Thursday July 22nd 2021

08:30 Another hot day, and Lois and I don't want to get out of bed. The heat is really getting to us, but we've got to take a shower. Today will hopefully be the last really hot day (86F / 30C) - tomorrow will be a few degrees cooler, and then at the weekend the temperature will drop to 71F/22C with hopefully rain and even thunderstorms, which will be nice.

10:00 Lois is searching again for meal ideas that don't involve the oven. We got a chicken delivered by Waghorne's yesterday, so she cooks that on top of the stove for 90 minutes, so we can eat bits of that cold. We're also ringing the changes on cheese, corn beef, tinned tuna and egg. We're trying to use the microwave oven as much as possible - Lois makes some banana bread this morning.

11:00 I get a text from Gill, my sister in Cambridge. She recently got a DNA test kit as a birthday present, and when her test results were forwarded to a DNA database, we discovered that we were closely related to a BBC journalist, David, who was adopted as a baby. 

It's weird, but the case resembles a previous plot of the US soap-opera General Hospital, and also an episode of Sunset Beach.  But which came first, the reality or the art? - I don't know, but I think we should be told!

Gill and I are pretty sure now that David has a half-brother, whom we're trying to research at the moment.

The big question is, of course, when will David's "evil twin" show up? We imagine he must have one. And will the showdown be at some big family celebration?

a typical scene from the soap opera "General Hospital"

Yes, we're sure now that David has a half-brother, and we're trying to get some of his details from the web. Gill recently sent away for a birth certificate of one of the suspected half-brothers, but it came back today, with a "computer says no" sticker, Gill says. 

Damn!

In a way I wasn't too unhappy, because I have a candidate for the half-brother, and I know that he was a company owner and director in 1972, and got married in 1974. If Gill's candidate were our man, he would have been a company owner at the age of 15 and would have got married at age 17, which seems unlikely. Still, stranger things have happened in soap operas, that's for sure!!!!

15:00 Lois and I wait for Mark the Gardener to finish his work and then we go upstairs to spend a couple of hours in bed. It's pretty pleasant with the big fan wafting us and a breeze blowing the curtain across one of the big windows. Pity about the rhythmic churning of the cement mixer that one of our neighbours across the road has called in!

Still you can't have everything, can you!

20:00 We settle down to watch a bit of TV, this week's edition of Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking.

We're both feeling a bit apprehensive about tomorrow, but we don't do too badly as we try to compete against the 2 teams.

Neither team get the connection between these 4 pieces of music on the music question, where Lois and I score because our long memories of popular music, specifically "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by the Tokens, and memories of Stanley Holloway Monologues. Simples!

contestants had to recognise these 4 audio recordings, 

and then recover the link between them - in this case "lion": simples!

Later we recognise the following four synonyms for tennis terms, which defeats one of the teams but not the other. So we give ourselves half a point for that - how petty we've become haha!

It isn't often that my knowledge of Hungarian comes in useful with this show, but it does tonight. In the "wall" question, contestants have to resolve a scrambled set of 16 terms into 4 sets of related terms.

This is the initial display with the rows scrambled:

And this is the solution:

The top row are all verbs for "to fail". The second row are foreign words for the English "day". The third row are things you can drop, and the fourth row are the first names of UN Secretary Generals.

Luckily I was helped to recover the second row by knowing that "nap" is the Hungarian word for "day".

Victoria says hello to the show's Hungarian fans

[Little things please little minds! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed. We have to be up early tomorrow because we've got to order next week's groceries, make ourselves a snack, and then take the car over to Gloucester for its MOT test. Yes, we'll actually have to mix with other people for once. Yikes, scary!!!!!!!

Zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!