Danskcolin: Friday June 25th 2021

11:00 The car has been standing on our forecourt since last Friday, which isn't good - it needs some exercise haha.

a rare picture of me behind the wheel of our car this morning

And Lois also wants to hand over a basket of our garden fruits and vegetable to a friend in her 80's, who lives on the other side of Cheltenham.

Lois's poor friend is reluctant to go out and shop because she's afraid that her daughter, recently discharged from hospital after liver/kidney problems and now temporarily lodging with her, will take the chance of being alone in the house to sneak herself an alcoholic drink or three - what madness !!!! It was alcohol which landed her in hospital in the first place.

Lois chats to the 80-year-old on the doorstep - as expected, she doesn't want us to come in, what with the coronavirus and all, but the news from her overall seems to be good. She seems very happy - her daughter is eating well, and putting on weight. Lois and I think that both mother and daughter were basically lonely, and that living together is making things better for both of them, which is nice.

I've read this before, and I think it's become a bit of a truism, that if nothing else, heavy drinking among family-members can make Christmas gift-buying dilemmas somewhat easier (report, Onion News).

SIESTA KEY, FL—Saying that it was simple and straightforward to locate a gift that their mother would enjoy, the children of alcoholic Alison Cassidy confirmed Friday that she was pretty easy to shop for.

“It’s cool that we don’t have to get stressed out running around to a bunch of different shops when we can just duck into the liquor store and arrive at her house with the perfect present,” said Lance Cassidy, 24, telling reporters that he knew his mother would love anything he picked out with an ABV of 20 percent or higher.

“Of course, all of us kids try and find some special booze that she has an emotional connection to, but at the end of the day, I know she’d be just as happy with a huge plastic bottle of Popov as some finely aged small-batch bourbon as long as it came from us and will get her absolutely shitfaced.”

Cassidy added that he and his siblings faced significantly greater challenges shopping for their father who almost always exchanged whatever they gave him for cash to feed his gambling addiction.

Anyway, it looks like now that our 80-year-old friend, happily, will have more of a gift-buying dilemma this Christmas than anything else, and that she and her daughter will be having a lot more wholesome fun, something which Lois and I are, needless to say, very happy about!

14:00 Lois goes out for a walk on the local football field, and I wait in because we're expecting my Father's Day meal to be delivered by CookShop some time this afternoon. I ordered the meal and dessert last week to come in time for Father's Day, but I must have had some sort of "senior moment", because I apparently asked for it to come on June 30th, which doesn't make any kind of sense. I rang up the local CookShop and asked for it to come today instead, so that we can have it tomorrow at lunchtime.

14:15 A bald guy from CookShop delivers the food - I've been salivating about it for 9 days - for the food, not for the bald guy or for the delivery, although I don't tell the bald guy this. I don't want the shop's staff to get too cocky haha! Needless to say, we ordered the cheesecake "portion for 2", not the one for 10-12. We're not that greedy haha!

16:00 Tea and muffins on the sofa. It's our granddaughter Rosalind's birthday today - she's turned 13: yikes! Her brother Isaac will be turning 11 in a month's time, on the same day as our twin granddaughters in Australia, Lily and Jessie turn 8. And our other grandchild, Josie, will be turning 15 in September.

Our daughter Alison, Rosalind's mother, has put a couple of charming photos up on social media.

As Lois and I always say, you know you're getting old when some of your grandchildren start to become teenagers haha!

It's been a big week for Alison and family. A couple of months ago they moved into a large rambling Victorian house in rural Hampshire, in much need of repairs, modernisation and refurbishment, and on Wednesday this week the builders finally arrived to start the renovation work.

Alison's house this week - it's in quite a state, to put it mildly!

20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch some TV, the latest programme in Andrew Marr's new series on "The World's Greatest Paintings".

It's interesting that this week's paining, Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" (1642) which features a Dutch town's volunteer militia, is so popular that people will even pay to watch it through protective screens, being renovated - my god!

Rembrandt is believed to have "painting-bombed" his own painting, as can be seen from this detail of the huge work, which depicts a bit of his own face.

What a showman !!!!!

It's a bit sad that in 1715, when the painting was moved to its new home in a council chamber, it didn't quite fit, so builders lopped several square feet of it off so that it would fit the space between two doors. How crazy - and art connoisseurs say that many important features that gave the painting meaning were just thrown away by this process, and they've never been found !!!!!

Connoisseurs have emphasised their disquiet at this, however, producing some examples of other famous artworks, showing how vulnerable many of these are to this "cutting back" process, and thereby sounding a timely warning to other so-called "builders".