Danskcolin: Saturday July 3rd 2021

Not a good day! We make a bad start by backing down from our resolution to stop wiping down with disinfectant the groceries delivered to us by Budgens, the convenience store in the village.

a typical way of wiping down groceries - why do we keep doing it???

Does it say more about us than it does about the virus????

Lois doesn't want to take any risks, even though scientists say there's no risk. Plus we've sort of got into the habit of doing it now, so maybe it's simpler to continue - what madness !!!!! Perhaps we'll be doing it for the next 10 years - if we're lucky haha!!!

flashback to last Sunday - the helpful Canadian study

pointed out to us by Steve, our American brother-in-law

Later (about 12 noon) we have a near-death experience in Bishops Cleeve, the small town 3 miles north of Cheltenham. Some people say that the mere fact of living in Bishops Cleeve is a near-death experience, but we reject that idea - we like quiet neighbourhoods! We are driving along Station Road on a trip mainly designed to give our car a bit of "exercise", when a police car comes round the bend in front of us and we have to quickly swerve to the left and drive onto the pavement to get out of the way - yikes!

Station Road - a bit of a bendy road, and we weren't

expecting a police car coming in the opposite direction

round one of the road's frequent bends. What madness -

there hasn't been a crime committed in Bishops Cleeve since 1792 !!!!

We survive the near-death experience and reach home in time to have a cup of coffee on the patio.

we survive the near-death experience, and suddenly

life seems more precious haha!

We're just a couple of old codgers, so TV is a big factor in our life. Unfortunately at the moment TV is mostly wall-to-wall sport, what with Euro football, Wimbledon, Rugby and the Tour de France. Andy Murray and somebody else British have now been knocked out of Wimbledon, so there should be less interest in the tennis from now on, which is nice.

Saturday's TV highlights - what madness !!!!

[That's enough madness, settle down now! - Ed]

15:00 An annoying brush with Amazon on my part. I order a small can of WD40 to spray on our washbasin's pop-up stopper, which pops up well enough but doesn't "pop down" - damn it! Lois has had the brainwave of putting a small yellow plastic basin under the taps to collect the water when we've washing our hands etc.

our washbasin stopper still pops up,

but it doesn't pop down any more - an embarrassing problem

for anybody haha! But Lois today thought of putting a plastic

basin in there - sheer genius !!!

I can't complain about Amazon's speed in processing my order - the WD40 will be coming tomorrow, even though it's a Sunday. But that's probably mostly because I mistakenly signed up for a free trial of Amazon Prime when I was putting in my order.

Damn, damn, damn! Every time I order something from Amazon they try to get me to sign up for Prime, and this time I must have done something wrong, because I ended up actually agreeing to Prime. Damn (again) !!!!

I've cancelled my Prime membership, but it will still be valid till August 2nd.

What was it Paul McCartney sang?

"I clicked something wrong,

Now I long

For yesterday"

I have yet another unfortunate brush with Amazon later this morning. We want to send our twin-granddaughters in Perth, Australia, a dominoes game, so I order it from the so-called "Australian Amazon" (amazon.com.au). But first of all there's a lot of messing about with my password.

In my little book I've always had a separate password for the Australian Amazon from my UK one. But I think they must have standardised passwords between the 2 sites, because first of all Australian Amazon reject the password I've used before, so I spend a lot of time changing it. Then when I come to log on to the UK Amazon, I realise that the UK site will now only accept my Australian password.

In the end I wish I hadn't bothered. The so-called Australian Amazon still ships most of its merchandise either from the UK or from the US, so you don't save any money on shipping costs, which is a bummer, to put it mildly!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

16:00 We have a cup of tea and a currant bun on the sofa. Lois reads me bits out of her copy of "The Week", which gives a digest of the week's news from around the world. The copy has today emerged from its compulsory 24 hours quarantine on the hall floor. [Don't say it! - Ed]

this week's copy of "The Week"

It's interesting, Lois tells me, that for all the talk of a "United Ireland", it's apparently never going to happen: the Irish Republic could never afford it, apparently.

The UK spends £10 billion a year on keeping the North afloat - the old heavy industries, like shipbuilding for instance, have long ago collapsed and a third of all workers are employed in the public sector. But the Republic would never be rich enough to carry this burden.

Lois also tells me an interesting story about office occupancy in New York - it's still only at 25% apparently due to the continuing practice of working from home. Even Philadelphia is only at 30%.

If companies decide they don't need their big office blocks any more, and decide to shed them, that's going to hit the finances of city governments of course. Something similar is happening in the UK. And while companies look ahead to the inviting prospect of being able to save money on taxes, fuel bills etc, it'll be the employees working from home that will have to heat (or cool) their homes 24/7, although they won't have to pay for quite so much travel. It's a bit of a social revolution isn't it, to put it mildly.

17:00 Our daughter Alison, who lives in Huntley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children has put an interesting picture up on Facebook of some of the books her eldest child Josie (14) will have to read for her high school GCSE English course starting in September.

Josie's reading list - note that Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca"

appears twice, once on each shelf, but Alison assures

us the Josie will only have to read it once haha

But oh dear they certainly put you through it if you take English these days - my god!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in Andrew Marr's series on "Great Paintings of the World".

In general I don't really care much for "abstract art" or "modern art", but I make an exception for Picasso's "Weeping Woman", which certainly expresses the woman's grief, there's no doubt about that. It was inspired by Picasso's own mother's weeping after the brutal Nazi bombing attack on the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937 - it was a so-called "experiment" by Hitler to see how much damage aircraft could do to a town by bombing raids alone: 70% of the town was destroyed, and a third of the population killed.

Picasso's "Weeping Woman" (1937):

Note how the 'warm' colours in the background contrast with some of the 'cold' colours of the woman's face; note also her teeth - teeth rarely appear in artwork, strangely.

Lois and I didn't know, or had forgotten, that this painting was quickly bought up, for £284, by Picasso's friend, private art collector Roland Penrose, who brought the picture back to hang his flat in London. So it disappeared from public view, as far as the art world was concerned, for over 30 years.

In 1969 it hid the headlines again when Penrose's flat was burgled and the picture stolen. Eventually it was discovered in a second-hand shop and was then donated by Penrose to the Tate Gallery. So all was well in the end.