08:00 A good start to the day - I look out of the window and I see that Mark the Milkman must be on holiday. Stand-in-guy has left our 5 pints of milk in front of the front door, instead of hiding them behind a plant-pot like Mark does: something which we think is completely crazy - in 35 years in this house we've never had a single pint of milk stolen from our doorstep!
the plant-pot behind which Mark the Milkman
hides our 5 pints of milk - what madness !!!!!
It's a stroke of luck for me that Mark is away this week, because this week under our brilliantly designed "couples rota", it's my turn to get the milk in and swab the bottles down, as well as making our cups of tea. Mark being away means I can just open the door and pick up the bottles instead of having to traipse round the corner to retrieve the milk from behind the plant-pot.
These days one has to relish every stroke of luck that Dame Fortune hands you - that's for sure! Life is relentlessly cruel normally, so it's nice when you get a lucky break, no doubt about that haha!
our suggested complex 2-week rota for couples [patent pending]
I realise that not all couples get milk delivered or swab their bottles meticulously down, so I suggest substituting that duty for something else - e.g. whitewashing the outside walls or similar. It's not exactly rocket science!
Later I find out that Lois is getting stabbing pains in her back, so probably I'll be Person 1 and Person 2 this week.
Poor Lois !!!!!!
10:45 Mark the Gardener arrives and does a couple of hours in the garden. Lois wants him to remove a holly bush, do some trimming on the shrubs and plant some of her new flowers in the flower-beds.
Mark the Gardener removes a troublesome ivy bush..
... and beds in some of Lois's newly acquired plants
16:30 We speak on the phone to our daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children, Josie (14), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11). The family recently spent a few days down in Dorset on the south coast, staying with Ed's parents.
flashback to last week: Isaac having fun on the beach
in Dorset with his cousin Ben
Alison and Ed have got builders working on their house in Headley, and so when they went off to spend a few days in Dorset, they shut their 2 cats, Dumbledore and Otto, up in the kitchen with plenty of food, and a litter tray.
When the family got home again 3 days later they found that only one of the cats, Otto, was still there in the kitchen, although the doors were all still shut - the other one, Dumbledore, had somehow escaped. It turned up, looking hungry but not starving - Ali thinks he will have kept himself going with a diet of rodents from the garden. It's in his heritage: he's a former Copenhagen alley-cat. But what madness!!!!
They're calling Dumbledore "the Great Dumble-dini" now.
One of the trees in Ali and Ed's enormous 6-acre grounds has been found to be dangerous and will have to come down, probably this coming Friday.
the fir tree in Ali and Ed's grounds that is dangerous
and has to be felled, probably on Friday - my god!
In the meantime, half of the so-called "tennis court" has been declared "out of bounds". I would normally say "It's health-and-safety gone mad!", but in this case I have to agree. But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
an example of the sort of tennis matches that are currently
banned until the "dangerous" fir tree has been felled - oh dear!
the "dangerous" fir tree in happier times -
before it was condemned haha!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, one of our favourite TV quizzes, "University Challenge", the student quiz. This week it's Emmanuel College, Cambridge versus St Andrews University.
Lois and I are always trying to get answers correct that the students get wrong. We start watching not feeling at all confident, but we end up equalling our all-time record of 9. So we've still got it haha!
1. Name the city on San Francisco Bay that includes the main campus of the University of California. Its name is also the surname of the choreographer who created the dance sequence for the 1933 musical 42nd Street.
Students: Palo Alto
Colin and Lois: the city is Berkeley, the choreographer Busby Berkeley
2. In 2020 Ben Martens, a 15-year-old Belgian, became the youngest player to win a qualifying match in the World Championship of what sport? He traced his success to once having won a miniature table at a fairground.
Students: table tennis
Colin and Lois: snooker
3. Name the US stage and film actress born in 1893. Her films include "She Done Him Wrong" and "I'm No Angel", although she's largely known now for her much-quoted wit.
Students: Lady Bunny
Colin and Lois: Mae West
4. Which French impressionist painter painted this work, which survives in 2 large fragments? It includes pictures of Gustave Courbet and Frederic Bazille.
Colin and Lois: Monet
5. Employed at the Harvard Observatory from 1881, the Scottish-born astronomer Williamina Fleming discovered which nebula in the constellation Orion, also known as Barnard 33.
Students: [St Andrews] Crab, [Emmanuel] Octopus
Colin and Lois: Horsehead
6. "The Great Gate of Kiev" is the final section of which work originally composed for piano solo in 1874?
Students: 1812 Overture
Colin and Lois: Pictures at an Exhibition - Mussorgsky
7. "Morning Mood" and "Anitra's Dance" are movements of what piece of incidental music first performed in 1876?
Students; [pass]
Colin and Lois: Peer Gynt - Grieg
8. "The Sea" and "Sinbad's Ship" is the first section of what larger orchestral piece premiered in 1886?
Students: A Thousand and One Nights
Colin and Lois: Scheherazade - Rimsky Korsakov
9. [The answer to this question is a 5-letter word, with all letters appearing in their alphabetical order] What word as a noun can mean a jewel or trinket, and as an adjective, when applied to a house or flat, can mean small and elegant?
Students: trophy
Colin and Lois: bijou
22:00 Enough said - we've done enough for tonight. We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!!
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