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) ???
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.
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!!!!
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