11:00 At last a warmish day (max 75F / 24C) and no wind to speak of. It's been my ambition, ever since the Whiskers Coffee Stand opened a few months back on the local football field, to have an ice-cream there with Lois, and at last we get our chance. Such is our lockdown life, marked by the occasional small victory like this one haha!
we perch on the "buddy bench" and have our ice-creams -
and how cute Lois looks in her Australian sun-hat,
a present from our 7-year-old twin granddaughters in Perth.
on the way home we see 10 old codgers playing 5-a-side soccer
in the netball court - probably inspired by England's
defeat of Denmark last night in one of the Euro 2020 semi-finals.
Go codgers haha !!!!
I thought she was going to say no to this. It's got to be a bit of a risk from the COVID viewpoint. We don't know how many social contacts these young people have had.
The usual English hosts for these weekly sessions can't attend this week, and Lois's friend Hilary has volunteered to fill the gap and give the refugees some language teaching, something she's had some experience of in the past.
Hilary has said that she could do the session on her own, but Lois feels sorry for her. Poor Hilary has to take her husband Richard along with her - Richard suffers from dementia, and Hilary can't risk leaving him home alone. Richard is a bit of a loose canon: he makes random remarks, goes wandering off and he's a bit of a worry generally, to put it mildly.
flashback to Tuesday: Hilary (left) and Richard visit us
with their dog Bertie. Lois is on the right
So Lois feels sorry for Hilary, understandably, and if you know Lois you'll know that she in any case always has a very strong compulsion to help people who are struggling, that's for sure. So Lois has agreed to go along too. Hilary is going to pick her up at 4:30 pm and take her there in her car, with Richard there too on the backseat.
Why Hilary would have volunteered to do this with a demented husband in tow, is quite beyond me! And why didn't they just cancel the class for this week, and let it resume next week when the regular teachers are back from holiday? It doesn't make any sense to me!
It will be a slight risk as regards COVID, but of course Lois, Hilary and Richard have all been vaccinated. Lois is going to wear a face-mask and gloves, and keep her distance from the young Iranians, which makes sense. And I have put the NHS COVID app on Lois's mobile phone, just to be on the safe side.
flashback to Wednesday: Lois in her black, animal-print-fringed
face mask, denim hat, and black gloves - how cute she looks !!!!
for convenience sake, we have a CookShop ready meal today
at lunchtime - lamb moussaka: yum yum!
The group are meeting in a coffee-shop, but there won't be any food on offer: the shop closes down its food service at 5 pm - what madness !!!!!!
Perhaps Iranians are like Italians and other Mediterranean types, and maybe don't have their evening meal till 10 pm. When Lois and I holidayed in Italy, we used to go into restaurants looking for an evening meal at say 6 pm or 7 pm, and we found that the only other customers were either Americans and/or other Brits. The waiter said you didn't see any Italians in there before 9 pm at the earliest.
And when I was on a business trip to Cyprus in the late 1980's with close colleagues Yvonne and Dusty, we used to go out for a quiet drink at a cafe/bar about 9 pm. Just as we were about to leave, around 10 pm, the place would suddenly fill up with local Greeks, many of them families with children, who started ordering big meals. What a crazy world we live in !!!!
16:00 I talk to my sister Gill on the phone. She has discovered recently, from information in a DNA database, that we have a close relative, David, a journalist, whom neither of us knew about - David was apparently adopted as a baby.
However, Gill and I have got to keep the information pretty much to ourselves for the moment, and not tell it too widely in our family, until the ground has been prepared: apparently at least one person in the family, closely related to David, will get a bit of a shock, to put it mildly, if/when he hears about David's existence. Oh dear - everyday life is becoming more and more like a TV soap-opera!!!
a typical 'Days of Our Lives' soap-opera plot involving,
in this case, one or more "evil twin" - yikes !!!!!
Or our daughter Sarah's favourite show, Sunset Beach.
The Wikipedia entry writer says, "The show was
known for its outrageous storylines, such as Terror Island in which several of the show's main
characters were stranded on an island with a masked serial killer (whose
costume bore a close resemblance to that of the killer from Scream) intent on killing them all, especially Meg [Who she? - Ed].
Sunset Beach's Ben Evans's evil twin Derek Evans
"A handful of
characters were killed by the maniac, mostly minor characters introduced as
serial killer-fodder, but also one lead character, young runaway made good Mark Wolper. In his dying moments Mark pulled off the killer's mask and
audiences were stunned to see Ben's face behind it. As it turned out, Ben had
an evil twin, Derek Evans, who plagued Ben and Meg's lives off and on for the rest of
the run of the show. Derek was killed after being shot in a struggle with Ben
during the show's final weeks, following a long storyline where Derek kidnapped
and impersonated his twin for months, sleeping with Ben's wife Maria Torres (having previously also slept with Meg)".
What a crazy world we live in !!!!! [You've already said that! -Ed]
16:30 Hilary calls at the door to pick Lois up, and she goes off in Hilary's car, with dementia-sufferer Richard sitting in the back seat. It feels weird to think I'm going to be in the house on my own for 3 hours. Lois and I have got used to living in each other's pockets, night and day, for about 16 months now. Help! Suddenly there's nobody here to suggest to me what to do, if I'm at a loose end - I'll just have to come up with some ideas of my own haha!
19:45 Lois comes back, and finds me on the sofa, watching YouTube on TV, as I haven't been able to think of anything better to do, although I have at least managed to do my watering of the plants in the garden tubs and in the flower bed in the front garden, which is nice.
I must have got the wrong idea about the Iranian session - I thought it would be Hilary and Lois, plus loose canon Richard, ensconced in a coffee-shop with a dozen or say young Iranians. It turns out there were actually 5 Brits there, and only 2 Iranians: 3 were expected, apparently, but the third one was up late last night celebrating England's win in Euro 2020, so he's obviously taking his new, acquired nationality seriously - my god!
The job of the Brits at the coffee-shop tonight, Lois says, was to chat to the Iranians, socialise and play table-tennis with them, teach them a bit of English and give them "gospel lessons" in English and Farsi.
Richard, Hilary's husband, was a bit of a nuisance, just as I expected. Just like he did at our house when the couple visited us on Tuesday, he would make random conversation contributions, and then go wandering about, looking at the pictures on the walls. Hilary was afraid he was going to maybe find his way out onto the fire escape, so eventually she took him home, and somebody else brought Lois home. What madness!
It's interesting that, for all his vagueness generally, Richard has an acute sense of time of day, and he likes to do regular things at regular times. When he arrived at our house at 11 am on Tuesday morning, he brought his lunch with him, and immediately started eating it, because he always eats at 11 o'clock in the morning apparently.
Tonight, Lois says, he kept telling Hilary that they had to get back home so he could wind his grandfather's grandfather-clock up, which he does every day at 6 pm.
Lois and I had the same reaction to this - remembering one of the earliest novels in the English language, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne (1759). At the start of the book, Tristram's parents-to-be are in the middle of having sex, trying to conceive their son, when Mrs Shandy asks Mr Shandy if he's remembered to wind up the clock.
This sudden disturbance of the couple's thought processes is believed by the author to have been one of the main reasons why, when little Tristram was born, he turned out to be so odd and to lead a rather odd life. I suppose that is a possible reason - could it really be true? I don't know, but I think we should be told!
20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch and watch a repeat of the start of Charlie Brooker's documentary series, "Cunk on Britain", a series which we didn't see the first time round.
There are perhaps too many history documentaries on TV, but it's nevertheless nice to see Philomena Cunk's refreshingly new approach to what really happened in Britain over the centuries. And it's no exaggeration to say that Cunk has effectively "rewritten the history books" on some of the most controversial periods in our past.
As a taster, here is Cunk's introduction to what happened in the 5th century after the Romans left Britain.
This is thought-provoking stuff, no doubt about that!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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