Thursday July 15th 2021

10:00 Lois and I have been invited to a 40th wedding anniversary in the part on Saturday afternoon, and Lois wants to get Mari-Ann and Alf a present of a potted plant, and to buy a ruby wedding anniversary card if possible.

We drive over to Gotherington Nurseries, and park the car. 

After that, as soon as we get out of the car, I don't see Lois for dust. I don't know where she goes exactly, but I get glimpses of her from time to time, and take some souvenir distance-shots and a few zoomed close-up photos.

She finally decides on some potted plant or other - I don't know what it's called, but I know that it's important that it's red, because it's a ruby wedding anniversary. I feel flattered that she asks my opinion, but I just rubber stamp her choice. They haven't got any specific 40th anniversary cards, so we just get a generic one.

I know nothing about plants or flowers. My job is to find my bank card in my wallet when it's time to go, and to pay contactlessly. I do that okay, but then I forget to take the wire-basket back to the shop after we've loaded the car with today's purchases, so technically we've stolen it. We leave it in the car boot so we can take it back we're round that way. Oh dear!

it's my job to hang around the entrance to the shop

so I can pay at the right moment - simples haha!

On the way home, we stop at Bishops Cleeve, so that Lois can buy a pair of slippers at The Original Factory Shop. This time I stay in the car - it's better that way, so she doesn't feel under pressure and she can take her time getting a really comfortable pair! So it's a win-win situation haha!

The Original Factory Shop at Bishops Cleeve

All in all, I don't think we have been quite as obsessively careful about touching things on this little outing as we have been on previous recent trips. The long lockdown has begun to wear us down a bit, I think.

12:00 We discuss our strategy for the picnic in the park on Saturday. It's going to be 2 pm to 6 pm -ish,  drop in and drop out again when you want. We figure if we arrive at the start it'll be easier to get a parking space.  We can leave about 3 to 3.30 pm, come home and go for a nap - perfect!

14:00 My sister Gill in Cambridge, in consultation with Lois and me, is currently researching mystery man David, a BBC journalist who was adopted as a baby, in 1959. David has been demonstrated to be a close relative of Gill and me thanks to a DNA match in a genealogy base, even though neither Gill nor I had ever heard of him. Weird, or what??!!!!

I've found half a dozen or so pictures of David's mum, and a possible picture of his dad. And Gill and I believe that David also has a half-brother that he doesn't yet know about: I've seen some info about the half-brother plus a couple of photos on Facebook. At the moment the half-brother aspect is something we have to keep the details of to ourselves, just for now, anyway, until sensibilities of certain family-members have been stroked (metaphorically only haha!). 

some typical half-brothers

The big question now is: when was the half-brother born? Lois and I have found out the date of his marriage, and we've applied to get a copy of the marriage certificate. Gill has applied for his birth certificate. We think at the moment that he was born either in 1939, 1946-ish, or 1957: we need to narrow this down hugely, obviously, before we can fit him into the story- my god, it's just like a soap-opera, that's for sure!

Full siblings are rare in soap-operas, but you can't help falling over half-brothers wherever you look especially on General Hospital: half-siblings are actually the norm.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg haha !!!!

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

20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch and watch one of our 2 favourite TV quiz shows, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking. 

At last, it's back, after far too long a break, and we both notice that Victoria's "assets" seem to get bigger every year. The main thing is, now we know for sure that every week there'll be at least 2 shows (this one and University Challenge) that aren't totally stupid, or else not-stupid but a repeat we have seen before. Hang out the flags!!!!

Having said that, Lois and I are shocked tonight to realise how dulled our brains have become over the long months of lockdown: presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell tests the teams with several questions where, after we hear the answer, we say, "We should have got that one". Oh dear!

Here's one we definitely should have got, but didn't.

What's the connection between the above 4 things? We really should have got that one: "crime" is an anagram of "merci", which means "thanks" in France, and so on. Damn!

This next one we sort-of got, but didn't express it very clearly. But it's interesting one: we didn't know these phrases, which all mean "When hell freezes over" or something similar, in English.

Oh dear, we'll just have to do a bit more studying before next week's show, that's for sure!

22:00 We go to bed, thoroughly chastened by our traumatically bad results tonight - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!