I spend a relaxed morning after mine and Lois's shower - so relaxed that I forget that this is a big day for Lois.
She's due to drive the 9 mile trip to Gupshill Manor, Tewkesbury, to have lunch and give a send-off to one of her fellow sect-members, Veronica, who's got dementia and is going into a home: this will be something of a relief for Veronica's poor husband David, I gather. Being Veronica's 24/7 "minder" is getting a bit much for him, understandably. My god!!
Gupshill Manor, on the road into Tewkesbury
When you get to mine and Lois's age, it's not unusual to have friends who develop dementia, something which is a bit scary, to put it mildly - yikes !!!!!
flashback to Gupshill Manor in happier times:
Lois's sect's Christmas 2018 lunch - David and Veronica are seated on the right
me and Lois at the same "do"
the route Lois will probably take today to her lunch at Gupshill Manor
Then after today's lunch, which she's hoping will be outside for COVID reasons, Lois has agreed to visit another fellow sect-member, Ursula, who's in Tewkesbury Community Hospital with some sort of UTI problem: oh dear!
one of the routes Lois could conceivably take this afternoon to visit Ursula
I watch Lois drive away in this arty black-and-white shot -
that means I must be on my own: yikes !!!!
I attempt a daring "solo walk" over the football field
14:00 I'm not expecting Lois back till after 4 pm, so I get into bed for a nap.
I look at my smartphone and I see from the Danish press (ekstrabladet.dk) that Denmark's so-called Bronze Age "Egtved Girl" has been "weighing in" (in a manner of speaking) on the controversial subject of whether Danish students should be allowed to wear "crop-tops" to school, a garment that the Danes call a "belly-blouse" or "maw-blouse" ("mave-bluse").
School authorities at Denmark's prestigious Firehøskole High School have recently attracted a lot of unfavourable publicity after banning pupils from wearing "crop tops" to school. Museum officials at the country's National Museum, however, have pointed out that in Denmark, as long ago as the Bronze Age, girls like the so-called Egtved Girl were actually buried in their favourite crop tops, and at that time, around 1370 BC, nobody seemed to have turned a hair over it.
the so-called Bronze Age "Egtved Girl" in her oaken coffin,
rocking her fashionable "crop top" or "belly blouse"
(belly area censored by the museum on grounds of decency)
Danish TV-presenters Sofia Linde and Joakim Ingversen
have weighed in on pupils' rights to wear crop-tops
Even Danish TV chef, Umut Sakariya (crazy name, crazy guy!!!!),
has joined in the rumpus. My god !!!
16:00 I talk on the telephone with Gill, my sister in Cambridge.
Gill and I recently discovered, after Gill did a DNA test, that we have 2 "new" cousins we previously didn't know about: David and Jonathan, illegitimate sons of our Aunty Joan, born respectively in 1949 and 1957, who were both adopted as babies.
At the moment we don't know for sure if David and Jonathan had the same father, although it seems a definite possibility. David's father we know to be Peter, a hotel manager, and in two cases (hotels in Cambridgeshire and Surrey) we know that our Aunty Joan, the boys' mother, was a receptionist at the same hotel that Peter was managing at the time. So there was plenty of opportunity for them to get together "out of hours" - oh dear!!!!
a photo of our Aunty Joan from the late 1950's,
so not too far removed from the time that her son David was born
Strangely, in this afternoon's phone conversation, Gill happens to tell me that one of the hotels that Peter managed in the late 1960's, was Gupshill Manor, Tewkesbury, where Lois has been having lunch today.
How very odd. What are the chances of that happening, eh??!!! My god!!!!!!
20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, this week's edition of "Last Word". We try to catch this programme every Friday to find out if anybody's died this week or not.
Mo wanted to put the violence back into murder novels, shall we say!
But what a woman! She was famous for always hiding from any form of publicity or interviews, so almost nobody would have known that she started out as an actress and glamour model called Candy Davis, and in the 1970's played the Grace Brothers department store's secretary in "Are You Being Served?", becoming a national icon.
the 1970's BBC sitcom "Are You Being Served?"
As a glamour model "Candy Davis" had won the Miss Nude Award for 1982, and she had also made appearances in the Benny Hill Show.
Her crime novels, written under the name of Mo Hayder, often dealt with male violence against women, where Mo drew on her earlier experience of working in "hostess" bars and clubs in London and Tokyo. Mo had a genuine love of the dark and the macabre, her friends say, and she apparently featured this side of life in her books out of genuine interest rather than just to increase sales or add colour to her novels - oh dear!
crime writer Mo Hayder, who has died, aged 59, seen here
showcasing her novel "Tokyo" (2004)
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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