08:00 Lois and I get out of bed but we both know today is going to be a bad day.
Lois is having some dental treatment this afternoon, designed to remove little bits of teeth. It's so complex a job that we've been told it's got to be split between two appointments - later we find out that it'll be split between three - my god!!!!
our dental surgery
We try and keep ourselves busy this morning - it's a way of distracting Lois from the coming ordeal. Lois has bought a present for a couple who are members of her sect and she wants to get the parcel collected from our door. But things don't go smoothly.
the Royal Mail website - one of the world's worst !!!!
I waste an hour on the Royal Mail website, one of the world's worst websites, trying to pay for, and print out, a postage-paid address label and also trying to arrange a collection. The website says it's "the quick and easy way to buy postage that fits around YOU!" What nonsense - it's the slow and difficult way, not to say impossible!
We give up in the end - we'll just have to take the parcel ourselves to the post office in Bishops Cleeve - damn!!!
Lois also wants to get an appointment with an ear clinic - she's got the name of the doctor who's seen her before, but we can't find his phone number. Later we find out that he's retired - damn (again)!!
At the moment I have to be on Lois's right side for her to be able to hear me. We can manage like that, but it would be nice to have a choice of sides!
a typical ear clinic procedure
Then we try to arrange for somebody to come and replace the door handle of the freezer - Lois broke it off last week: she doesn't know her own strength! We ring the number and then have to listen to 3 minutes of encouragement to put the phone down and log on to their website - encouragement which we are determined to ignore. We're really angry by this point !!!!!
I showcase the freezer's broken door-handle
We ring the helpdesk number. We've got the number of our insurance policy, but it seems that that isn't enough. They want to know the freezer's serial number. The guy on the helpdesk says it's often on a label behind one of the drawers - what madness!!! The drawers are all completely full, not to say overfull. Why haven't they got a record of the serial number on their copy of the insurance policy - it's crazy !!!!
14:40 I drive Lois to the dental surgery and then come home. I can't go in with her, because they're rationing entries into the building because of the pandemic.
I use the time to work on my so-called presentation, entitled "The Influence of Old Norse on the History of the English Language", but I'm mostly just reformatting the 17 pages I've written. But that's important in its way. I want to finalise the talk in the next couple of days, and produce the so-called "slides", and then give my talk to Lois, an audience of one, to see how long it takes.
Oh dear, I wish I'd never volunteered to do this, but it's too late to back out now, that's for sure !!!!!
one of my so-called "slides" for my so-called
presentation - oh dear !!!!!
14:45 I pick Lois up from the dental surgery. She's had a really awful time, with impressions taken of upper and lower teeth, followed by sustained drilling from all points of the compass. What madness!!!!
And she's just going to have to have soup tonight.
Poor Lois !!!!!!
18:00 I rush into the kitchen and create one of my admired signature dishes: cornbeef, boiled potatoes and peas - yum yum!
20:00 After her dental ordeal this afternoon, Lois decides to opt out of taking part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. And we both feel incredibly tired - oh dear, are we getting old?
[I can't believe you've only just noticed that! - Ed]
We see the latest edition of one of our favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking.
We do our best to answer a few questions but we're not on our top form. We're glad we have chosen to watch, however, because we catch presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell debuting her new redhead look.
In line with the show's usual policy on such things, no reference is made either by Victoria or by the contestants to her new hair-do and hair colour.
Lois and I are quite shallow so we spend a lot of time discussing whether it's a good look for her, or not. It makes her look a lot younger (too young), and it's a sort of a "girl-next-door" look, is our verdict. But overall, big mistake, no doubt about that!
flashback to last week's programme: presenter Victoria in happier times
sporting her normal look
20:30 We watch an interesting documentary on Sky Arts all about the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy.
Lois and I have been discussing a lot recently about what it's like to be married to a writer - not very nice, basically! We recently saw a documentary series about Ernest Hemingway, which showed how he expected his wives' lives basically to revolve around him.
Also, on Margaret Thatcher's ex-cabinet minister Michael Portillo's current series of walks on the Devon and Cornwall coastal path, we saw the church which, back in 1870, the young trainee architect Thomas Hardy was redesigning - which was also the church where he met, and fell in love with, the rector's daughter, Emma.
flashback to September 2nd: Lois and I watch as Michael
Portillo visits the church at Beeny which Hardy redesigned
Hardy immediately fell in love with Emma, the rector's daughter, especially after he saw her riding her horse along the clifftops - sexy or what haha!!!
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free,
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
We picture the scene too, as a similar scene is described later in passages from "Far From The Madding Crowd".
Hardy falls in love with dashing, horse-riding Emma, genuinely and profoundly, and one of the things that draws the couple together is a shared love of literature, and the belief in Hardy as a writer, a belief his own family didn't share.
Poor Hardy !!!!!
But Emma supported him as an aspiring writer right from the beginning. She writes out manuscripts for him, she becomes his secretarial hep, she collaborates with him in his programme of self-education and reading, the programme he undertook in the 1870's when in his late 30's.
For a while the marriage was very happy, and they had a wonderful first 2 years in Sturminster Newton, when Hardy wrote, "The Return of the Native". They had a lovely house looking out over the Blackmoor Vale at the edge of the town.
But then things started to go pear-shaped.
Hardy's writing career took him away from Emma into quite a masculine world of clubs and fellow authors, from which she was excluded.
But perhaps by this stage Hardy was starting to feel annoyed with his wife, because this is the time when he's writing The Mayor of Casterbridge, where young hay-trusser Michael Henchard has a row with his wife Susan and, in a fit of drunken pique, auctions her off for 5 guineas to a passing sailor. My god!!!!
Emma later wrote of Hardy that he "only understands the women he invents - the others, not at all". He seems to "fall in love with these extraordinary creatures, and particularly in the case of Tess, he was [actually] in love".
She wrote about her husband, and about husbands in general, telling wives to "expect neither gratitude, nor attentions, love nor justice".
Emma wanted to be a writer herself. And she was understandably hurt when Hardy stopped showing her his new books, while showing them to other people to read.
And the moral is - never marry, or go to bed with, a writer. Oh dear !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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