08:00 The schoolchildren are going back to school today after the Easter break, so as Lois and I lie in bed we can hear bunches of them talking below our bedroom window as they wait for the school bus.
Hearing their little voices is a great feeling for us, because we know that, with schools back in session again, it'll be quieter on the football field when we do our walk - and so it proves to be, although there are lots of adults, playing netball in the netball court and playing tennis in the tennis courts, which is correct procedure but a bit selfish, we feel!
I want to take a picture of the basketball and tennis players, but we waste a bit of time drinking coffee at the recently opened Whiskers Coffee stand, and as usual a lot of these sporty old codgers start packing up to go as soon as we approach, which is a bit inconsiderate, to put it mildly - damn!
Lois queues up at the Whiskers Coffee stand
we waste a bit of time drinking our coffee and hot chocolate
by the time we've finished, the elderly netballers have had enough and
start packing up and doing their "cooling down" stretches - what madness!!!
...and one of the elderly tennis matches has finished (right) - how crazy !!!!
10:45 I get back home feeling a bit frustrated - I'm trying to fill the gap left by local man Ben Gutowski's "Rovers Report", whose netballing blog has not been updated for 4 years for unknown reasons - see that story in Onion News which went viral recently.
Noting that the site devoted to the
Prestbury Rovers netballers and their minor league affiliates had long ceased
being updated without any explanation, sources confirmed Friday that local man
Ben Gutowski’s defunct four-year-old sports blog, “The Rovers Report,” was
still quietly lurking on the internet.
“Ubalda Jimenez looked extremely
sharp in five games, so she looks poised for another All-Star season that will
hopefully help push us back into the playoffs,” read an excerpt of Gutowski’s
most recent post on the inactive Blogspot page, dated March 2, 2017, covering
the Rovers’ spring training games.
“Meanwhile, Wilamena Rosario
(remember that name, because she’ll be leading the NL MVP race in a couple
years) has been killing it in Double-A with the Noverton Drillers, so she could
be a game-changer later in the year when she gets called up to the majors.
Check back next week for a complete position-by-position breakdown of the
roster, the latest Prospect Power Rankings, and a list of potential offseason
moves the team could still try to make before the season starts.”
Reports also stated that the
long-dormant blog contained a poll asking readers which team would win the NL
West division in 2011, which as of press time had received one vote.
It's a pity but truth be told, there are a lot of dormant blogs out there - it's like all the unwanted hardware floating around in space. Somebody will just have to go out there and collect them all some day: not a pleasant job but somebody will have to do it ! Let me hold my hand up straightaway and just say, "It's not going to be me" - call me lazy if you like!
[You're lazy! - Ed]
11:00 |I get a phone call from Scilla, who is the Old Norse expert in the U3A Danish group that Lois and I run (the only one in the UK). The group is currently reading a Danish crime novel, "Dybt at falde" ("The Further You Fall") and Scilla wanted me to buy her copy of the paperback. She had asked her son to order it from the book's Danish publisher, but he had encountered some insuperable IT problems trying to do so, so I offered to give it a try, and it seems to have worked. Silver surfers rule OK haha!
The astonishing thing is the price. It's only a 300-page paperback, but it costs £10.50, and worst of all - it costs £31.50 for shipping, making the total charge to Scilla of £42 in all - what robbery!!!! Is that because, unlike Royal Mail which has several private competitors, the Danish Post Office is a monopoly? I don't know, I'm not sure about this, but I think we should be told !!!!
I got an email today saying that the book will arrive here at my address tomorrow, so I will have to post it to Scilla. She's staying with her son Tom down in Somerset at the moment, but Tom will be driving her to Brighton this week for her second astrazeneca coronavirus vaccination jab: she has to have it in Brighton, where her other son lives, simply because she had her first jab there - what a crazy world we live in !!!!
18:00 We settle for a Parsley Box meal tonight - one of their new creations, Lancashire Hotpot, with some of our own added vegetables, as we find there isn't actually very much of their showcased and much vaunted carrot pieces present in the pack - oh dear!
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar. I settle down on the couch and watch a bit of TV, two more episodes from the series "Pls Like", which features a cynical Generation X presenter, Liam, investigating what millennials are doing on the social media these days, particularly when it comes to being so-called "influencers".
I have to say that one of my favourite things about this series is the excellent, very informative graphics, stats, pie charts and bar charts - that kind of thing. And tonight's episodes don't disappoint, to put it mildly!
For instance, how often have you and I wanted to ask the question, "What exactly does it mean to be a 'micro-influencer'? Well all the answers are right here on this next slide.
You see, it's all merely a question of numbers - simples!!!!!
The series also keeps me up to date with the latest useful apps, like the "iWake Smart Alarm Clock", which uses smart data and GPS tracking to tell you what time your immediate neighbours and near-neighbours are waking up.
Memo to self: Must get hold of that app!!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her seminar and we listen to a bit of radio, an old edition of Desert Island Discs, the series where celebrities are asked to talk about their lives and choose the 8 so-called "gramophone records" they would like to have with them if they were ever stranded on a desert isle.
Tonight's celebrity is Barbara Pym, one of Lois's favourite writers. She had an interesting career as a very successful writer of slightly comic novels in the 1950's, when she sold a lot of copies. But she ran into trouble in the 1960's when her publisher and other publishers of the time, decided she had become old-fashioned, and not in tune with the so-called "swinging sixties".
Barbara Pym
Pym was effectively "dropped" by the publishing world for 15 or 16 years, until the Times Newspaper ran a series where they invited well-known figures from the literary world to nominate 2 contemporary authors, one they considered the most over-rated, and one they considered the most under-rated, of the times.
All the respondents chose different writers with one exception: two poets, Philip Larkin and Cecil Day-Lewis nominated Barbara Pym as "most underrated". This led to Pym's rehabilitation in the literary world, and she went on to achieve several more published novels.
One of the records that Pym chooses tonight to have with her on her desert isle is a recording of Philip Larkin reading his poem, "An Arundel Tomb", one of my favourites of his, which is nice. It's about the two stone effigies of a medieval earl and countess lying on top of their tomb in Chichester Cathedral, holding hands. The poem finishes like this:
Lois and I visited the cathedral in 2012 and took this picture of the tomb.
We also visited the exhibition of modern sculptures in the cathedral grounds.
Happy days !!!!!
21:30 We go to bed on an old edition of Fawlty Towers, the John Cleese comedy from the 1970's.
When we watch old episodes of this sitcom we always hear a few comic lines that have passed into our family folklore over the decades. Tonight's set of lines is all about Basil's amended "Gourmet Night" menu.
Many years ago I took up the "duck surprise" idea, and to this day several of my signature dishes have names like "Boiled Egg Surprise", "Fish Finger Surprise" - and they're also some of my most popular creations I have to say!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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