's shiny new wooden bench - yum yum!

We don't order anything to eat. The odd thing about the lockdowns is that Lois is the one who has been putting on weight even though she's the active one of us - I mainly just sit around all day. We both weigh about the same now, 10 stone 4 lbs (144 lbs or 65 kilos), even though I'm 5 foot 10 and she's only 5 foot 3. How weird is that?!!

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 to watch the second half of a documentary on film-star Liz Taylor, that I started watching last night.

I wasn't intending to watch the second half of this programme, but I'm stuck for finding programmes that Lois doesn't like, so I decide to see this one through to the end after all, and I'm glad I did: it's actually very interesting and at times inspiring.

We take up the story when the shooting of "Cleopatra" starts in London in 1961.

I'd forgotten that Taylor became very ill with some sort of pneumonia problem when the first attempts were made to shoot "Cleopatra" in England - Taylor  actually became so ill, there were fears that she might die. And we see the unexpurgated "Cleopatra" photo of her that clearly shows the tracheotomy scar after her operation. We also see pictures of her being carried on board a plane to take her back to the US after it was all over.

Taylor, as Cleopatra, but with her tracheotomy scar clearly visible

Taylor being carried onto a plane to the US after her operation

I hadn't realised that she suffered from poor-ish health all through her life, but overcoming these problems seemed to make her a stronger person each time. After her brush with death in 1961 she recalled later how she had felt so "bloody glad to be alive" and that she had begun to "exult in life".

After her marriage to her Cleopatra co-star, Richard Burton, she entered the best years of her emotional life, according to her friends. Burton loved to buy her expensive presents, including the yacht Kalizma, where the programme's next landmark photo was taken, as the couple cruised off the coast of Sardinia in 1967.

The next picture is Taylor in the next, less happy, phase of her life. She is pictured with Liza Minnelli and Betty Ford, wife of the ex-president, sitting on a sofa at a party at the Studio 54 club in New York, in May 1979. 3 years after her second (and final!) divorce from Burton.

According to Taylor's friends, the trio spent a few hours on this sofa just so photographers could get shots of them - it was not a happy era in Taylor's life, and she was just wishing she could "get up and go home", friends say. And all three women would be embarking, within a year of the photo being taken, on years of rehab for alcohol and drug addiction. But Taylor was, in the early 1980's, to become one of the first celebrities to have the courage to go public on her addiction problems.

The programme's next photo was taken at a speech by her to members of the US Senate in 1986. The AIDS crisis was in full swing, and she had lost her close friend, film star Rock Hudson, to the disease in 1985. She urged senators to commit more money to the campaign to fight AIDS. Friends remark, in tonight's programme, on how assured and powerful a person she had become by this time - and we see her here showcasing the full 1980's "power-dresser" look, the Dynasty-style shoulder pads, the big hair and the big earrings etc.

Taylor speaking in the US Senate in 1986

The next picture shows her after another health scare, when she had had an operation to remove a brain tumour in 1997. The picture clearly shows the scars from her operation, which she was fearlessly determined not to hide.

a photo of Taylor after her brain operation in 1997,

saying to her public, "I got through this - and you can do it too".

One of the programme's last pictures tonight is of Taylor receiving her award of "Dame of the British Empire" from the Queen in 2000. 

Fascinating stuff !!!!

21:15 Lois emerges from her zoom session, and we watch a bit of TV, but - as I write these words the following morning - I can't remember what we saw. Oh dear - is it perhaps the sherry?

"Forgot what watched" haha!!!! 

I recall Katy's famous diary entry of "Forgot what did". 

Maybe somebody could do some research on the days Katy can't remember, and produce a "posthumous" novel "What Katy Forgot What Did", with options on a sequel "What Katy Forgot Next What Did". But am I entering the world of fantasy here, perhaps? I'm not sure, the jury's still out on that one! If I remember, I'll let you know next time.

22:00 We go to bed, I remember that, haha - zzzzzzz!!!!