Tuesday, 25 May 2021

Tuesday May 25th 2021

09:00 The day begins for Lois and me. I look at the weather forecast: it's mildly good news - although there may be some light rain this evening, today will be followed by a dry-ish spell of several days according to the Met Office.

Makes a change - my god !!!!


Unfortunately the welcome prospect of some dry weather at last is, for me, overshadowed by the prospect of my having to go to the local general hospital tomorrow for tests: and I have to be there for 7:45 am. !!! Damn !!!!!

11:00 Lois and I are self-isolating at the moment: I was coronavirus-tested on Sunday in preparation for tomorrow's hospital appointment, so we've got to self-isolate until tomorrow's appointment begins. 

But as luck would have it, we actually have two visitors today, which almost never happens: Mark the Gardener, and Nick the Fishman, who has come up from Bristol. We just have to keep away from them - we've explained the reasons to them already, so that they're not too offended haha! And we manage to pay Nick "contactlessly", which is a relief.

the ghostly image of Mark the Gardener at work today 
weeding our flower beds

some of the boxes we buy today from Nick the Fishman, just arrived from Bristol: 
smoked haddock and breaded goujons - what madness !!!!

16:00 We have a cup of Earl Grey tea on the couch and listen to the radio, an interesting retrospective on the amazing, chance discovery of Richard III's skeleton in the middle of Leicester a few years ago.


The programme participants remark again on what good teeth Richard had. 

There was a debate on the quora website recently about the things modern movie-makers get most wrong when they're making films about medieval times. The mistake made most often was apparently that a lot of the women seen ought to be shown as pregnant, because that was a fact of life in those days, with no opportunities for birth control.

But there was also a bit of a debate about medieval teeth: should they be shown as rotten? Some experts however, weighed in to say that medieval people generally had better teeth than people today, as they didn't have access to sugary foods, and they generally had to do a lot of chewing. Makes sense!

There are normally a lot of old crones in these films, probably too old to be pregnant, who tend to be shown with blacked-out teeth, especially in films about the French Revolution, we've noticed. 

a typical old crone from the French Revolution, 
probably a washerwoman with a fugitive duke or count 
hidden under a pile of laundry in the back of her washer-wagon

Lois and I don't want to see any more of these crones - so wake up, Hollywood and others, let's see some crones with dazzling smiles haha !!!!!


No comments:

Post a Comment