10:00 Budgens, the convenience store in the village delivers our groceries for next week - it's another bald guy doing it. As usual Lisa from the shop rang me about 9 am to tell me the amount due, and this time I pay it immediately online by bank transfer - last week I forgot to do this and had to apologise to the store when they rang me to query this: oh dear! Black mark, Colin!
Lois and I realise that we've forgotten to order any red wine, which is a pity because we're having a celebratory duck meal at lunchtime and we've only got a bit of red wine left - damn!
We swab each grocery item down with disinfectant as usual - when will we be able to stop doing this? Ray Davies of the Kinks wanted us to stop immediately, in his song, "Stop Your Swabbing", which was later covered by the Pretenders.
The Pretenders cover the Kinks song "Stop Your Swabbing"
Wise words indeed, and incredible to think how prophetic! When the lyrics were first written by Davies (1964), the current pandemic was still more than 50 years in the future!
The song was later covered by the group The Pretenders, with lead singer Chrissie Hynde. According to Wikipedia, Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders collaborated closely with the original song-writer Ray Davies of the Kinks when planning the cover version, so closely, in fact, that the couple subsequently had a baby, and you can't get much closer than that, to put it mildly!
12:45 We sit down to our delayed Father's Day lunch - delayed because of the mistake I made when I was ordering from the local branch of Cook Shop.
Yum yum though! It's been well worth the wait, I have to say.
We just have half the first course (the half duck becomes a quarter duck - you do the math haha!), because the remainder will make a meal for later in the week. We've been doing this more and more recently - it makes sense to us, because we're old codgers and we don't need to have the kind of quantities that young whippersnappers need, so it'll save work in the kitchen later in the week, that's for sure. Simples!
we have our delayed Father's Day "quarter duck" - yum yum! ...
but note the small quantities of red wine available, which is a pity: damn!!!
...followed by the little cheesecakes with home-grown raspberries
I look out of the window while we're eating, and I notice that the Borough Council's recycling department has already delivered the shiny new replacement brown garden-waste bin that I requested on Wednesday morning. I've got to hand it to them - that's really good service, I think. Later I get on the laptop and order some sticky labels to stick on the bin to give our address.
I showcase the shiny new garden waste recycling bin
that the Borough Council dropped off for me this morning
The mystery remains, however. Where do lost brown wheelie-bins go to? Do they get dropped into the recycling truck's grinding mechanism by mistake? Or is the council's recycling truck followed around by a shadowing truck, crewed by pirates or so-called "brown slavers", who whisk a proportion of the brown bins away, with the bins eventually ending up in Morocco, to be used remorselessly a few times by sheiks, before being tossed away like an old glove? I don't know, but I think we should be told, that's for sure!
16:00 We have a cup of Earl Grey tea and a banana muffin on the couch. I leaf through next week's Radio Times - it looks dire as regards TV programmes next week. We've already got the FIFA European Soccer Championships being covered wall-to-wall on BBC1 and ITV, but now we've also got rugby, the Tour de France cycle race, and Wimbledon tennis starting. What madness !!!!!
It's wall-to-wall sport on TV these days -
what madness !!!!!
The Tour de France used to be ignored in the UK when I was a boy, but then at some point about 10 years ago the people trying to improve the numbers of medals Great Britain won at the Olympics decided that cycling was a sport they could throw money at and really get results in terms of medals. I'm one of the taxpayers who has been funding this, but I don't recall ever being asked whether I approved of all this subsidy.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, an old episode of Desert Island Discs from 2010, featuring 1960's pop star and subsequent psychotherapist Sandie Shaw.
The premise of this series is an interview with a celebrity who talks about their life and chooses the 8 "gramophone records" they would choose to have with them if they were ever marooned on a desert island.
I haven't heard Sandie's voice in such a long time, but it's always a pleasure - she's so feisty, and direct. She doesn't mince words, talking about one of her businesses going "tits up" - she makes me laugh out loud, and more than once tonight.
She was the singer who won the UK its first ever Eurovision Song Contest Winner, in 1967, with the song "Puppet on a String", which Sandie always hated. After winning the contest, she refused all invitations by her entourage to party. She just felt exhausted and went back to her hotel and up to her room, carrying a big bottle of champagne, and wearing her lynx coat (because it was okay to wear fur then). But she somehow locked herself out of her room, so she just lay down on her fur coat clutching the big bottle, which she couldn't open, and she just fell asleep there on the floor of the hotel corridor - my god, some celebration!
She's certainly feisty - one of her nicknames is "The Dagenham Diva", and we learn tonight that she did actually work at Dagenham's enormous Ford car factory, although only for about 6 weeks. That's something she's got in common with 1980's pop star Billy Ocean, although he worked there a bit longer than 6 weeks, I believe.
I suppose that Dagenham is the UK's answer to Motown in the USA. But no Dagenham singer that I've ever heard about has ever come up with a song as haunting as Whitney Houston's poignant "Where Do Lost Brown Bins Go?" (1988).
21:00 We switch off the radio and watch a bit of TV, an interesting Channel 5 documentary on the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton.
Let's hope that nothing stops Kate becoming queen in due course, because whether by luck or by judgement William has certainly picked the right woman for the job: she seems as perfect as Queen Elizabeth, who's kept the UK going through thick and thin for nearly 70 years.
From the fashion angle, Kate has also been very influential, and the programme compares her influence to that of Jacquie Kennedy in the 1960's.
Kate at Prince Philip's funeral
It's not surprising that she wasn't so good at her role to start with - who would be? But she obviously made up her mind to watch others, study it, think about it, and perfect it. She's not a natural extrovert, and doesn't seek the limelight - she maintains an element of intrigue. And unlike Meghan she knows how to handle the press: by smiling, chatting to people she meets but not saying too much to the press, never reacting to articles, concentrating on her speeches for charities, never complaining, never explaining, just like the Queen herself would.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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